Enon Hall Interior
A new family room and kitchen in the Chapman’s addition blend early 19th century architectural elements and finishes with a more open 21st century flow.
Maybe we’re all finding our way home. Some of us search an entire lifetime, but it remains elusive, this imaginary place of safety and comfort. For others, like William Hathaway Chapman, executive director of the Richmond Forum, it was an actual place that took him on a decades-long quest to reclaim the spot where his roots were first planted: Enon Hall in Lancaster County, the ancestral home owned by his mother’s family for nearly two centuries ’til it slipped from their hands in 1939.
It all started back in 1970 when William, who goes by Bill, was only seven years old and his grandfather showed him a photo of the old homestead in a newly published genealogy titled Hathaways of America. Right then, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. “It was a family treasure and it had been lost. I wanted to get it back.”
The manor house, known as Andrews at the time, and some 200 acres, was originally purchased by Bill’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Hathaway, in 1762. Five generations of Hathaways followed, each modifying the home to meet their family’s changing needs. By the early 1800s, the original section of the house took a Dutch Colonial form. Additions expanded the structure in the 1840s, 1880s, and 1950s.
Growing up in Richmond, Bill heard all manner of tales about the idyllic life in the Northern Neck. “My grandmother, Catherine Blake Hathaway, grew up in the old Eubank Hotel, now the Palmer Building in Kilmarnock,” explains Bill. “Her family ran the hotel in the early twentieth century. My grandfather’s family, Ernest “Bus” Hathaway, or actually his mom, Ella Hathaway, ran the White Stone Beach Hotel during the same period and his father, Ernest Emory Hathaway, managed the steamboat wharf there.” When he was in high school, Bill’s great aunt, Lucella Hathaway Brent, took him to visit the family cemetery at Enon Hall. Although, by then, most of the estate land had been sold, leaving only the manor house and 3.67 acres, it only fueled his passion to claim it back.
After Bill married in 1990, from time to time he’d ask people whether Enon Hall was on the market, although he admits he was in no position to buy it. He had recently started his own advertising agency, and his wife, Gay, was raising their young son. But he couldn’t shake his fear that someone else would buy it and tear it down. Finally, in 1996, he reached out to the reclusive 93-year-old owner. “We sat on the screen porch and chatted. He showed me into the parlor and the center hall, and beyond that, I couldn’t see for the clutter. He and his wife had bought the place in 1968. While they had clearly loved Enon Hall in the thirty years they owned it, they were both in their nineties by then, and the house and property had long since gotten away from them.”
After two and a half years of discussion, they settled on terms, even though Bill had seen only two rooms and his wife had never stepped foot inside. Returning the home and the land to the Hathaway family was the goal. The condition of the house was secondary. “We decided there was nothing we could possibly find that would deter us, so why scare ourselves to death!” Without as much as an inspection, the couple purchased the property, giving the elderly couple lifetime tenancy: the option to remain in the house until their death. On July 25, 1999, the Holy Grail was returned to the Hathaway family.
Soon after, the wife of the previous owner moved to a local nursing home, and in February 2000 her husband died at Enon Hall. Three months after his death, the Chapmans spent their first night on the porch of the old home place. “The first thing we did was force open the center hall doors that had been boarded shut for at least fifteen years,” says Bill. “It was dirty and dusty and smelly, but it was just amazing to finally be inside.”
In the beginning, the spirits of his ancestors were palpable. “I remember the first time I touched the original staircase, feeling the wear on the banister and the treads and visualizing the centuries of family passages—the babies born here, the deaths, the marriages—that somehow, some way led to me being who I am today.”
But the flush of victory soon faded with the daunting task ahead. After decades of neglect, vines choked what little of the dilapidated exterior was visible, and the land was a dense forest, covered with invasive Russian olive trees and stately cedars snarled in grapevine. “That first year we did a lot of demolition,” says Gay, “tearing out a lot of nasty stuff and hauling it away.” They stripped off asbestos shingles, tore down two decaying twentieth-century additions, rebuilt the back porch, painted much of the interior, and updated two bathrooms. “We also scrubbed and scrubbed every inch of the interior to try to rid the house of the smell left by hundreds of mice, and seemingly, as many cats, all harbored by the previous owners.” On weekends, Bill and Gay and even their young son, William Jr., drove from Richmond, rolled up their sleeves, and did the work themselves. Every step of the first nine years of the restoration is chronicled at enonhall.com, which apparently became the predecessor of hundreds of so-called house blogs that began cropping up on the web.
Early on, Bill and Gay began the process of adding the home to the Virginia Landmarks Register. But in 2004, when they made the decision to sell their home in the Richmond suburbs and move to the manor house full-time, they stopped. “As we considered our needs, it became clear to us that it didn’t make sense to lock the home down in any single time period,” says Bill. “Every generation of the family had made their mark on the home, and ours should be no different.” Realizing that they didn’t want to repurpose any of the home’s original rooms, the couple set out to build a two-story addition to meet their twenty-first-century needs, again doing most of the work themselves. “In the addition, with its own center hall, we used period-correct materials to create an 1820s feel. The floors are reclaimed heart pine, the walls are unpainted plaster, and all of the doors are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century originals we found stashed away in the chicken house.” Bill built all the windows himself, including reproduction wavy glass, and created two new staircases, inspired by the one in the original Dutch Colonial portion of the house. Period mantels surround two new fireplaces and a beautiful new kitchen with soapstone countertops opens up—twenty-first-century style—to an adjoining family room with a full wall of built-in bookcases.
Over the years, as they have peeled back walls and dug on the property, they have stumbled on countless treasures. “One thing we used to do a lot on weekends is come here, and our entire activity would be to dig a hole. We couldn’t put a shovel into the earth without digging up something. We found artifacts my family had likely touched: chards of old pottery, clay marbles, a tiny rag doll, a locket, even a Union Army cavalry spur and Hardee hat insignia, possibly remnants from a known raid on the plantation in 1864. The oldest item was a 1750s clay pipe stem.”
Along the way, Bill sought clues about the original design, gathering old snapshots from family members and previous owners. “Early on, we met with Agnes Hathaway, the last family member to live in the house before it was sold. She had stacks of photos showing the house and long-gone additions.” At one point, they dug up an old shutter dog, a device used to hold a shutter in the open position, and used the photos to confirm that it came from the house. Bill was then able to track down original antique shutter dogs of the same seashell design for use on the new addition. Another old photo led them to reclaim a brick walkway, buried under sod for decades.
While the quest is over and the house remains a work in progress, just as it has been since 1762, Bill can feel the land changing him. “There’s a sense in me now of having roots, knowing that this is where I belong, where my people came from, and where I’ll remain for eternity”—in the backyard, buried alongside his ancestors, in the walled graveyard on the peaceful banks of Antipoison Creek, as it makes its way to the Chesapeake.
Go to enonhall.com to read more.
This article appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of The Local Scoop Magazine, pgs. 11-19.