American Evolution

A Family Reclaims Its Colonial Homestead, One Weekend at a Time

WHITE STONE, Va.

On wall pegs just inside the front door of Enon Hall -- built at least a decade before upstart American colonists battled British redcoats -- hang a plumed tricorn hat, woolen cape, fringed hunting frock and coonskin cap.

The latter-day costume belongs to William Hathaway Chapman Jr., 10, who is practicing to become a drummer boy in the Seventh Virginia Regiment of Revolutionary War reenactors.

No surprise there. For half of his young life, he has been steeped in early American history, spending nearly every weekend at his family's 18th-century farmhouse overlooking Antipoison Creek on Virginia's Northern Neck, helping his parents, Bill and Gay Chapman, rescue the ancestral homestead from extreme neglect.

An eager tour guide, William points out the oldest horsehair plaster walls and worn pine stairs, and shows off archaeological treasures found on the property: fragments of china and glass two and three centuries old, a bit of a clay pipe stem from the 1600s, an art deco-style brass padlock.

Five years after the couple brought the original two-story Dutch colonial and several 19th- and 20th-century additions back into the family, it remains very much a work in progress.

The Chapmans, who live about 70 miles away in Richmond, have stripped off asbestos shingles, torn down two perilously decaying rear additions, rebuilt the back porch, felled old trees, removed brush, cleaned up the family graveyard, painted much of the interior, updated two bathrooms and renovated two bedrooms so they no longer have to camp out on the screened porch. They even reclaimed the brick walkway, long hidden under sod, after seeing it in a 1935 family photo.

Only a handful of professionals have been called in: roofers to top the various wings with cedar shakes or standing-seam copper; architects to draw plans for a possible addition; and structural engineers, who invariably urge Bill, 40, a marketing and advertising consultant, and Gay, 47, a stay-at-home mother, to tear down Enon Hall and start over again.

Not a chance.

The seven-room weekend getaway -- believed to have been named for Aenon, the Biblical baptismal waters -- is both labor of love and homage to Bill Chapman's long-dead kin.

The saga began on these shores in 1666, when William Hathaway arrived in present-day Middlesex County Va., from Stratford, England. Nearly a century later, great- great-great-great-great-great-grandfather William Hathaway III bought the wood-frame manor house and 200 acres. Over time, acreage and buildings were added. The property stayed in the family until 1939, when Henry Hathaway, a first cousin twice removed, sold it. Farming, it seemed, was not his strong suit.

Subsequent owners unloaded so much land that by the 1960s fewer than four acres remained. Chapman kept close watch on Enon Hall, fearing it would be bought and razed. In 1998, he approached the somewhat reclusive owner, a man in his nineties who shared the dilapidated house with an ailing wife, dozens of cats and thigh-high piles of debris.

Without ever setting foot inside, Chapman offered $160,000 for house, land and outbuildings, and allowed the elderly couple to stay there for life. By 2000, both had died, and Enon Hall -- with its dense woods, curving shoreline, walled graveyard, rickety chicken house, original smokehouse and combination kitchen house and slave quarters -- was back in Hathaway hands.

That transaction came 33 years after Chapman first opened a 1,426-page genealogy titled "The Hathaways of America," compiled by an association of descendants.