Descendants of John Langhorne, 1640

115. Anne Frances Langhorne [10023] was born on 10 Apr 1842 in Campbell County, Virginia, died on 3 Jun 1907 at age 65, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Anne married Edward Sixtus Hutter [10022] [MRIN: 3350], son of George Christian Hutter [10243] and Harriet James Risque [10259], on 19 Dec 1861 in St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Lynchburg, Virginia. Edward was born on 18 Sep 1839 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 22 Jun 1904 in Lynchburg, Virginia at age 64, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

General Notes: Major Edward Sixtus Hutter.

Rivermont was the home purchased by Edward and Nannie Hutter later in the 19th century. While they did alter the house, they did a great deal with the land in the neighborhood above and beyond Daniel's Hill. In 1873, Hutter, a civil engineer, parceled and sold lots above the mansion in a development he named Danieltown. He was later one of the organizers of the Rivermont Company, the largest of the several land companies of the 1890's boom, and he was in part responsible for engineering the bridge over Blackwater Creek, which was so essential; to the development of what then was farmland.

Major Edward Sixtus Hutter II: Virginia Military Institute class of 1859. Saw service April 17, 1861 as Captain of a company of cadets who became involved in combat. Surrendered at Danville on April 27, 1865 as Major of Artillery. Later, his occupation was Civil Engineer. Residence; Rivermont.

Newspaper article in Ragland possession (2004):
"Among the most prized possessions of Attorney H.M. Gibbes is a volume that once formed part of the law library of the Confederacy and which has a most romantic and interesting history.
The volume is a copy of Vattel's Law of Nations: as edited by the great jurist Joseph Chitty and the copy in the possession of the local attorney is in most excellent preservation. It bears the incription, probably written by Judah P. Benjamin, "Confederate States, Department of State,: and was saved from the general desctruction of the secret archives of the Confederacy by Major E.S. Hutter who was Mr. Gibbes' father in law.
The circumstances were as follows: When the Confederate government withdrew from Richmond following the rumors, (then unconfirmed), of the surrender at Appomattox, the secret archives and a large portion of the law library and other appurtenances of the department of state were sent to Danville, Virginia, where Major Hutter was in charge and there stored in the government warehouses. As soon as the rumor of the final surrender was partially verified, Major Hutter received orders to destroy all the archives and, there being imminent danger of an immediate Federal attack, he went at night with a small force of faithful soldiers, poured kerosene oil over the entire contents of the storehousees and complied to the letter with his orders to destroy everything that might embarrass the friends of the Confederacy in both America and Europe. It is said that this act of Major Hutter's was one of the most vital of the dying days of the war of secession as it completely prevented disclosures that might have caused international complications of treamendous magnitude.
While opening the cases of books and papers that the fire might do its work without possibility of failure, Major Hutter came across the volume of international law and kept it as being one of the last relics of the defeated ambitions of the south. Later, it came into the possession of Mr. Gibbes after his marriage to Major Hutter's daughter and as stated, it forms one of the treasures of his law library second only in importance to a copy of the statutes of South Carolina published in 1836 and which contains many a long list of the old families which settled the "South State" in the latter end of the Seventeenth century. The Gibbes family was among the earliest of these settlers and, for generations was prominent in the affairs of the colony.
Major Hutter was identified with the armies of the Confederacy from the very beginning, he having been ordered to attend the execution of John Brown after the raid at Harper's Ferry and being at that time captain of one of the cadet compaines of the University of Virginia. On the day of the execution he attended as aide to Stonewall Jackson. Thus it may fairly be said that he was present at both the opening and the closing acts of the history of the southern states. He was in command at Danville after the surrender in 1865 and it will be remembered that the president and cabinet officers of the Confederacy were compelled to retreat through that place as the only road then open to the south was through the Virginia city."
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Edward Sixtus Hutter, born at "Sandusky," near Lynchburg, Va., September 18, 1839. Graduated at Virginia Military Institute in July, 1859; entered University of Virginia in 1860; entered Confederate Army, April 17, 1861, as Captain of a Company of University Students: served throughout the war, reaching the rank of Major of Artillery; surrendered at Danville, Va., April 27, I865. Married at Lynchburg, Va., December 19, 1861, to Nannie Langhorne, of Lynchburg, Va., a descendant of two of Virginia's most distinguished families, the Langhornes and the Dabneys

155 M i. John Langhorne Hutter [10279] was born on 18 Feb 1864 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 22 Jun 1893 in Pittsville, Virginia at age 29, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

157 M iii. Edward Risque Hutter [10281] was born on 31 Jul 1868 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 26 Dec 1910 in Glen Ferris, Fayette County, West Virginia at age 42, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

General Notes: Edward and his brother Christian drowned crossing the ice on the Kanawha River after having gone to a party and were on their way to their sister's home.

+ 158 F iv. Harriet Risque Hutter [10282] was born on 10 Dec 1869 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 22 Mar 1942 in Lynchburg, Virginia at age 72, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

+ 159 F v. Nannie Scott Hutter [10283] was born on 3 Mar 1873 in Lynchburg, Virginia and died in Lynchburg, Virginia.

160 M vi. George Christian Hutter [10289] was born on 14 Oct 1874 in Lynchburg, Virginia and died on 26 Dec 1910 in Glen Ferris, Fayette County, West Virginia at age 36.

+ 161 F vii. Lucy Boyd Hutter [9981] was born on 21 Jul 1875 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 3 Apr 1966 in Beckley, West Virginia at age 90, and was buried in Sunset Memorial Park, Beckley, West Virginia.

