Traveling to History: Fourteen
MOSES MYERS HOUSE: REBUILDING A LIFE IN NORFOLK
By James F. Lee
A NEW START
The Moses Myers House on East Freemason Street Norfolk. This Federal-style brick mansion was completed around 1795. (Photo by James F. Lee)
Newly married Moses Myers took a gamble in 1787. After going bankrupt, the New York-born merchant and ship-owner needed a place to rebuild his life. He chose Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk was a logical choice: the city was still rebuilding after burning to the ground during the American Revolution; and the 1786 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom offered him the protection to practice his Jewish faith.
Myers’ venture paid off; he rebuilt his fortunes, eventually establishing Moses Myers and Sons merchant company with a reach extending from Norfolk to ports along the North American coast and beyond to the Caribbean and to Europe.
The result for us today is a magnificent Federalist-style brick mansion built by 1795 on East Freemason Street. And because the Myers family was the only family to live in the house, much of the furnishings, artifacts and even clothing are original to Moses and his wife Eliza Myers.
My wife Carol and I visited the house recently and were greeted at the front door by Karen Dutton, Assistant Manager for Visitor Services at the Chrysler Museum of Art, which operates the Myers House. At one time, guests coming through this door would have been greeted by enslaved servants and asked to wait until being received, allowing them time to contemplate the richness of the furnishings and décor of this room called the Passage Below. They, like us, saw the unique moldings and the neoclassical ceiling based on a Robert Adam design, and a gorgeous case clock that Moses Myers brought with him from New York.
“It was built to impress,” said Dutton.
But a house is more than bricks and furnishings. At any one time, Moses and Eliza’s household might contain as many as 30 people, including their nine children out of 12 who survived to adulthood, enslaved servants, apprentices, and guests. It is through their stories that the house comes alive.
This portrait of Moses Myers by Gilbert Stuart is in the Drawing Room of the Moses Myers House. (Photo by James F. Lee)
THE MURDER
The Drawing Room of the Moses Myers mansion exudes a sense of wealth and style.
Our eyes were drawn to the exquisitely detailed 22 ½ carat gold leaf on the fireplace mantle, elaborate wheat leaves, acanthus leaves, and rope strands, indicating the nautical connection to Moses Myers’ business. The floors are old-growth pine, and the sofa and window seats here are original to the family. Like most of the house, this room is furnished as the house would have been in 1819.
Portraits of several family members hang on the wall, including one of Samuel Myers, Moses and Eliza’s second son, dressed in a Roman toga, emblematic of the Neo-Classical aesthetic found throughout the home. Samuel graduated from the College of William and Mary, the first Jewish person to do so; he practiced law and worked in the family businesses.
In May 1811, Samuel grabbed one of his father’s pistols, went to the townhouse of merchant Richard Bowen, and shot him in cold blood.
Bowden was a former business associate of Moses Myers, who claimed that Myers took financial advantage of him. The two got into a heated argument in Market Square in Norfolk, which led to violence; Bowden beat Myers so mercilessly with his cane that bystanders had to carry Myers back to his home. Enraged, Samuel immediately sought revenge. He was indicted for murder, although the charges were later lowered to manslaughter.
Moses wrote to his eldest son John, then in London, about “… the most unfortunate business which has caused us so much heartfelt Grief (sic) …” Yet, Samuel had some support in the community. “Dear Sam has all the comfort and consolation that numerous friends can give,” Moses wrote. “The feeling of sympathetic friends has been shown to such a degree as will astonish you.”
Samuel was eventually acquitted, and like all wealthy families do when scandal envelopes one of its members, sent Samuel away on an extended trip to Europe.
Note the rich detail on this mantle in the Parlor of the Moses Myers House. The 22 ½ carat gold leaf had been painted over and was only recently discovered. (Photo by James F. Lee)
PROPHETIC SAMPLER
Adeline, Moses and Eliza’s eldest daughter, was an accomplished young woman.
Like many in the family, she was a musician, proficient in the harp and pianoforte. The actual pianoforte that she and her eight siblings played is on view in the Parlor. On a music stand, there are samples of sheet music from the family’s collection of over 900 pieces, one of the largest collections in the country at that time. A harp is there as well, a period piece not original to the family.
