The Graysons of Salubria

Salubria, an attractive 18th century manor house near the tiny hamlet of Stevensburg in still-rural Culpeper County, Virginia, stands sentinel on a hilltop just off a divided highway in the commonwealth’s central Piedmont Region. Rev. John Thompson and his bride Ann Brayne Spotswood, widow of colonial governor and wilderness explorer Alexander Spotswood, designed and oversaw construction of the ca. 1757 home in what was then the outskirts of European civilization. Following the Revolutionary War, Thompson descendants sold the house to Mordecai Barbour, who in 1802 sold it to the Hansborough family.

Salubria was nearly 100 years old when in 1853 unmarried 23-year old Robert Osborne Grayson, Jr. (1830-1907, family reference #1112) took on a large debt to purchase the house and 430 surrounding acres. His late father Dr. Robert O. Grayson (1788-1841, family reference #111) of Stafford County, Virginia had three sons: John Benjamin Grayson (1815-1863, #1111) was born to first wife Susannah Peyton (d. 1824), Robert Jr. and John Cooke Grayson (1832-1895, #1113) to second wife Sarah Mason Cooke (1791-1861), granddaughter of founding father George Mason IV of Gunston Hall.

Salubria in the Civil War

Twice-widowed Sarah Cooke (Selden) Grayson, lately of Alexandria City, had family and business connections in Culpeper County, including with the lawyer husband and sons of her late sister Million Cooke Green, and with Alfred Taliaferro, whose daughter Georgie would marry into the Grayson family a generation later. Sarah Grayson and two unmarried sisters, Elizabeth and Harriette Cooke, relocated to Salubria in the 1850s to manage the household. These three women, Robert, Jr., and 17-22 slaves were its primary residents in 1861.

My mother – born and raised in Culpeper – and I once attended a lecture. When the speaker said, “America has never been invaded, or experienced the true hardships of a war,” my mother leaned toward me and whispered, “That man is not from Virginia.”
Katherine B. Ellis, “Voices of Salubria” pg. 91

The strategic Orange and Alexandria Railroad ran through Culpeper County, which is located midway and slightly west of the Civil War capitals of Richmond and Washington D.C. It can be argued that no county in the nation suffered more severe hardships during that war than Culpeper. The region was occupied by one army or the other throughout the conflict – its livestock, produce, and timber denuded and a great many farms left fallow as free citizens and their slave labor scattered. In early 1863, a cavalry commander – encamped near Salubria to defend the fords on the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers -complained, “I do not object to the work, but I do object to seeing my command broken down by positive starvation. We cannot get forage.” (Ellis, pg. 99). A March 1864 photo of Stevensburg and vicinity depicts a stripped and treeless wasteland (Ellis, pg. 107).

With the secession of Virginia in April 1861, 31-year old Robert Grayson enlisted in the infantry, asking 28-year-old brother John C. Grayson, an unmarried physician in Washington, D.C., to come to Salubria to care for the farm and their ailing mother. Robert’s four months in the infantry was interrupted when Sarah died in June. In March 1862 Robert enlisted in the 9th Virginia Cavalry for an undetermined period. He married Mary Virginia Richeson in Amherst County in December 1863, this while the Union Army of the Potomac occupied Culpeper County – some 20,000 cavalrymen in winter camp around Stevensburg – Salubria serving as a division headquarters. The women of the house, presumably including Robert’s new bride, were reportedly treated with courtesy, but likely relegated to the basement or to a room or two on the second floor. Robert himself headed to Northern Virginia to join the horse battalion led by John Singleton Mosby, whom he probably met as a cavalryman in early 1862. Private Robert Grayson was captured in Fauquier County by Union forces in April 1864, spending the subsequent year as a prisoner of war.

Three Brothers after the War

Upon his return, Robert Grayson’s indebtedness led to the transfer of ownership of Salubria to his younger brother, John Cooke Grayson. Robert never had children, lived out a somewhat troubled life within a few miles of Salubria, and died at age 83 in the home of his late niece Bettie Grayson Fitzhugh (see below).

