The Family in Richmond

Davenport Hollow

The family home on St. Andrews Lane is one of the tangible anchors of the family's Richmond story. So many Davenports lived on or near the street over the years that it became known informally among the family as “Davenport Hollow,” a nickname that says something about how thoroughly this family took root in Richmond.

Of John and Marguerite's five sons, all but Stephen, who built his life as an Episcopal priest in Kentucky, eventually made their homes on or near St. Andrews Lane as adults. Bradfute Warwick Davenport Jr., Betty Davenport Wright, Huntley Davenport and his wife Jean, Sydney and his wife Barbara, and their family members have all lived in Davenport Hollow, and the pattern has carried on into the generations since. Several more family members have lived in the broader neighborhood.

Origins of the House

Martha Davenport's 2006 account, Grandpa's Photograph Album, places the beginning of Davenport Hollow in 1911, when John and Marguerite purchased a ten-acre farm in Henrico County from an Englishman named Mr. Matthews. The property included an unusual octagonal stone building with walls about three feet thick, filled with rocky debris because Matthews feared “the winds of the West” would blow it down. That octagonal room became the living room and architectural center of the developing home.

A Devout Household

John Sidney Davenport Jr. was a devout man, a member of the Anglican Catholic church, and Marguerite belonged to Grace and Holy Trinity Church, which her family had helped to start. Believing his sons were not receiving enough religious education, he had his children kneel at the side of the bed to pray each night, took them to church without fail, and taught them the Bible himself.

The five brothers all got along well, and all of them were funny, with the same dry wit. They were all good golfers, with the exception of Byrd. Whatever their differences, they liked nothing better than to kid one another.

Household Memory

Family memories of Davenport Hollow include Buttercup the cow, Henny Penny the chicken, Sam the yardman, Sarah the cook, Sunday dinners after church, High's vanilla ice cream, test-tube hummingbird feeders painted red, children hiding in the octagonal-room attic, and Marguerite painting vines into cracks in the plaster walls.

Marguerite herself called the house “Bellevue,” for its pretty view, even as the wider family knew the street and neighborhood as Davenport Hollow. She lived there until she was about eighty-five, with a woman named Mrs. White living alongside her, before moving to a rest home. Her cook, Sarah, lived in a little house nearby and owned the first television in the neighborhood. The children would go upstairs to watch it and sit on her lap, and feast on Sarahs’ homemade rolls. Uncle Byrd got a set of his own sometime later.

Civil War and Older Earthworks

Family recollection places Civil War skirmishes in the St. Andrews Lane neighborhood and describes old earthworks or breastworks once visible in Marguerite's yard. Marguerite Warwick Davenport Lord described them in her 2006 memoir as “Indian breastworks,” and her father found arrowheads nearby. Whether the earthworks were Indigenous, Civil War-era, or layered from more than one period remains an open question. A separate family story, still to be verified, says a Union soldier was captured and buried somewhere on the present-day Country Club of Virginia golf course.

A Remarkable Coincidence

John and Marguerite’s old house is now owned by family friends who are themselves descendants of the Carter family, the same Robert “King” Carter who is a direct ancestor in this family tree.

Imogen & Ida

The 1918 influenza pandemic swept through Richmond the same autumn it swept through the world. Among its casualties was Imogen Warwick (1889 to 1918), younger sister of Louise Marguerite and daughter of Ida Louise Burrows Warwick. She left behind two small daughters: Imogen and Ida. Their father, for reasons that have not been entirely preserved in family memory, found himself unable to provide for them, and Marguerite did not hesitate.

The two girls came to live at 6118 St. Andrews Lane, joining a household already dense with sons. The house did not have room to absorb them without adjustment, and so two of the Davenport brothers relocated to the apartment above the garage. It was the kind of arrangement that never gets written down anywhere, just quietly done, the way families do things.

It meant that the family at Davenport Hollow in the early 1920s included not only John and Marguerite and their five boys, but two orphaned nieces. Whatever the brothers made of sleeping above the garage, they made it. Imogen and Ida grew up Davenports in everything but name, and Marguerite treated them like daughters all her life.