Thomas Nelson Page

Thomas Nelson Page (April 23 1853 – November 1 1922) of Virginia was a lawyer and American writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, including the important period of World War I.

Biography

Born in the village of Beaverdam in Hanover County, Virginia, he was a scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia. Although he was from once-wealthy lineage, after the American Civil War, which began when he was only 8 years old, his parents and their relatives were largely impoverished during Reconstruction and his teenage years. He attended the school now known as Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia but had to leave before graduation for financial reasons. After working for a while, he was enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia in pursuit of a legal career.

Admitted to the Virginia Bar Association, he practiced as a lawyer in Richmond between 1876 and 1893, and began writing. He was married to Anne Seddon Bruce on July 28, 1886. She died on December 21, 1888 of a throat hemorrhage.

He remarried on June 6, 1893, to Florence Lathrop Field, a widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field, and moved to Washington, D.C.. There, he kept up his writing, which amounted to eighteen volumes when they were compiled and published in 1912. Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His 1887 collection of short stories, "In Ole Virginia", is the quintessential work of that genre. Another short-story collection of his is entitled "The Burial of the Guns" (1894).

Under President Woodrow Wilson, Page served as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. His book entitled "Italy and the World War" (1920) is a memoir of his service there.

He died in 1922 in Hanover County, Virginia.

Historical sites

Page was an activist in stimulating the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities to mobilize to save historical sites at Yorktown and elsewhere, especially in the Historic Triangle of Virginia, from loss to development. He was involved in gaining Federal funding to build a seawall at Jamestown in 1900, protecting a site where the remains of James Fort were recently discovered by archaeologists working on the Jamestown Rediscovery project which began in 1994.

Family

The Page and Nelson families were each among the First Families of Virginia. The Page lineage in Virginia began with the arrival at Jamestown of Colonel John Page at Jamestown in 1650. Col. Page was a prominent founder of Middle Plantation, which was later renamed Williamsburg. The Page family included Mann Page, U.S. Congressman and Governor John Page. The Nelson lineage began with Thomas "Scotch Tom" Nelson, a Scottish immigrant who settled at Yorktown, and his son, William Nelson, who was a royal governor of Virginia. Thomas Nelson Page was a direct descendant of Thomas Nelson, Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a governor after Statehood, and thus of Robert "King" Carter, who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The Nelson family had settled in Hanover County, where Thomas's mother Elizabeth Burwell Nelson, married John Page.

A contemporary cousin of Thomas Nelson Page was William Nelson Page (1854-1932), who became a civil engineer and mining manager had helped develop the natural resources of western Virginia and southern West Virginia in the alte 19th and early 20th centuries. William Page is credited with, in partnership with millionaire financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, planning and Building the Virginian Railway. His family's Victorian-era mansion, the Page-Vawter House in Ansted, West Virginia, is a National Historical Landmark as is a former company store of the Page Coal and Coke Company in Pageton. Another cousin was U.S. and Confederate Naval Officer and Confederate Army General Richard Lucian Page (1807-1901).

The ruins of Rosewell Plantation, the home of early members of the Page family and one of the finest mansions built in the colonies, sit on the banks of the York River in Gloucester County. In 1916, a fire swept the mansion leaving a magnificent shell which is testament to 18th century craftsmanship and dreams, and the site ongoing archaeological studies.

Titles

*"Marse Chan" (1884)
*"Meh Lady"
*"In Ole Virginia" (1887)
*"Two Little Confederates" (1888)
*"Befo' de War" (1888)
*"On Newfound River" (1891)
*"Elsket and Other Stories" (1891)
*"The Old South" (1892)
*"Pastime Stories" (1894)
*"The Burial of the Guns" (1894)
*"The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock" (1897)
*"Two Prisoners" (1898)
*"Red Rock" (1898) [http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC12224942 Full version available at Google Books]
*"Gordon Keith" (1903)
*"Bred in the Bone" (1904)
*"The Negro:The Southerner's Problem" (1904)
*"The Old Dominion: Her Making and her Manners" (1908)
*"Robert E. Lee, the Southerner" (1908)
*"John Marvel, Assistant" (1909)
*"Robert E. Lee, Man and Soldier" (1911)
*"The Land of the Spirit" (1913)
*"The Stranger's Pew" (1914)

Further reading

*Theodore L. Gross, "Thomas Nelson Page", New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1967.

Trivia

The 1915 silent movie "The Outcast" is based on a short story of Page's from "The Land of the Spirit".

Arlington Traditional School was once Thomas Nelson Page Elementary School in Arlington County, Virginia

External links

* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=19355120 T.N.Page at Find A Grave]
* [http://docsouth.unc.edu/pageolevir/bio.html Brief biography]
*imdb name|0656360|Thomas Nelson Page
*gutenberg author|id=Thomas_Nelson_Page|name=Thomas Nelson Page