A Place Called Appomattox

1. The Tavern

1 THE TAVERN John Raine might have been forgiven a touch of melancholy on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, for in the spring of 1845 the half-century mark served as an even greater reminder of man’s mortality than it would in a more salubrious time. For Raine, however, the eleventh of April that year signi- fied more than the last day of his fifth decade. According to a notice posted in the Lynchburg papers, that date had been chosen for the liquidation of property that he had once expected to tide him through old age.1 In the summer of 1839 Raine and his wife, Eliza, had bought half the interest in a twenty-year-old tavern on Clover Hill, overlooking the headwaters of the Appomattox River from one of the gentle hills of Virginia’s Piedmont. The tavern had been built by Alexander Patteson to serve passengers on the stage line that he and his late brother had established between Richmond and Lynchburg in1814; Alexander Patteson himself died in 1836, leaving the tavern and its 206 acres divided between his estate and his brother’s, but in September of 1840 the Raines acquired the remaining half-interest for the same price of $1,525 that they had agreed upon for the first half. By 1839 stages stopped twice every weekday at the two-story brick tavern, and once a day on weekends; Raine lacked the Pattesons’ advantage of owning both stage line and tavern, but his was the best-known stop between Buckingham Court House and Lynchburg, and regular travelers remembered Clover Hill as the old headquarters of the stage company.2 For all of that, Raine had not prospered. At his death he would be remembered as a man who suffered economic reverses through his own stubborn belief in the virtue of others, and before the Christmas of1842 his fortunes had sunk so low that he appealed to his brother, back in Campbell Map 1. Clover Hill, 1845 County, to pick up the lapsed notes on the tavern parcel. Hugh Raine allowed him $3,500 for the 206-acre parcel, and permitted him to stay on as manager of the tavern. Now, barely two years later, thirty acres around the tavern had been sketched into town lots, and Hugh Raine was advertising them for sale.3 Hugh was taking economic advantage of a political circumstance on which John had long hoped to capitalize. Clover Hill lay amid rolling farmland, isolated by twenty-five or thirty miles from any county seat. Patteson’s tavern sat on the upper edge of Prince Edward County; a few hundred yards away, hugging the north branch of the Appomattox, the Sweeney family’s apple orchard worked its way up a slope in Buckingham County. Interested delegates to the state legislature had been trying for decades to have portions of Prince Edward, Buckingham, Campbell, and Charlotte Counties carved off to form a new county, with Clover Hill as the seat. For obvious reasons Alexander Patteson had made the first attempt himself, in 1824, when he presented a petition to the General Assembly for a new county called ‘‘Fayette,’’ but the attempt failed on a technicality. By 1839 proponents of a new county had grown better organized, and on February 21 of that year Thomas H. Flood presented the House of Delegates with another petition from a committee (which included John Raine) representing citizens in extremities of the four existing counties. 2 { t h e t a v e r n } These people were burdened with travel of as much as thirty-two miles each way every time they had to vote, attend militia muster, serve as jurors, or do any court business; they asked the delegates to create a new county with Clover Hill, the residence of John Raine, as the seat of justice, with a town of about forty lots laid out there. According to this memorial, the new county might be called Bouldin, Bolling, Appomattox, or anything else the legislature preferred. So certain was John Raine of ultimate success , despite the petition’s failure in the 1839 session, that over the next two summers he signed the pair of interest-bearing notes for a total of $3,050 to gain title to the Patteson property, where he had apparently been managing the tavern for some time.4 Raine had good cause for his optimism, as the...