The Branch house at 2501 Monument Ave., home to The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, celebrates its centennial in 2019. (Photo courtesy The Branch Museum)
John Kerr Branch hid his hooch.
In the elevator shaft are sealed off roomlets where, says The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design Executive Director Penelope C. Fletcher, the Richmond financier skirted Prohibition regulations by squirreling away his adult beverages.
If you have 72 rooms spanning 27,000 square feet on several levels designed as a mashup Tudor-Elizabethan mansion, then you can find places to stash your stuff. On Thursday, Jan. 10, The Branch inaugurates a yearlong celebration of its stately presence at Monument and Davis avenues. The house this year turns a full century old.
It’s not known exactly when during 1919 that the contractors dusted themselves off and handed John and Beulah Branch the keys, or if the three kids dashed up and down the staircases to give them a test run. The family’s first stay seems to have started prior to Thanksgiving.
The house, devised in the offices of New York architect John Russell Pope, and with the assistance of frequent Pope collaborator Otto R. Eggers, was intended to meet the needs of the Branch family as a “holiday house.” This was the third of the Branch houses; the others were in upstate New York and Italy. The lengths of the Branches' stays varied, although they tended to return to Richmond from around Thanksgiving to New Year’s, though they seem to have included some Halloweens and Valentine’s Days in there, too.
The Branches — their likenesses, that is — begin a yearlong residency as part of a presentation Jan. 10 at 6:30 p.m. by fashion historian and writer Caroline Rennolds Milbank, “A Grand Tour of the 1880s: Beulah’s Adventures in Art (and Romance).” This is the first of a series of ticketed tours and talks about the numerous threads of stories, from the personal to the architectural, that abound here.
Milbank is a descendant of Beulah Gould Branch. Branch as a young woman traveled abroad for the first time. Piecing together from Beulah’s diaries and letters, Milbank has pulled together a narrative of “adventure, danger, a growing passion for art, history and even flirtation.” (The $20 tickets can be purchased here.)
Portraits of Beulah Gould Branch (London, 1924, on loan from the collection of Marjorie Greville) and John Kerr Branch (Paris, 1930, on loan from the collection of Margaret Rennolds Chace) by Philip Alexius de László will be displayed at the Branch house during its centennial. (Images courtesy The Branch Museum of Architecture & Design)
The portraits are the work of Hungarian-British artist Philip de László. The loan of the paintings comes through arrangement from Branch descendants Marjorie Greville and Margaret Chace. This is the first time that the Branch pictures will be shown in public together. Mr. and Mrs. Branch will see you in the library.
“This is an important year, not only for the house, but the Branch family,” says Fletcher. “The first Branch came to Virginia in 1619.” Plans are in progress to host a family reunion this summer on the grounds.
The house, on its acre of land, went up at a historic turning point. The Gilded Age came to an end with the cataclysm of the Great War, which brought with it income tax, but the top-most strata the Branch family occupied continued to prosper. The shake-out of 1929 was in the future, while a national ban of alcohol sales held sway. The parties nonetheless went on. Branch’s sister was supposed to build her own house in the lot next door, what is today parking for First Baptist Church, “but she ended up spending most of her life abroad,” Fletcher explains.
You can learn more about the work of John Russell Pope, the Branch family history and their legacy through the series of five lectures to occur through May.
In addition, at 2 p.m. on three separate Saturdays, Jan. 20 and 26 and Feb. 9, visitors can take an architectural tour of the Branch House. You'll see Beulah's rehabilitated bedroom, but in addition, Fletcher says, “You’ll also able to go into spaces you don’t normally see. Where the three children had their bedrooms, for example.” (Tours are $10 per person.)
Pope believed the Branch house would be the last one on Monument, making it either a heraldic announcement of entry or an exclamation mark at the end of the avenue’s architectural statement. He even devised a brick gate to allow for the entrance of motor cars from Monument.
“No one living has a memory of that section of wall ever swinging open,” Fletcher says, adding, “It’d take a ton of WD-40.”
