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EPILOGUE. Mourning Pharsalia
- University of Georgia Press
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epilogue Mourning Pharsalia In the mid-1930s, the Virginia Writers’ Project, an offshoot of the Works Progress Administration, undertook the Virginia Historical Inventory (vhi). The vhi sent fieldworkers across the Old Dominion to write up descriptions of the state’s surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures. In Nelson County, Massie Thacker of Arrington was hired to complete the survey in the western part of the county, including the triangle at the foot of the Priest. In the summer of 1936, Thacker went to Tyro to speak with Florence Morton, one of Bland Massie’s daughters , and Mrs. M. E. Massie, Hope’s daughter, to get information about Pharsalia. The old plantation house, then in the possession of E. P. Parson , who had bought it from James Bentz, was still in good repair. With Florence Morton as her main informant, Thacker wrote a quick sketch of the appearance and condition of the Massie estate.1 Judging from Thacker’s report, Pharsalia was still a jewel in the eyes of the Massie family. Florence and John Morton had returned to the area a few years before, buying back much of her father’s Tyro farm. They continued to admire the big house up the road, though. Thacker clearly adopted Florence Morton’s perspective and presented Pharsalia, William Massie’s pre–Civil War gentry home place, as a home that had once united natural beauty with gracious living. The vhi surveyor adored the setting of the house “located on a high ridge which extends down from the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge.” She also admired the “many beautiful” ornamental flagstone walks that William Massie’s slaves had built around the house nearly a century before. Florence Morton also drew Thacker’s at- 224 epilogue tention to the “signs of very high class workmanship” that survived inside the house, “despite the many repairs,” especially the ornate mantles above the various fireplaces. Mentally, Florence Morton may already have been restoring the house she and her husband would buy sixteen years later. Thacker praised the Pharsalia house as being “in a perfect state of preservation ” despite “the use of much paint” in the interior.2 Thacker’s description of the old plantation also revealed the way the Massies still separated their ideal of the gentry home place from the business of commercial farming that went on there. When explaining the “historical significance” of the plantation, Thacker recounted William Massie’s career as a progressive planter and petty industrialist. Yet in the memory of his descendants, his capitalist outlook on agriculture and the environment had been reduced to a personal eccentricity. He “had a strong mind for experiments,” Thacker reported, a quirk that “went to the extent of trying to raise cranberries on this farm . . . which was not very successful.” The grandchildren of William and Maria Massie preferred to remember their grandfather as “Mars Billy.” He was the patriarch who built the great mansion of the neighborhood to house their family—before the upheaval of the Civil War and the breakup of the plantation .3 Like other romantic Virginians of the early twentieth century, they thought of Pharsalia as a genteel refuge from an unstable world, rather than an aggressive enterprise struggling to master that world.4 Capitalist intensification floundered in the South because the region’s farmers did not believe they could have the peace and security of rural life while investing heavily in reformed agriculture. The Problem of Southern Agriculture So why, precisely, did southern farmers not take the remedy prescribed by the region’s conservationists? Judging from the story of Pharsalia plantation , we should be cautious before accepting the reformers’ view and blaming the region’s cultivators for being obstinate and ignorant. There were few places in the nineteenth-century South where agricultural reform was pursued as aggressively as at Pharsalia. Yet for all the Massies’ efforts at intensifying the plantation’s agricultural ecosystem, the place never quite met their goals. Europeans came to the South in the hopes that [3.95.39.127] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:55 GMT) mourning pharsalia 225 agriculture would provide them with both independence and prosperity. Secure on their own property, white men like Maj. Thomas Massie and his son William believed they could rule over their dependents and defy the demands of the outside world. With no one able to make claim on them, they reasoned, they could accumulate wealth by confidently selling crops grown by the labor they controlled and live the good...