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The Jefferson Davis memorial on Monument Avenue (Photo by Megan Irwin)
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Mary Patteson modeled for the sculptor and later married Henry Watkins Ellerson. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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The allegorical female figure atop the Davis monument (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
You can see a love story on Monument Avenue, or half of one, perched 50 feet above the street atop the column of the 1907 Jefferson Davis monument.
Overlooking the great boulevard’s commuters, sightseers, protesters and sunbathers, “Vindicatrix,” also known as “Miss Confederacy,” is the work of Edward Virginius Valentine, who also created the Davis figure.
Valentine, like other sculptors working here at the outset of the 20th century, used neighbors and friends to pose for his work. Richmonder Mary Williamson Patteson (1887-1949) became the embodiment of the allegorical female. The artist depicted her with a finger held high, as though caught in mid-scold against the rebuke of the Confederate ideal, or testing to see if the winds of history may carry the vindication of the “Lost Cause.”
But that breeze isn’t wafting in her direction.
While his family prospered through manufacturing the curative Valentine’s Meat Juice, Edward Valentine (1838-1930) turned to sculpture and history. He became connected to bronze and stone Confederate hagiographies in part due to necessity. He returned from Europe, where he’d been studying since before the Civil War erupted; while there, he made commemorative figures to help raise overseas money. The lure of home and family returned him to a prostrate and traumatized city where art was just about the last thing on anybody’s mind. Funerary adornments for the dead, however, abounded.
His older sibling, Mann S. Valentine Jr., who founded the Valentine museum, advised his artistic brother, when he complained of money issues, to sculpt any dead Confederate officer for income.
Among his works is the 1875 “recumbent” Robert E. Lee memorial in Washington & Lee University’s chapel. It depicts Lee asleep in full uniform, like a medieval knight. Valentine worked from precise measurements he made from Lee prior to the Confederate general’s 1870 death. (Lee is in a crypt beneath the chapel, not under the sculpture). He also received the commission for the Jefferson Davis figure (“of heroic size,” as the 1907 commemoration booklet describes it) that stands on Monument Avenue before a colonnade designed by Richmond architect William C. Noland.
Davis is portrayed as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, giving his farewell address to his colleagues in Washington on Jan. 21, 1861, after his state declared its secession from the Union. The carved inscription running around the pediment of the colonnade quotes from that speech, in which he insists that the breakaway came not to commit “hostility to others … but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children.”
Those rights included owning slaves.
Valentine worked on his commission for several years prior to the 1907 installation. According to a 1954 Richmond Times-Dispatch article by Lois H. Keane, he first hired a professional New York model to pose. “Apparently she didn’t meet the requirements,” Keane wrote. “A young Richmond girl superseded her and assumed the illustrious role with marked success.”
The article refers to a note by Valentine about the change of model on April 24, 1906: “Miss Mary Patteson of ‘Forest Hill,’ stood for me for the face of the full-size female figure.” Patteson’s ancestors built the Patteson-Schutte House, Richmond’s oldest frame residence, in the 1750s; the Historic Richmond Foundation saved it from demolition in 2006.
While posing as Vindicatrix, Patteson, then 20 years old, met another Valentine model, Henry Watkins Ellerson (1875-1941). At the time of their meeting, Ellerson held a middle-management position for the expanding Indianapolis-based meatpacker Kingan & Co. While he may have had metaphorical big shoes, his actual feet were petite — and that was why he also posed for Valentine. In addition to the Davis figure, the artist had received a commission for a Lee statue to stand in the Virginia portion of the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.
“General Lee had unusually small feet,” wrote Keane. (And the Valentine today has in its collection an 1852 pair of Lee’s boots to prove it.)
The Patteson-Ellerson romance seems to have been a slow simmer — they were actually cousins. The couple married on April 16, 1912, and eventually lived in a Westover plantation-influenced, Duncan Lee-designed house on River Road they called Glen Roy. Ellerson assisted in organizing the Crippled Children’s Hospital, now part of the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, and served as its president. He also helped lead the Richmond Community Fund.
A grandson of the Ellerson-Patteson union is H. Watkins Ellerson III, a Richmond-area music producer and promoter for such blues and R&B performers as Terry Garland and Li’l Ronnie, Marion James and The Night Hawks. He attended law school at Washington & Lee and is aware of the statue’s connection to his family.
“Given the recent and significant criticism of the Davis monument on Monument Ave., I must admit that I have mixed feelings about that,” he responded by email, when asked about Mary Patteson’s role in light of the current debate surrounding Confederate monuments. He understands why some people are offended by what the statues represent.
“I furtively hope the spire with our ‘grandmother’ on top will be preserved,” he wrote, “but they can discard the statue of Jeff Davis as they may wish.”