162 M viii. Chiswell Dabney Hutter [10284] was born on 18 Apr 1877 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 29 Sep 1898 in Lynchburg, Virginia at age 21, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

163 M ix. Edward Sixtus Hutter [10285] was born on 9 Jun 1878 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 28 Sep 1880 in Lynchburg, Virginia at age 2, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

165 F xi. Kitty Walker Hutter [10287] was born on 27 Mar 1885 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 7 Dec 1885 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

166 M xii. Harry Langhorne Hutter [10288] was born on 29 Jan 1888 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died on 17 Sep 1888 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and was buried in Presbyterian Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia.

116. Chiswell Dabney Langhorne [10365] was born on 4 Nov 1843 in Lynchburg, Virginia, died in 1919 in Richmond, Virginia at age 76, and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.

General Notes: A railroad Tycoon. Known by his children as "Shilly Langan".

Purchased the fabulous country estate "Mirador" in 1892 and returned to the genteel lifestyle that his ancestors had enjoyed for generations. At his death in 1919, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne left a trust to his heirs of over $1,000,000 in addition to the numerous estates which include at least Mirador and Greenfields.

A Note from Pittsylvania History: The sale of loose leafed tobacco by auction on a warehouse floor originated in Danville just prior to the Civil War. The practice proved to be very popular and was quickly adopted everywhere, being known as the "Danville System". Colonel Chiswell Langhorne, the father of Lady Nancy Astor, lived in Danville after the close of the war, and it is said that he set the pattern of the tobacco auctioneer's chant, which was also quickly adopted and followed everywhere.

The Langhorne sisters of Virginia were a phenomenon in America, in the South and then in the North, long before the third of Chillie Langhorne's five daughters crossed the Atlantic and became, as Nancy Astor, in 1919, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. For a decade or two after that, she was probably the most famous woman in the world. Nancy, in turn, had grown up in the shadow of her elder sister Irene. It was Irene who had first projected the sisterhood into the public imagination when she emerged in 1890 in Virginia, aged seventeen, as the last great Southern Belle; two years later, she was the first to go north since the Civil War, to lead the debutante balls. She married, in 1895, the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, into whose image Irene merged, thus achieving celebrity comparable now only in movie star or supermodel terms. Irene's rise to fame coincided with the moment that Chillie Langhorne, the patriarch of this family, who was born into the old Virginian squirearchy, a class ruined - like every other in Virginia - by the war, made a sudden fortune on the railroads and rescued his family from twenty-five years of poverty and hardship in the years of Reconstruction.

About Mirador: Virginia Historical Site

Mirador ** (added 1983 - Building - #83003256)
U.S. 250, Greenwood
Historic Significance: Architecture/Engineering, Person
Architect, builder, or engineer: Delano,William Adams
Architectural Style: Federal
Historic Person: Langhorne,Nancy, Lady Astor
Significant Year: 1842
Area of Significance: Politics/Government, Architecture
Period of Significance: 1825-1849, 1850-1874, 1875-1899, 1900-1924
Owner: Private
Historic Function: Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic
Historic Sub-function: Agricultural Outbuildings, Secondary Structure, Single Dwelling
Current Function: Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic
Current Sub-function: Agricultural Outbuildings, Animal Facility, Secondary Structure, Single Dwelling

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Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia
By JAMES FOX
The Langhornes
The Langhorne sisters of Virginia were a phenomenon in America, in the South and then in the North, long before the third of Chillie Langhorne's five daughters crossed the Atlantic and became, as Nancy Astor, in 1919, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. For a decade or two after that, she was probably the most famous woman in the world. Nancy, in turn, had grown up in the shadow of her elder sister Irene. It was Irene who had first projected the sisterhood into the public imagination when she emerged in 1890 in Virginia, aged seventeen, as the last great Southern Belle; two years later, she was the first to go north since the Civil War, to lead the debutante balls. She married, in 1895, the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, into whose image Irene merged, thus achieving celebrity comparable now only in movie star or supermodel terms. Irene's rise to fame coincided with the moment that Chillie Langhorne, the patriarch of this family, who was born into the old Virginian squirearchy, a class ruined - like every other in Virginia - by the war, made a sudden fortune on the railroads and rescued his family from twenty-five years of poverty and hardship in the years of Reconstruction.

Langhorne installed his family at Mirador, a colonnaded house at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the younger children, Nancy and her closest sister, Phyllis, Nora, and Buck, grew up. For the northern admirers who came down on the train to propose to Irene and to inspect this glamorous family, the setting was important in the Langhorne sisters' myth. It was a long way from the overcrowded four-room bungalow in Danville, where most of them were born and spent their early childhood; or the dusty streets of funereal Richmond, where they had moved from one rented house to another. It was a sudden transformation - and a rare one for Virginians at the time.

