Laura van den Berg once penned, "If you have no way to mark the hours, no variance in the days,…read moretime will open its mouth and swallow you." She must have visited Welbourne.
More than one visitor, this one included, has concluded that spending time at Welbourne is like visiting Grandma's house, for there's no better quick description of it. But the fact of the matter is, there is so much more.
Welbourne is a living, breathing timepiece of current, past, and aged history that has been ticking through the ages of American life, since before America became a "united" States. Within its walls lie relics of Piedmont, Virginia, and U.S. history that you're not only allowed to touch, but are encouraged to take into your hands and feel, play with, and enjoy, just as if they were items in Grandma's house.
From the second you cross the front porch and walk over the front door transom, history descends on you in waves like the folds of an old, warm blanket. If you ensconce yourself in the wonderful library to the right of the large foyer, you can relax in a rocker next to a nightstand on which sits a narrow treatise from 1765 entitled Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies for the Purpose of Raising Revenue, by Act of Parliament; which you can take into your own hands and read under the steady painted gaze of Richard A. Dulaney in all his Confederate Colonel glory; while hundreds of volumes of history in floor to ceiling bookshelves beckon you to investigate the Civil War, as well as any number of fiction works old and "new" (circa early 20thcentury or earlier).
Those sounds underfoot as you step from room to room aren't creaks, they're the songs of the past asking you to join in the chorus of centuries of life here. The faces in those paintings and pictures wait patiently for you to settle into your comfy chair to listen to their myriad stories of eras past, buttressed by the thousands of books in the untold number of bookcases all over the house. The well-worn rugs atop those well-worn original floorboards muffle the cries & laughter of times past as the ever-present tick-tock of the 1840 Howard & Davis banjo clock on the stairwell wall keeps perfect time to the music of those lives like a metronome of history.
Beneath your feet well-worn Persian rugs laying atop original black board floors sing songs of centuries of life that have danced were you now so comfortably sit. A seat where the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe came to pen some of their works while their legendary publisher Maxwell Perkins enjoyed his close friendship with Elizabeth Lemmon, lady of the house. In fact, all over the 3 floors of this manse sit numerous bookcases filled with thousands of books large & small on every topic imaginable, all watched over by photos, paintings, and drawings of family members past; each unique room & bedroom holds a special piece of that past, presented in the now familiar term of faded elegance and comfort befitting Grandma's house.
Noah Webster and all his intellectual heft leaves me wanting in the superlatives necessary to describe, much less explain, Welbourne and its impact on you. Because it's more than just Grandma's house. It's a thousand Grandma's houses, of thousands of Virginians, of thousands of Americans; storied lives were lived and breathed within its walls and out in its countryside; their ghosts speak to you out of the expansive silence; every photo and painting and picture a reflection of someone you should know; the life of someone who very well may have supped with George Washington at Mt. Vernon, ridden with John Mosby and his Rangers, or perhaps accompanied J.E.B. Stuart across the Potomac River at Seneca on his way to a collision with Union forces at Gettysburg. Welbourne is one of those few extant places that stands in silent testimony of a disappearing Virginia hunt countryside with so many stories to tell they would have kept Ken Burns & Shelby Foote quite busy.
So how can I describe this place in such a way as to get you to come? I can't. If you're looking for opulence and gentrified regalia accompanied by $500 glasses of aged, vintage Virginia wine, you've come to the wrong place; turn around and go back to Middleburg and drive north 5 minutes to the Salamander Resort and all its antiseptic perfection. But if you want to touch living, breathing history as lived by 7 generations of the same family, the descendants of which welcome you like old friends with a heart-felt make yourself at home warmth as if they were your cousins; if squeaking floors and cracks in walls aren't noise and eyesores but instead the house's attempt to open itself up to you to sit, reflect, and bask in respite from the modern in the lap of true old-world family comfort & charm, come here.
Come. Come now.
Stay. Stay forever.