“She did grow up very beautiful, wealthy, privileged, accomplished, and popular,” Dutton said, with a “but” hanging heavy in her tone.
When she was seven years old, she stitched a sampler showing the alphabet and this aphorism:
“The happiest man that ever breath’d on Earth/ With all the glory of estate and birth/ Had yet some anxious care to make him know/ No grandeur was above the reach of woe.”
The long dining table, Hepplewhite chairs, cups, and candle sticks in the Dining Room, are original to the Myers family. The cabinet in the background was custom-built to fit its nook. This room is part pf the 1805-1810 addition to the house. (Photo by James F. Lee)
The aphorism turned out to be prophetic.
In March 1811, when she was 20, she was courted by three men. Soon, however, the marriageability of the beautiful Adeline suffered a severe blow because of the scandal caused by her brother Samuel’s shooting of Richard Bowden. No young man wanted to marry into a family tainted by violence, no matter how wealthy or accomplished the family might be.
Eight years later, she became engaged to Solomon Nunes, a Jewish businessman, yet tragedy still stalked her. According to family lore, two days before their wedding day Solomon died. He was the first Jewish adult buried in Norfolk. Adeline never married.
Today, a replica of the original needlework hangs on the wall of Adeline’s room, a second-floor bedroom, where the girls of the family moved from the nursery upstairs upon reaching 12, the age of adulthood for girls in the Jewish faith. The room is one of the more sparsely furnished in the museum, containing a bed with headboard and large footboard, washstand, stool, mirror, and chest of drawers, all original to the family.
Karen Dutton shows us the Parlor in the Moses Myers House. This room was originally the dining room, becoming a parlor when the addition was built. The Myers family was very musical and had a sheet music collection of over 900 songs. (Photo by James F. Lee)
LEMONADE SAVES A LIFE
Jim, an enslaved servant in the Myers household, was stricken with cholera.
Cholera was an ever-present problem then, especially for the poor and the enslaved. A pump at the back of the house brought untreated river water from the Elizabeth River through an underground wooden pipe. The enslaved cook would boil the water before serving the Myers family and their guests, whereas the servants were denied that luxury and instead drank untreated, unboiled water directly from the well.
That water was likely contaminated with the cholera bacterium.
Family records show that Jim was treated with castor oil to expel the bad “humors,” but also with boiled lemonade, which naturally contains electrolytes, replacing the fluids and electrolytes he was losing. Jim survived cholera. In this one instance, he was lucky because he was allowed the “privilege” of boiled liquid, increasing his chances of survival.
Jim was most likely treated in the Kitchen or in the room above where enslaved servants slept. Originally detached from the main house, the Kitchen was the busiest room on the property, for here an enslaved cook and others worked day and night providing for the large household. She, or he, most likely slept in a small room to the side. All the enslaved servants ate here as well.
Most of the kitchen implements here are period pieces, although the ballast stone floor and the brick hearth are original. An interesting feature here is that the brick hearth extends far out from the large fireplace. Dutton explained that the cook would put coals right on the bricks, and then pots on the coals to increase the useable cooking area.
This hearth is in the Kitchen of the Moses Myers House, originally a detached building. Enslaved servants cooked and cleaned for the Myers family here. None of the artifacts in this room are original to the house. (Photo by James F. Lee)
THE DUEL
On March 22, 1820, one of the most famous duels in American history took place at Catonsville, Maryland. One of the duelists was Commodore Stephen Decatur, hero of the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, so famous that his picture appeared on the twenty-dollar bill at that time. His opponent was Commodore James Barron. The pistols were owned by John Myers, Moses’ eldest son.
Decatur had a Norfolk connection: he was married to Susan Wheeler, daughter of the mayor of Norfolk, a man well-known to the Myers family. Decatur had been a guest at the Myers’ home. John Myers was a friend to both duelists, especially to Barron. Family tradition holds that Barron asked John to lend him the pistols for the duel.