Nancy and, soon afterward, Phyllis, barely out of their teens, and both beauties to rival Irene, followed their elder sister north, encouraged by their father and their mother, Nanaire, to escape the poverty trap in Richmond. Both made disastrous first marriages to idle, hard-drinking northern millionaires, and both made their retreat from this further humiliation by the Yankees, across the Atlantic to England - a place of "homecoming," as they saw it - where Irene and Dana, on their grand tours, had already become assimilated into Edwardian royal circles. Nancy and Phyllis, both brilliant and fearless riders, shipped their horses from Virginia and first made their mark on English society on the hunting fields of Leicestershire. Within two years, having turned down many titled suitors, Nancy in 1906 married Waldorf Astor, whose father, William Waldorf Astor, had settled in England and who was considered then the richest man in the world. Later, Phyllis, who had taken longer to extract herself from her own first husband, married Bob Brand, Oxford scholar, economic expert, and intellectual, known since he was a young imperial civil servant as "The Wisest Man in the Empire."
Nancy and Phyllis found themselves in highly unpredictable circumstances, at the center of English politics and power, changing one vanishing world for another. But it was Nancy who drove the bandwagon, first by effortlessly conquering Edwardian society and the literary world and then by moving into politics from her base, with Waldorf, at Cliveden, their great house by the Thames. Under Nancy, even before the First World War, Cliveden had become a hothouse of political power that embraced both government and opposition, as well as Anglo-American intrigue.

Nora, the youngest, wayward sister, was in turn forced from Mirador and across the water to England by Nancy and Phyllis, who hoped to tame her with a good English marriage, under their supervision. She arrived after a series of romantic episodes that kept the family constantly on the edge of scandal, and that continued even more scandalously after her marriage. (Part of Nora's claim on history, later on, was the fame of her daughter, the actress and comedienne Joyce Grenfell.) Of the sisters, only Lizzie, the eldest, born in 1867 soon after the war, who had married a Virginian, was left behind in this extraordinary exercise of mobility and transformation - but she continued, from Richmond, to have her stern effect on the family. The Langhorne boys in the family, Keene, Harry, and the youngest child, Buck, were no match for their formidable sisters, to whom their father had been more lenient. Keene and Harry succumbed to tuberculosis at a young age, aggravated by alcohol and much time spent "spreeing" in the mountains, trying to get away from their father's dominating control. Buck, a man of immense popularity in Virginia, survived these same afflictions for longer. He lived the pleasurable life of an eighteenth-century squire on a remote farm near the James River, "the only man I know," said his father, "who inherited a self running farm."

The lives of the Langhorne sisters spanned one hundred years, from the birth of Lizzie to the death of Nancy in 1964; from the end of the Civil War, through the traumas of Reconstruction, to Edwardian England; the politics and turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s, through the Second World War to the early 1960s. So enduring was the Langhorne sisters' myth that when Irene visited the White House in April 1945, a few days before Roosevelt died, and forty years after Nancy had married Waldorf Astor, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column, "The younger members of the family were fascinated by her, because she is still the Gibson Girl of her husband's drawings; and though some of the youngsters had never heard of the Gibson Girl, they fell a victim to her charm of manner and beauty. All of the Langhorne sisters are people one has to notice!" The sisters left an exceptional legacy of correspondence - many thousands of letters, most of which had lain in a large black trunk, barely disturbed since my grandfather, Bob Brand, husband of Phyllis, had collected them in the early 1950s, as part of the process of grief after Phyllis's premature death. They tell the intimate story of these sisters and their odyssey on both sides of the Atlantic, of fame, fortune, and often of tragedy. The immense detail contained in this historical archive also provides a rare picture of the era - part nineteenth century, part twentieth - in which they lived.

"Nothing could be quite as lovely as that," Nancy wrote about the Virginia of her youth some years before she died and after a lifetime in some of the finest houses in England. It was the Virginia of better days that she was remembering; the years of her teens when her father, Chillie Langhorne, had struck his bonanza collaborating with the Yankees. He had bought Mirador with this quite sudden wealth, as a summer place - a colonial red-brick house with a farm, near Charlottesville, whose back porch looked across apple orchards and up a long gentle slope toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. It had box hedges along its paths, smokehouses for the hams, dark green shutters on its Georgian windows, a fine cobbled stableyard. In Mirador, Chillie Langhorne had re-created a world belonging to the sentimental novels of the 1830s, years after the war that had devastated Virginia. None of the sisters ever quite got over the idyllic idea of Mirador, and yet they abandoned it, despite the communal wealth at their disposal. But like many families with a sense of themselves, they had invested it with a symbolic importance beyond its natural beauty. Its importance was that it had created the Langhorne sisters.

Nancy was eleven when Irene, aged seventeen and "bewitching" to look at, was led by a beau on to the dance floor at White Sulphur Springs and declared a Belle in her own right - a Cinderella-like transformation. The Golden Age of the Belle lasted for thirty years, from the end of the Civil War to the appearance of Irene. The system was taken immensely seriously in Virginia. It was a highly institutionalized fantasy, a means of foiling the memory of defeat, of ignoring poverty, of turning the clock back to some imagined 1840, of defending the inviolable purity of the white southern girl in the face of forced emancipation and Reconstruction. It was a lifeline of self-esteem. Irene capped this by taking herself north - Mr. Langhorne was glad to bury the hatchet - and leading the New York balls, and then by marrying Charles Dana Gibson. He had created the "Gibson Girl" in 1890, five years before he married Irene. Her image -- the upturned nose, what the poet Thom Gunn called her "sporty jaw," the slender waist, the slightly disdainful look of the new emancipated woman - looked remarkably like Irene. Gibson had created the first nationwide fashion frenzy and he had become a cult figure himself, mobbed for his autograph. Their wedding in Richmond was an affair of American royalty and was seen as another symbolic end to the North/South hostilities. Irene became the Gibson Girl, the icon of the young American woman that gripped magazine readers for two more decades. She had turned the vanishing Southern Belle into a modern media fantasy. She then settled down with Dana Gibson to be immortal, fixed in the moment of her fame, as the world changed about her.

