Bremo Historic District

Bremo is not one house but three, strung along the James River in Fluvanna County, Virginia, and built between about 1803 and 1845 by General John Hartwell Cocke: planter, amateur architect, president of the American Temperance Union, co-founder of Thomas Jefferson's university, and the owner of well over a hundred enslaved people. Bremo Recess came first; Upper Bremo, the Palladian mansion, was finished in 1820 with Jefferson's master carpenter John Neilson; Lower Bremo was rebuilt around 1844. The whole estate became a National Historic Landmark in 1971. The ghost belongs to Bremo Recess, and it reached print in 1930, in Marguerite du Pont Lee's Virginia Ghosts: a doctor reading indoors notices a shadow fall across his book, looks up, and finds a woman in a green skirt standing over him. Lee gives her no name. This entry used to identify her as Cocke's first wife, Ann Blaws Barraud Cocke, who died on 27 December 1816; we could not find that identification in any source and have withdrawn it. What the archive does hold are names: Peyton Skipwith, the Bremo stonemason freed in October 1833 and sent to Liberia, and the letters his children wrote back.

Bremo is not a house. It is three houses, a stone barn, a temperance temple, two rammed-earth quarters for enslaved people and a chapel, spread over some 1,500 acres on the north bank of the James River in Fluvanna County, Virginia, and every one of them was raised under the eye of the same man. John Hartwell Cocke was born in Surry County on 19 September 1780. He came of age in September 1801 as master of 5,691 acres of James River land, married Ann Blaws Barraud of Norfolk on 25 December 1802, and moved his family permanently to the inherited Fluvanna estate in 1809. The National Park Service nomination that made Bremo a National Historic Landmark describes three house groups built between 1803 and 1845: Bremo Recess first, put up around 1803-1809 as a plain frame house; Upper Bremo, the Palladian mansion, completed in 1820; and Lower Bremo, rebuilt about 1844, when Bremo Recess was also recast in the neo-Jacobean manner. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources notes that the Recess and Lower Bremo were modelled on Bacon's Castle in Surry County, a Cocke family house. Cocke drew and redrew Upper Bremo himself, and took advice from Thomas Jefferson, whose Central College board he joined in 1816 and whose university he helped build over thirty-five years as a visitor. But the nomination is blunt about who actually designed the mansion: "the final architect was actually John Neilson, a master carpenter who had worked for Mr. Jefferson at Monticello", and it was Neilson "who interpreted all of the ideas and sketches received or drawn by Cocke and who gave the house its final appearance". Cocke spent the rest of his life on reform. He chaired the founding meeting of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle in 1817. He called alcohol "the most prolific source of evil on earth", presided over the Temperance Society of Virginia from 1834 and over the American Temperance Union from 1836 to 1843, and built a Greek Revival temple over a spring beside the canal so that bargemen would drink water instead. In an 1843 letter he named temperance, the eradication of tobacco and the colonisation of former slaves in Africa as "the three objects nearest my heart in this life". And he owned people. Eighty-nine aged twelve or over in 1816; 107 in 1830; 135 across Virginia and Alabama by 1860. He was a vice-president of the American Colonization Society from 1819 until his death and founded a Fluvanna branch in 1825, because he believed emancipation was worthless without deportation. He also acted on the belief that his slaves had souls: they were meeting for worship at Bremo by 1821; in 1825 he put up a brick building for their religious and educational instruction; his second wife Louisa Maxwell Holmes Cocke taught them to read through the 1820s; he hired teachers from the North for a more formal school, and Louisa took the work back when Virginia outlawed the employment of teachers for Black people in 1831. The schoolroom survives in Upper Bremo's west wing. In 1835 he built the chapel that is still, according to its own National Register nomination, the only known slave chapel in Virginia. The archive keeps the names the plantation would otherwise have swallowed. In October 1833 Cocke manumitted his stonemason, Peyton Skipwith, and Skipwith's family; the manumission paper is in the Cocke Family Papers at the University of Virginia. Eight Skipwiths sailed for Liberia. Peyton's wife was Lydia Randall; his daughter Matilda was nine years old on the ship. From Monrovia, Peyton (d. 1849), Diana, Nash, Matilda and James wrote back to the man who had owned them, and their letters survive because the Cocke family kept them. Peyton's first, dated "Monrovia Liberia Febuary the tenth 1834", begins simply: "Dear Sir I embrace this oppertunity...". From Louisa Cocke's diary comes another name, and the whole contradiction in one sentence: on 14 January 1828 she wrote of a child called Betsey, "I hope to train her up for heaven, and there it will never be asked what colour her skin was of while upon earth". Cocke's biographer Martin Boyd Coyner called him "a lonely outpost of freedom's ferment, a figment of New England reform, a harbinger of Victorian morality and the Bible Belt, paradoxically ensconced in Neo-Classical magnificence on the banks of the James River, master of human slaves". By the 1860s Cocke had abandoned even his gradualism and concluded that slavery was "of Divine Origin". He died on 24 June 1866 and was buried at Bremo Recess, beside his two wives.

Bremo is private property and it is not open to visitors. There is no ticket office, no tour and no published schedule, and there never has been. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources records that the three estates are "still owned by Cocke's descendants", and attaches to its register entry the standard notice that applies here in full: many listed properties are private dwellings, are not open to the public, and owner privacy should be respected. Upper Bremo, Lower Bremo and the Bremo road frontage carry preservation easements held by the Virginia Board of Historic Resources, which protect the buildings but confer no right of access. The houses sit off U.S. Route 15 north of the John H. Cocke Memorial Bridge, roughly 2.4 miles west of the highway; the approaches are private drives. Do not attempt to reach them. There is an honest alternative, and it is the more important building. The Bremo Slave Chapel, put up in 1835 in the chapel field at Lower Bremo, was moved to the village between 1882 and 1884 and consecrated as Grace Church on 14 February 1884; when a new brick church was built in 1924 the chapel was shifted a little to the north and became the parish hall. It stands today beside Grace Episcopal Church at 754 Bremo Bluff Road, Bremo Bluff, Virginia 23022, in the middle of the village and visible from the road. It is listed separately on the National Register (reference 80004189) and is described in its nomination as the only known slave chapel in Virginia. Anyone wanting to see something of Bremo should go there rather than towards the houses, and should contact the parish before assuming the building is open. For the houses themselves, the substitute is the archive. The Historic American Buildings Survey documented Bremo in 1940 and deposited the records with the Library of Congress; the photographs are catalogued under the survey number HABS VA,33-FORKU.V,1 and are in the public domain. The National Historic Landmark file is a free PDF from the National Park Service, and the Bremo Slave Chapel nomination is a free PDF from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Between them they contain floor plans, elevations and photographs of buildings no visitor is going to see in person.