Richmond’s gain was Washington’s loss, and far from the clinging wants of the State Department in the nation’s capital where she’d worked 20 years, Elizabeth Brown Pryor became something more familiar.
“Just Elizabeth. She was just Elizabeth,” said a neighbor.
Along Grove Avenue, in the shops along Belmont Avenue in Richmond’s Museum District and along the easy walk to the Virginia Historical Society, there was a deep sadness all day Tuesday.
Family members and friends are making funeral arrangements for Elizabeth Brown Pryor, a 64-year-old scholar and former State Department negotiator who studied the Civil War, wrote passionately of the human behind the marble mask of Gen. Robert E. Lee and the determination and insight that marked the life of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.
People are also reading…
“She loved Richmond because it represented such a great quality of life for her,” said Realtor Christopher Small, who sold a 2,800-square-foot Edwardian townhouse to Pryor in September 2009.
Before that, Pryor stayed at the bed and breakfast that Bertie Selvey and her husband ran near the Virginia Historical Society. Selvey was getting her hair done at a shop on Belmont on Tuesday and was close to tears remembering the quick-witted, world traveler who couldn’t part with the papers stored at the VHS.
“She was passionately in love with the Virginia Historical Society,” Selvey said. “And now we are all heartbroken.”
Richmond police on Tuesday identified Pryor as the victim in the 2:45 p.m. high-speed collision Monday in the 4400 block of Grove Avenue that saw Pryor’s Audi TT struck from behind, crushing the vehicle. Pryor died at the scene across Grove Avenue from Mary Munford Elementary School. An investigation is continuing into the collision that sent the driver of the striking car to the hospital. He has not been identified.
“She was always very gracious, “ said New York businessman Robert E.L. deButts Jr., a great-great-grandson of Lee’s, who befriended Pryor and supported her research into a trove of Lee family letters. They had been discovered in 2002 in an Alexandria bank vault after 84 years and are a focal point of the VHS collections. “She certainly wasn’t pulling any punches,” deButts said of Pryor’s finished product. “It was the letters that really got her intrigued.”
Pryor was a highly regarded Civil War historian who recently shared the Lincoln Prize for “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through his Private Letters.” She spoke March 22 at the Jepson Alumni Center at the University of Richmond. Her lecture was titled “Reading Other People’s Mail: thrilling discoveries by an Archival Addict.”
Pryor served with the U.S. State Department for 20 years and was a top international negotiator there; after graduating from Northwestern University, she joined the U.S. Park Service, at one point leading tours of the Washington Monument decked out in Park Service gear, including the standard-issue Smokey Bear cap.
But she also did a tour of duty at Arlington House, the ancestral home of the Custis-Lee family that sits across the Potomac River from Washington, and it was there she developed her interest in the soldier.
“At the State Department, I had to move at the heart of a lot of very problematic issues,” she said in a 2008 interview with Humanities magazine. She described long periods of going without food or water. “I was in Sarajevo at the time of the siege, and I felt a kindred spirit with General Lee when he was at Petersburg and places like that.”
She was celebrated for her detailed sense of history’s human side, from the humane burial of Civil War dead to introspective assessments of Civil War generals.
“He begged his mother to let him go to West Point,” she told Humanities magazine of General Lee, “yet was disenchanted with army life just a year after graduating. He contemplated leaving the service every year for decades.”
Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society, called Pryor “a generous, gracious lady, a first-rate scholar able to hold her own in the rough and tumble world of Civil War scholarship. She made us see Robert E. Lee in a whole new way, and she did it with a combination of charm and scholarly rigor that is hard to come by.”
Deaton called Pryor’s death “a tragedy for all who value history and the pursuit of knowledge and the love of the written word.”
John Coski, historian at the Museum of the Confederacy, described Pryor as an engaging but unpretentious storyteller who kept listeners spellbound with her recollections of State Department trips to Eastern Europe where she served as a principal negotiator.
“She would tell us about working beside people like Secretary of State James Baker in Serbia or something, and it was remarkable to think about all that she had done and was here in Richmond,” Coski said. “She’d spent 20 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, and I think she was happy to be in Richmond because it was just far enough out of the Washington orbit to where she could dedicate herself to her passion for history.”
A favorite memory for Coski and his wife was attending a showing of the “Lincoln” movie, filmed in Richmond, with Pryor.
Pryor’s Lee portrait appeared in 2007 and it received the Lincoln Prize, the Jefferson Davis Award, the Richard B. Harwell Book Award, and the Richard S. Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography.
Coski recalled that Pryor studied with Harvard president, Virginia native and civil war expert Drew Gilpin Faust at the University of Pennsylvania; University of Richmond President Edward L. Ayers described Pryor as “a tremendous contributor” to the university’s programs.
“She was one of the most elegant writers I’ve worked with,” said Deborah C. Grosvenor of the Grosvenor Literary Agency in Washington. Grosvenor said Pryor meticulously pored over her manuscripts and was in the process of making the final touches on a book about Lincoln, much of it written as the movie on Lincoln was being filmed in Richmond.
But Pryor also loved to socialize and enjoyed cooking for her guests, Grosvenor said. “Every anniversary of Lee’s birthday (Jan. 19) she would throw a party and cook dinners from the Lee family cookbook. ... She was vivacious, always well-dressed, and the sort of person who you would clearly recognize as intelligent and highly sophisticated minutes after you met her.”
Funeral arrangements were incomplete on Tuesday night.