The eldest sister, Lizzie, had borne the brunt with her parents of those twenty years since the war and resented the Yankee beaux coming down in droves, in private railroad cars, to get a fashionable taste of the South and to propose to Irene. In Lizzie's time, no one went north from Virginia, it was unheard-of. When Nancy and Phyllis were small children, the family had lived in Danville, with seven children and destitute relations crammed into four rooms. Their mother, Nanaire, had eleven children, "all of them unwanted," Nancy liked to say, most of them born under these harsh conditions. Three died in infancy after Lizzie was born. Later, Lizzie helped Nanaire to raise the remaining four, and in contrast to Nanaire, she did it severely and was forever resented for it by her siblings. She never enjoyed the pleasures of a Mirador childhood. Before the Langhorne fortunes had changed, she married a Virginian, Moncure Perkins - an option all of the others avoided - and was the only one to remain there, despite the mystical attachment to it that the other sisters claimed all their lives. Lizzie belonged to the old Richmond of Reconstruction, of black-veiled war widows, drunken husbands, winter mud and summer dust, of obsession with genealogy and, above all, with talk. It was a place rebuilt out of rubble in late Victorian style, of mahogany furniture and gas lamps, of deep conservatism, of cultivation and shabbiness, and close-knit pride where everybody knew everyone else on the ten blocks where they all lived. Lizzie became sad, somewhat embittered by the way her sisters treated her, and ended up fatally dependent on Nancy's controlling purse strings.

In Irene's wake, Nancy, Phyllis, and later Nora, the youngest sister, began to exercise what their mother called "the right of every Langhorne daughter to become a Belle." They became famous in succession. Chillie had taught Nancy and Phyllis to ride, bareback at first, to jump the steep Virginia snake fences and to break and train yearlings, to be fearless, to take "excessive" risks. The combination of beauty and brilliance on the hunting field - Phyllis became the best rider of her generation - gave them an advantage of mobility never lost on the sisters in later times. They were helped, too, by the wave of admiration and forgiveness toward the South that followed Reconstruction, and the northern fantasies of an old and gracious world, "distinguished" and "aristocratic." Industrialists and carpetbaggers were sending their daughters to the spas in white flannel blazers to teach them how to be Belles, imagining a pageant of southern chivalry. By the time they had appropriated "Belledom," it was all over. The Langhorne sisters had gone north, where every appearance at a horse show or a ball and certainly each engagement or marriage was a sensation reported in the New York Times.

There was nothing self-conscious about the way the Langhornes carried on at Mirador. In the Republican political imagination during Reconstruction, Virginians especially were looked on with suspicion as Tories and aristocrats. And the Langhornes had taken effortlessly and naturally to their new wealth, reverting to the old simplicities of rural life of Chillie's boyhood, of horses and hunting, quail shooting and leisurely farming. Country Virginia was no cotton-growing Georgia, with great plantations and labor gangs. It was Anglophile, gentle, enclosed. It was almost unchanged since the days of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello a hundred years earlier; cultivated, unpretentious, with good food and endless hospitality, and a preoccupation with gardens. Mirador was furnished not with the Victorian mahogany of the Richmond bourgeoisie, but with old Georgian furniture bought cheaply, with mixed cretonne, unfashionable chintz -- the walls painted different shades of gray. They danced waltzes and two-steps in the parlor to the fiddle and banjo played by black musicians, and sang in close harmony. They lived closely with their servants, treating them - some of them former slaves - as they would their subordinate relations, calling their nurses "Aunt," hugging them in the photographs. They lived closely enough to inherit the religious feelings and diurnal superstitions of their black staff, and to adopt their particular humor and sense of the ridiculous. It was built in to the Langhorne style. They liked performing, too - especially Chillie, the tempestuous, all-protecting patriarch "who kept them all in stitches with his plantation songs, his dancing and inspired high jinks." "The Langhornes are like street musicians," a Chicago psychiatrist who knew the family said some years later. "They entertain you whether you ask them to or not." They were clannish, quick, merciless with each other, battering out vanities with their cruel games of "truth" that, to the amazement of visitors, brought sounds of terrible weeping from behind closed doors, followed by hysterical laughter. "We were fitted for battling in our family," Phyllis wrote. The M in Mirador, she said, stood for misery as well as mirth.

The Langhornes seemed to have invented themselves through this collective mystique of sisterhood. To outsiders, they were fascinating and impenetrable, giving the impression that no one would ever get as close to them as they were to each other. It was this relationship that anchored their lives, that produced the glamour and excitement for the strings of admirers who fell in love with each or all of them. They gave off the sense that they were set apart, even unique. They were thought of in the plural long after their separate careers were a matter of history. They produced this effect in part because each of them had such a strong sense of her own identity. They were starkly different types: Lizzie, the strict pioneer figure, of stern elegance and Puritan disapproval; Irene, passive and golden, the image of what men expected from women of that era -- unintellectual, chaste but flirtatious, stately and amusing - was the eternal Belle and the most ready victim of her sisters' wit. Nora, the youngest, was the eternal child. Dreamy, disorganized, and unschooled, she was talented - a brilliant mimic and inventor of skits, a talent inherited by her daughter - with a romantic smoky singing voice that she accompanied on the ukulele and guitar. She was physically the most alluring as well as the kindest-hearted of them all. She was also free with her favors, unable to tell the truth and irresponsible with money. Her life, punctuated with seductions and boltings, debts and broken appointments, was a charmed one until her last years, successfully devoted to making sure everyone had a good time. She said of herself that she had "a heart like a hotel." One of her beaux added, "And every room was full." Of all the sisters, she was considered the best company, the cosiest and most reassuring, and to children she was enchanting. "If you had half an hour to spend on earth, you'd spend it with Aunt Nora," said one of her nieces. "Then," she added, breaking the metaphor, "you wouldn't see her for a year."

