sixteen years old when he started work at the dry goods store in Richmond. Sixteen years later, when he was thirty-two years old, Chenery married his second cousin—it was in the family tradition—Ida Burnley Taylor. They had six children, one of whom died young. Ida Chenery, a disciplinarian, pushed and raised and shaped them.
The oldest boy, William, went through journalism school and rose to be the editor of the Rocky Mountain News and then an editor at Collier’s magazine. A daughter, Blanche, attended the University of Chicago, married an advertising man, and settled down in Pelham Manor, New York, where practically the whole family wound up living at one time. The youngest boy, Alan Chenery, went through Richmond Medical School and became a urologist with a practice in Washington, D.C. Charlie, the only one of the children who did not go to college, eventually worked for his brother Chris. And there was Chris.
Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.
Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s youngest daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty was a central emptiness in their lives:
The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know. The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family, fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult…. Each of the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have…. His mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and sent them out into the world with a great sense of family obligation.
The children shared their opportunities for education. Each boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to allow another of the boys his two years of study. And that is what sent Chris Chenery into the mountainous terrain of West Virginia when still a boy of sixteen.
By then he had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.
In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.
“When he got back to Oregon,” Penny Tweedy wrote, “he was quite a ‘hell-raiser’ and the minister’s daughter he wooed in Portland spurned him. Later he found her again in Chicago, and after two stormy, indecisive years they were married.” Her name was Helen Bates, and she descended from a long line of New England homeopaths who moved slowly from the east coast to the west, by way of Rochester, Minnesota. Helen Bates was pretty, resented her richer cousins’ hand-me-downs, and found a favorite uncle who sent her to Smith College. She went to Chicago to strike out on her own and improve herself, there married Chenery and left Chicago when America entered World War I:
Christopher “joined up” right after they were married in 1917. Helen did not relish living with her mother-in-law in Ashland. Mrs. Chenery had remarked, hearing that Chris was engaged to an Oregon girl, “I thought they only had barmaids out there.” But these two strong-minded women survived, and Chris survived the war—spent ignominiously teaching cavalrymen to ride at nearby Fort Belvoir.
Chenery left the service in 1918, and in the next decade he switched from engineering to finance and began one of those inexorable American climbs to the presidency of a string of utility companies. In 1927 he quickly became wealthy and began to acquire all the accoutrements of money and position and substance as they had been defined for him and as he had defined them for himself. He moved to Pelham Manor, New York, and founded the Boulder Brook Club—a riding club—in Scarsdale. He played some polo and fox hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. Chenery was never a haughty man, never a man who flaunted his wealth, and he was enough of a romantic and sentimentalist to want to finally return to The Meadow.
One day, in 1935, he took his daughter Penny and his wife Helen to see a boarding school that Penny would attend in Washington, D.C. She would recall the day many years later, picture it as she and her father and mother drove south toward Richmond from Washington and bumped toward The Meadow, where he had spent summers as a youngster, toward Ashland where he had grown up and learned to know the country to which he was returning now:
We drove south for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.
Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:
Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:
Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.
Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in