Everywhere I go these days, I encounter windows with names etched on them.
Well, that’s not entirely true, but it sure seems that way.
After writing about the autograph of a former Supreme Court of Virginia clerk and the date of 1905 carved into a window in the Oliver W. Hill Building on Capitol Square, I was working on another story in Powhatan when I came upon something similar.
At historic Belmead on the James, the subject of an upcoming feature, members of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who are working to preserve the manor house and the 2,200 acres of riverfront property, pointed me to a window pane in the dining room.
There, the son of the 19 th-century plantation owner and his new wife had scratched their names into the glass on their wedding day in the 1860s.
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Then I received a call from Dr. Jim Jordan, a professor of anthropology and sociology and founder of the Archaeology Field School at Longwood University. He has an interesting window story, too.
In 1887, three young women — Fannie, Estelle and Lucy — engraved their first names into a second-story window pane of what was then a dormitory room of what was then the State Female Normal School at Farmville. The names were discovered 103 years later by Jesse Grant, a local glass craftsman conducting window renovations.
It was the sort of discovery that archaeologists like Jordan salivate over, so he, along with others at Longwood, began researching the names on the windows. They determined:
• the calligraphy in which the names were written was typical of the late 1800s;
• the names were etched with a diamond and the grooves in the first name, Fannie, are not as deep as the others, leading the historical investigators to wonder if a diamond ring was used and if might have belonged to Fannie, so she might have etched a little more gently with it;
• the young women’s full names, based on alumni records, were Fannie Jeffress of Mecklenburg County, Estelle Ransone of Mathews County, and Lucy Boswell of Charlotte County. There were only 172 students at the school in 1887, so it wasn’t terribly difficult to match first names with lasts. They even found a class photo that included two of the women.
So what’s the deal with signing one’s name on a window? Was that a 19th-century (and maybe early 20th-century) sort of thing?
“As far as I can tell … it seems like it was relatively common around here shortly after the Civil War,” Jordan said.
After word of the Fannie-Estelle-Lucy pane reached the local news, Jordan received a dozen or more calls from people living in older structures around the university, wanting to show him windows with names etched into them from long ago.
Jordan doesn’t consider what the three Longwood women did as vandalism. He likens it to workmen signing their initials to the wooden frame of a structure before wall boards go up or even a prehistoric potter pressing a thumbprint into the wet clay as a way to “leave an important piece of themselves … to show they were there.”
“As an archaeologist, I have stood in front of that window pane and thought, ‘This is just where they stood, just this far away,’ ” Jordan said. “You wonder how tall they were and what they said, whether they were giggling and laughing. It just makes the past so much a part of the present to see their mark.”
Pieces of human history like this — perhaps inconsequential in the larger scheme of things — resonates deeply with people in Jordan’s line of work. It reminds Jordan that he’s merely a single link in “a long, long chain” and that if not for students like Fannie, Estelle and Lucy and their classmates and their teachers he might not have found his way to Longwood where he has taught for 35 years.
“It kind of puts you in your place,” he said.
The window was removed from West Ruffner Hall and now resides on permanent display, with its story, in the atrium of the university’s Greenwood Library, where Jordan has been known to walk past in the evenings and say goodnight to Fannie, Estelle and Lucy.
He knows it sounds a little odd, but he also knows he’s lucky to be able to do that. The timing of the window’s discovery, removal and relocation was most fortuitous: West Ruffner was among the structures destroyed by a major campus fire in 2001.
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