Nancy, the most flamboyant of them all, represented power - an irresistible force of nature, bred in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was turned loose initially on the stuffy Edwardian ruling class of England, and then on the House of Commons, and finally, with more devastating effect, on her own family. This innate "power engine" enabled Nancy, at first, to cut her way through life with astonishing facility, although it disguised frailties in her psyche. She had many weapons at her disposal, beyond the fact of her married wealth and the grandeur of Cliveden. There was certainly a touch of genius to her wit and verbal speed, her intuition. She was the most compelling performer in a family bred on spontaneous performing. Nora was brilliant in her way, but Nancy was gifted with the attributes of an anarchic, radical comedian: lack of caution, deadly mimicry, comic timing, an uncanny intuition for hitting the weak nerve, for "divining your inmost thought," as Bob Brand wrote of her. She was gifted, too, with a rare social fearlessness unknown in Edwardian England. Nancy said to a pompous British Cabinet minister at Cliveden, having got the attention of the whole table, "I know your wife thought you were a bore when she married you, because she told me so, but nobody could have thought you'd be as bad as this." The rest of her guests, who had been saying this behind his back, were convulsed with laughter. And the minister's vanity was flattered by this apparent display of intimacy. A less-gifted performer would never have got away with it, and even Nancy sometimes failed. She could be prejudiced, bullying, deliberately tactless; she could act, as one of her relations described it, with the instincts of a gangster. Even this could be exciting in the way that it could instantly transform situations; her behavior was always a guarantee against boredom, pomposity, convention. Nancy had a passion for meeting people, and it was this cheek and directness that enabled her to connect instantly with people she wanted to get on terms with, her "betters," as she called them. She had long and loyal friendships with Arthur Balfour, the last of the great aristocratic Tory prime ministers; with George Bernard Shaw; with Sean O'Casey, the Irish Communist playwright, with whom she corresponded for forty years; and with T. E. Lawrence, none of whom were bullyable types needing her patronage.

Nancy got almost everything in life through her wit - she never used her beauty for flirtation, as an instrument of power - but also through an incomparable courage, a combination used to powerful effect on the political hustings. They enabled her to hold on to a largely working-class constituency for twenty-five years of political turbulence, as the first woman MP; and they helped her to withstand the battery of male resentment that greeted her in Parliament for many years after she took her seat. Nancy had no reflective power; she was often wildly wrong in her political judgments. She relied entirely on instinct; she saw herself as a "fighting woman" from Virginia. If she could sense a nerve to attack, often leaving her victims speechless in disbelief, Nancy could also empathize with suffering almost to the point of feeling it herself. Then she would act - an engine of kindness - putting into gear the vast resources at her disposal of money and secretaries. There appeared to be no limit to her generosity or the number of people, famous or obscure, who benefited from it.

But the sister who had the deepest emotional effect on those around her, particularly on men, was Phyllis, eighteen months younger than Nancy. When the beaux were courting, Nancy remembered, "They liked me but it was Phyllis they always fell in love with." Such charm as she had is indefinable, but clearly she possessed it. Feminine, sympathetic, there was a luminous quality to her beauty, a melancholy in her nature, a "minor key," as her sisters called it, and a streak of introversion so foreign to her father and her siblings. She radiated some mixture of love and goodness along with the connecting Langhorne gaiety. She was musical, a brilliant horsewoman and huntress. She was also the most popular within her family, except with her father, who disliked her reticence and her need for solitude, and liked to watch the tears swell "like diamonds" in her eyes when he made her cry. Of all Nancy's contemporaries, including husbands and admirers, Phyllis was the only person Nancy loved her entire life. She loved her with such a passionate longing that at times it seemed as if Nancy's other attachments were an exhausting duty and challenge. It was to Phyllis that Nancy confided, in her early letters from Cliveden, the panic she felt having married into the Astor clan, the longing to be back at Mirador, and her grief, which lasted for twenty years, for her mother's death. Only Nancy knew, for some years, of Phyllis's great and secret romance with a captain in the Grenadier Guards, and the many sadnesses of her life.

Phyllis and Nancy, whose lives are the center of this story, appear at first to represent opposite, complementary forces. If Nancy represented elemental power, Phyllis, at least in Nancy's eyes, stood for the inner life Nancy had always longed for and never achieved, despite her fanatical, and, to Phyllis, incomprehensible, devotion to Christian Science. These were the qualities Nancy missed after the death of Nanaire, her idol of long-suffering selflessness and the driving force for the great crusade of "goodness" that dominated her life. "Every day I pray that I shall be really spiritual and that I'll be able to raise the dead," Nancy confessed to a clergyman friend, "then I go out and all I do is raise hell." Despite her bountiful compassionate heart, Nancy never acquired the gift of selfless love, a virtue that she exhorted on others and carried as her banner. She never understood why Nanaire's rewards - total devotion from her children - had eluded her. She had assumed exclusive rights of ownership over them for many years with a clear conscience, believing she was doing God's work, and that they were better off under her improving wing. She tried to exercise these rights over her sisters, too, particularly Phyllis. Having wanted to be like her saintly mother, Nanaire, she became more like her father, the irascible, tempestuous Chillie Langhorne, whose bullying ways she had always despised. (His full name was Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, known and pronounced "Shilly Langan.")