Decatur was killed; Barron was wounded but survived. The affair was a cause celebre, dominating the nation’s newspapers. Attending Decatur’s funeral was President James Monroe, and over 10,000 spectators lined the streets of Washington.
John had purchased the pistols in 1810 during a tour of Europe; they were expertly made of wood, steel, brass, and silver by Durs Egg of London, one of the most renowned gunsmiths of the time. A Decatur biographer describes the pistols as “…elegant artifacts, exquisitely engraved specimens of the gunsmith’s art.”
Today, the pistols are on display in their original case in the Passage Below, the room in the Myers House where visitors were greeted. Also on display are a powder flask, bullet mould and ramrod with cleaning attachment, and a small key.
The set of pistols used during the duel between Commodore Stephen Decatur and Commodore James Barron. Expertly crafted by Durs Egg of London, John Myers purchased them in 1810. (Photo by Christine Gamache with permission)
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER LAUNDRESSES
A family like the Myers did not do their own cooking or their own laundry. Enslaved servants did those tasks. Researchers use what documentation they can find to tell the stories of enslaved people at the Myers house, an undertaking complicated by the practice of not identifying enslaved people with a last name.
A bill of sale on display in the enslaved servants’ quarters above the Kitchen gives a glimpse into the lives of a mother and daughter, Drusilla, and her daughter Chany. In September 1818, James Gleason intended to sell them to William Hickman of Bedford Tenn., thus relocating them from Norfolk. Moses Myers bought them instead. Drusilla was 35 and Chany was 14 at the time. A year later they were identified in household records as “washer and daughter,” indicating they were likely laundresses. As laundresses, the mother and daughter would have worked in the back building housing the Kitchen and enslaved servants’ quarters.
“Can you imagine being 14 years old and doing the hard work, manual labor, of laundry, which is terribly hard, caustic on hands; they made soap from lye – this is your life every day and there is no choice about it,” Dutton said.
A HOUSE WEDDING
Of the three Myers daughters to survive childhood, Augusta was the only one to wed. On January 25, 1826, she married Philip I. Cohen of Baltimore, most likely in the Dining Room of the family home, an ideal location for an intimate wedding. This lovely room with elaborate moldings and a curved wall on one end with three large windows was added to the house between 1805 and 1810 to accommodate the Myers’ growing family. Banquets, balls, and even funerals were held here, as were celebrations of the Jewish High Holidays. The family had a great interest in theater and local groups performed in this room. John Myers, in fact, was a founding member of a local acting group called the Thespians.
On the long dining table, built by noted Norfolk cabinet maker James Woodward, are the family’s original apricot and cream dishes and silver candlesticks. Around the table are 12 matching Hepplewhite shield-back chairs. Echoing the Neo-classical style that typifies the house, the mantle features images of Diana, the goddess of the hunt.
Eliza Myers had a substantial collection of glassware, some of which still decorate the room, but most now are in the Chrysler Museum of Art.
A fascinating quirk in the room is two almost identical sideboards, custom-built to fit into their respective nooks. Because the nooks are an inch different in width, the cabinet-maker had to build the sideboards with intricate precision.
“They practically haven’t been moved in 200 years since the room was built,” said Dutton.
These aren’t the only stories to learn at the Moses Myers House, nor are these the only artifacts. We also saw Moses’s original clothing, the bed where he died, twin Louis XVI chairs that might be connected to Dolly Madison, a wooden secretary desk with an inlaid federal eagle, the family’s Kiddush cup, handed down through the generations, and portraits of Moses and Eliza painted by Gilbert Stuart.
The Moses Myers House is open Saturday and Sunday 12-5, admission free. On the first Sunday of the month “History Speaks” offers a deep dive into the history of the house. Topics have included architecture, medicine, enslaved servants, and the Myers family’s military service.
SOURCES:
"'The confidence placed in you is of the greatest magnitude': representations of paternal authority in early Jewish American letters." The Free Library. 2014 Pennsylvania State University Press 30 Nov. 2021
Rage For Glory: The Life of Commodore Stephen Decatur. James T. deKay. Recorded Books, 2004.