Nancy and Phyllis nevertheless had similarities of character rooted in their inheritance, which led them into the same damaging move encouraged by their father, marrying their northern millionaires, by whom they had children and whom they then divorced. Chillie Langhorne's instructions were contradictory: to be a Belle but also to make your own destiny. Both sisters reinvented their lives as far away from their first husbands as possible, believing they could close the door on the past not only for themselves but for their children, too. These parallel mistakes led ultimately to catastrophe in their family lives. The men they married or drew into their orbit in England were, this time, the brightest and the best, high-minded reformers and idealists closely connected with power who saw their great task as nothing less than federating the old Empire, and forging an imagined Pax Americana-Britannica, a civilizing, global rule of law that would end nationalism, the arms race, war itself. They belonged to the generation from before 1914, brought up in public schools and Oxford quadrangles, the last to believe that they were dealing with a rational, perfectible world, ready to stabilize itself into an ordered system under British and American guidance. Their plans were swept away by two world wars and economic collapse, the momentous upheavals of the century that also deeply affected their personal lives.

I grew up, for much of my holiday childhood, in the house of my grandfather, Bob Brand. He had married Phyllis, my grandmother, in 1917. In 1928, they moved to Eydon Hall, an elegant Palladian house with an antebellum feel, in the heart of Northamptonshire. It was bought to remind Phyllis of Mirador, and to put her in the best hunting country, or what my grandfather, brought up in Hertfordshire, called "a real grass country": she was subject to bouts of melancholy, for which hunting was her one sure antidote. Her premature death in 1937 was a catastrophe for my grandfather, whose marriage had been a love affair sustained for twenty years, a love hard won and the only one in his life. In the twenty-five years he still had to live, he never got over his grief, and wrote in the pages he filled trying to make sense of it that when she died, "everything lovely had left my life." He had been living, since, "in a spiritual half world." Yet for him there was further tragedy to come.

By the end of the Second World War, when he returned to England from Washington, where he had also served in a key role for his country in the First World War, Bob Brand had become something of a hero of his times. The Wisest Man had lived up to his name, in part for his clear-sightedness and his predictions, which had all tragically come to pass. In the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he was almost a lone voice in trying to persuade the Allies to drop punitive reparations demands on the Germans, warning of ruin and hyperinflation. When it came, in the 1920s and 1930s, he fought, again in vain, to get the bankers and governments to stabilize the mark. As early as 1936, he predicted - because he had watched the consequent rise of Nazism in Berlin - that we would have to fight Hitler in a war and urged his friends and his countrymen to rearm to prevent it. His warnings were ignored on all sides and by all the parties. When it was announced that his government had given him a peerage in 1946, the Washington Post took the exceptional step of writing a leader with the title "Honoring Mr. Brand" - praising him for his achievements. "Even more outstanding and precious," it read, "is his record of friendships made....Americans who have come into contact with Mr. Brand prize his friendship. It is restful to meet a man who is so sweetly reasonable, so devoid of dogmatism, so willing to learn and to share what he knows, and is so unobtrusive." One of these friends was Felix Frankfurter, justice of the Supreme Court, adviser to presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt, who later wrote of "that gentle and wise man": "Not one of the so-called private and unofficial ambassadors active in promoting harmonious Anglo-American relations was more effective or more welcome than Lord Brand was in his quiet way."

Before he left America, Bob Brand paid a last visit to Mirador, sat in the garden, and wrote to Nancy: "Not a soul here. The house shut....I have never felt such a ghost. When I think of two generations of gaiety laughter beauty here & now silence. This morning early the dove was softly mourning. This is a sound that whenever I hear it brings back to me hot mornings at Mirador when I first was in love with Phyl and when there was warmth and love and ease and happiness before me, and the smell of honeysuckle, an indescribable mixture that marks this time out from any other in my life and when Virginia became, as it remains, the truly romantic spot in the whole world. Everything passes, everything changes and God knows what we are or why we are here. Some moments have made life worth living. But they are all gone except in memory and when I think of the names in the Mirador visiting book I wonder why I am still alive."

To his grandchildren, too, Bob Brand was a man of great benevolence and sweetness of nature who looked at you through the same rimless glasses he had worn to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. I remember his heavy corduroys, the thistle-cutter he carried, the black beret he wore as he took me on walks around his barely mechanized farm. Very little in the house had changed since Phyllis's death. He had kept it that way, seeing no point in doing otherwise. The house in some ways was a shrine to Phyllis - her saddles and bridles were locked in a tackroom in the stableyard, untouched and unused after her death. Her boudoir, a pretty room in a bow on the side of the house, with a desk, an Adam fireplace, armchairs, was also kept locked and unused, the plain silk curtains gradually falling apart. Elsewhere, the décor hadn't changed since she created it, and the lightness and grace of the architecture still reflected her southern taste, her furniture and paint. It was unlike any other house in the district, and one of the prettiest I have seen in England, to this day. My grandfather lived alone here, with a few members of the prewar staff, including the retired butler, Mr. Blyth, a man of eccentric informality compared to his peers in that formal profession. Phyllis had employed him in 1922 and had written to her husband, "He is the greatest treasure we have got." Nancy discovered that Phyllis had found the only butler in England who had the natural familiarity of the black staff at Mirador. Mr. Blyth could hardly move when I knew him, and I acted as his bicycle courier, riding to the pub for his cigarettes.

--------------------
RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH
February 15, 1919

Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, famed as the father of Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson, the original Gibson Girl and the father of America's most beautiful women, millionaire railway builder, sportsman and gentleman of the old Virginia school, is dead in his home, Montor Terrace, here. He died yesterday afternoon following an illness of several weeks.

Funeral services will be conducted privately from St. paul's Episcopal Church at 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon. Internment will be in the Hollywood Cemetery. Mrs. Gibson will attend the funeral. Her sisters, Mrs. Waldorf Astor, Mrs. Robert Brand and Mrs. Paul Phipps are in London, whence they started to come to the bedside of their father several days ago but were advised not to attempt the journey because of transportation conditions.

WAS BORN IN LYNCHBURG AND FOUGHT IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY.

Besides his daughters, Mr. Langhorne leaves one son, W. H. Langhorne of Albemarle, a brother, Thomas M. Langhorne of Covington, a sister, Mrs. John H. Lewis of Lynchburg and three grandchildren, C. D. L. Perkins, Mrs. Henry Field and Alice M. Perkins.

Mr. Langhorne was born in Lynchburg November 4, 1843. His parents were John S. Langhorne and Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne. As a youth he entered the Confederate Army and served with distinction during the war. Soon After the war he went to Danville where he married Miss Nannie Keene, a woman of remarkable beauty and wonderful accomplishments from whom his daughters inherited much of their charm and grace.

Chiswell married Anne Witcher Keene [10430] [MRIN: 3490], daughter of Elisha F. Keene [12796] and Unknown, on 20 Dec 1864 in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Anne was born in 1847.

167 F i. Irene Langhorne [10431] was born in 1873 and died in 1956 at age 83.

Irene married Charles Dana Gibson [10432] [MRIN: 3491] in 1895. Charles was born on 14 Sep 1867 in Roxbury, Massachusetts and died in 1944 at age 77.

General Notes: Famous for the creation of the "Gibson Girl" and was owner of Life Magazine at the time of his death. His wife, Irene Langhorne is often credited as the model for the famous Gibson Girl.

In Victorian times, illustrators for popular magazines had as much influence on people as movies and television do today. Just as we now look for fashion ideas and moral inspiration from celebrities, actors, or musicians, so the Americans of the 1890's and first two decades of the past century found their hopes and ideals expressed in the pen-and-ink drawings of Charles Dana Gibson.
Many writers have attempted to describe the Gibson Girl, but Susan E. Meyer, in her book America's Great Illustrators did it best and most simply: "She was taller than the other women currently seen in the pages of magazines.. infinitely more spirited and independent, yet altogether feminine. She appeared in a stiff shirtwaist, her soft hair piled into a chignon, topped by a big plumed hat. Her flowing skirt was hiked up in back with just a hint of a bustle. She was poised and patrician. Though always well bred, there often lurked a flash of mischief in her eyes."
The flash of mischief was not lost upon readers. It was a characteristic they loved, that seemed to exemplify the American spirit of resourcefulness, adventurousness, and liberation from European traditions.

Then "inventor" of this elegant, willowy image of feminine beauty was born on September 14, 1867 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a descendant of sturdy, hard-working New England stock. His father was a Civil War lieutenant who dabbled as an amateur artist, and his mother was a warm-hearted spontaneous woman who lavished affection and encouragement on her five children.
During a childhood illness, Gibson's father taught him how to make silhouettes of people, animals, and trees, and eventually Charles became so adept at it that when he was twelve, his parents entered his work in an exhibition that gained him his first recognition as an artist.
When Charles was of high school age, his parents scrimped and saved to send him to the Art Students League in Manhattan, a fine school boasting famous painters like Thomas Eakins and William Merrit Chase on the staff. Charles' fellow students included the soon-to-be-acclaimed Western painter Frederic Remington.
Gibson studied for two years, before the financial hardship on his family made him decide to go to work so that he could pay his parents back for their generous support. Unfortunately, the skill that he had displayed as a silhouette artist was not evident, at first, in his pen-and-ink work. He made the rounds of all the magazines and publishers, both large and small - he had good business sense - with no success, until finally in the fall of 1886 he managed to sell, for four dollars, a small drawing of a dog chained to his doghouse, baying at the moon.
The purchaser of this work was Life magazine, at that time an influential humor publication edited by John Ames Mitchell, an artist himself. Although he thought Charles' work was crude, he saw the "honesty and courage" in it, which led him to give Gibson guidance and then more work - for the next thirty years.
Gibson was nothing if not determined, and he parlayed his first sale (after celebrating his new professional status with a seventy-five cent chicken pie) into an ever-growing business. Month to month his income increased steadily, and he found himself a studio. He poured over English and American magazines for new techniques and ideas, and when, in 1889, he was earning enough money for a trip to England and Paris, he went there specifically to study.
He met his idol, the English artist George du Maurier, who did satiric drawings for Puck, and when he came back to America Gibson developed a new vitality in his style. Du Maurier was famous for his drawings of striking society women, and soon Gibson would be, too.
By 1890, the artist was working for all the major publications in New York: The Century Harper's Monthly Weekly Bazaar plus doing his weekly drawings for Life. Then, with the creation of the "Gibson Girl," as she came to be called, he became - in modern parlance- a superstar.
The Gibson Girl was, in the artist's own words, "The American Girl to all the world," even as she raised her new-fangled golf-club and cried "Fore!" She was spunky and sentimental, down-to-earth and aristocratic at the same time. And she appeared in drawings that captured with bold craftsmanship such timeless themes as love, money, self-deception, and social climbing. One brilliant and moving series published in 1899 even shows the Gibson Girl from infancy to old age.
Gibson's captions gave the drawings, with their masterly evocation of mood through light and shadow, the quality of short stories. And indeed, in such series as "Mr. Pipp's Education," which was about a henpecked husband and his family traveling through Europe, Gibson created the visual equivalent of a novel.
The country rewarded this artist and social commentator (he preferred to see himself as the later) with the greatest adulation ever seen up to that time for an illustrator. Not only did he become a social lion and New York's most eligible bachelor (until he settled down with Virginia society belle Irene Langhorne in 1895), but he saw the nation decree "Gibson-mania" for the next two decades.
There was merchandising of the Gibson Girl on the level of Mickey Mouse or Star Wars. Large size books ("table albums," they were called), china plates and saucers, ashtrays, tablecloths, pillow covers, chair covers, souvenir spoons, screens, fans, umbrella stands...all bore the image of Gibson's creations. There was even a wallpaper for bachelor apartments, with the lovely Gibson faces in endless array. A popular turn-of-the-century hobby, pyrography, saw people burning the Gibson Girl into leather and wood; and the image was traced and stitched into handkerchiefs. There were plays, songs, and even a movie based on his creation.
Amid this adulation, the well-bred young ladies of the time came (with their chaperones) to Gibson's studio to pose; later, many of them claimed to have been the "original" Gibson Girl. And to keep his heroine company, the artist developed the Gibson Man, (for whom he himself could have passed), handsome, courteous, romantic, and almost at all times subtly in awe of the gorgeous Gibson Girl; for what comes across most clearly in the drawings is that Gibson felt women were clearly the superior sex...at least in terms of points per game!
Yet the important thing is that Gibson was able to show this in a way that never offended men; if anything, his male audience must have nodded in comradely, if rueful, agreement Charles Dana Gibson's elegant drawings captured the spirit of an age. Never before had an artist stirred such commercial interest. Magazines fought for the exclusive rights to his services in negotiations which made headlines; but no matter what agreements he made (and Colliers offered him unheard of thousands of pre-tax dollars if only he would be theirs alone), he always maintained a connection to Life, the publication that gave him his start.
Indeed, after World War I (during which Gibson led his fellow artists in creating soul-stirring patriotic art) and the death of his mentor John Ames Mitchell, Gibson took over Life himself, as editor. Unfortunately - or perhaps it was fortunate from Gibson's point of view, because now he had the time to paint in oils, which his busy schedule had long precluded - the end of World War I brought a change in the country's attitudes, and John Held's flapper drawings took the place of the Gibson Girl in the public's heart.
Gibson dedicated himself to his paintings, depicting his surroundings and family near his home in Maine, and he earned critical acclaim for his efforts. By the time of his death in 1944, the world was much different indeed, but Gibson's spirit certainly lived on, especially in the rash of 1890's nostalgia movies produced in Hollywood in the early 1940's.
As critic Henry Pitz wrote in The Gibson Girl and Her America... "he used his talent to express his most earnest convictions. He was not a consciously deep prober, but many of the surface features to which he was sensitive had deep and mysterious roots. He had a lot to reveal about the characters of his era and had more than a little to do with the shaping of it"
That's a fine epitaph for this talented artist.

+ 168 F ii. Nancy Witcher Langhorne [10433] was born on 19 May 1879 in Danville, Virginia and died on 2 May 1964 at age 84.

171 M v. William Henry "Buck" Langhorne [10679] was born about 1885 in Virginia.

General Notes: "Buck" Langhorne (AKA William Henry Langhorne b. abt 1885) and son of Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, was expelled from VMI (Virginia Military Institute) for stealing a pig from a traveling circus. Alice Winn says in her book that the indignant owner of the pig told the Commandant of VMI that the thief was a cadet with closely cut fair hair. When the news got out about the "crime" and the search for the thief, the whole corps was paraded before the Commandant and every cadet had a new hair cut. The Commandant wasn't amused, so Buck fessed up and was kicked out. (Always a Virginian - Alice Winn)

Mary next married Charles Davis Dehart [13498] [MRIN: 4461] on 24 Dec 1882 in Patrick County, Virginia.

183 F i. Daisy Evelyn Dehart [13501] was born on 30 Dec 1883 in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia and died on 23 Dec 1979 in Atlanta, Georgia at age 95.

184 F ii. Fannie Eunice Dehart [13503] was born on 20 Aug 1886 in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia and died on 30 Aug 1979 in Keysville, Virginia at age 93.

Fannie married Harry B. Powell [13504] [MRIN: 4466] on 27 Nov 1905 in Stuart, Virginia.

+ 185 M iii. Ellis Randolph Dehart [13505] was born on 19 Mar 1889 in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia, died on 3 Sep 1965 in Galax, Virginia at age 76, and was buried in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia.

186 F iv. Virginia Irene Dehart [13506] was born on 2 Feb 1897 in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia and died on 20 Aug 1945 in Richmond, Virginia at age 48.

187 M v. Charles Langhorne Dehart [13508] was born on 16 Jun 1900 in Meadow-Of-Dan, Virginia and died on 29 Jan 1972 at age 71.

Charles married Grace Marion Stultz [13509] [MRIN: 4473] in Nov 1917 in Stone, Kentucky.

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Descendants of John Langhorne, 1640

Eighth Generation