John Benjamin Grayson 1111 of nearby Prince William County, older half-brother of Robert 1112 and John C. 1113, was a 48-year old widower with four children when he died of typhoid fever in 1863. Daughter Emma Grayson (#11111, 1846-1917) and son Robert Grayson III (11112, 1847-1898) never married. Daughter Bettie C. Grayson (11113, 1852-1896) married William D. Fitzhugh in 1871. The couple had 12 children including Lena Grayson Fitzhugh (111135, 1879-1950.) All lived in Culpeper after the war, and all were frequent guests at Salubria. It is unclear what happened to John B. Grayson’s fourth child William (11114, 1856-?)

John Cooke Grayson was a Civil War surgeon in Richmond and Farmville, where he met nurse and war widow Lena Pettus Walton (1836-1879). The couple and Lena’s three Walton children – son Henry (1857-1943), daughter Willie (1860-1936, who married banker Eppa Rixey, Sr. of Culpeper in 1882), and son Walter (1862-1911) – moved to Salubria to live with great-aunts Elizabeth and Harriette Cooke, both of whom died in the early 1870s.

Extended Family at Salubria

John and Lena Pettus Grayson had three children of their own, all born at Salubria: John Cooke Grayson, Jr. (11131, 1871-1938), Sarah Mason Cooke Grayson (b. 1875), who died in infancy, and Cary Travers Grayson (11133, 1878-1938). Lena died when Cary was five months old, and young Cary later went to live with his older Walton/Rixey half-siblings in the town of Culpeper. In 1886 John married childless Georgie Taliaferro (b. 1841), who inherited Salubria upon John’s death in 1895. Georgie Grayson’s boarders over 30 years included her unmarried sister Susan Taliaferro (1837-1910), childless youngest sibling Alice Taliaferro (1854-1933) and her husband George Welsh (1850-1932), and long-widowed brother-in-law John Fry (1833-1914) and his only child Nannie Taliaferro Fry (1864-1939), to whom Salubria was willed at the death of her Aunt Georgie in 1926.

These, then, comprise the tangled web of Graysons and extended family members connected to Salubria from 1853 to 1939. With the death of Alice Welsh in 1933, Nannie Fry becomes the sole and final resident of Salubria, “surviving in an environment still affected by post-Civil War poverty and the Great Depression. She still has no electricity, running water, or telephone, uses a hand pump for water, and chops her own wood for heating. She is thought of by family and friends as an eccentric spinster.” (Ellis, pg. 132)

Historic Property

At her death in 1939, Nannie Fry, who outlived her younger contemporaries Cary Grayson and J.C. Grayson, Jr., left Salubria to M. Julia Grayson (111311, 1894-1979) of Charlottesville, 44-year old then-unmarried daughter of J.C. Grayson, Jr., and the oldest grandchild of Lena and John C. Grayson. The furnishings were auctioned off in May 1939, and the house has remained empty ever since. In 1942, Salubria was purchased by insurance executive George Harrison and his bride Alice Gordon Grayson, the widow of Cary Grayson.

Over the next sixteen years, George and Alice Harrison commissioned architectural surveys and hired various firms to assist in the planned renovation of the poorly-maintained historic house and its neglected gardens. Much was learned, but few renovations were ultimately made. When Alice died in 1961, she left Salubria to her three Grayson sons. In 1970 the home – still empty and unconnected to utilities – was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Gordon Grayson (1918-1997), oldest son of Cary and Alice, bought out his siblings and, with wife Laura May Norris (1924-2010) built the adjoining guest cottage in 1993. In 2000 Laura Norris Grayson donated Salubria to the Historic Germanna Foundation.

From their website: “Constructed in 1757, Salubria stands as a preserved, not restored, house showcasing original wood paneling—an exceptional example of 18th-century craftsmanship. Its raw, unfurnished state offers visitors a rare glimpse into the past.” Tours are offered by appointment, with seasonal open houses. https://germanna.org/salubria/

Many thanks to John Howard, Jennifer Hurst-Wender, Shannon Doherty, and the staff at Fort Germanna Visitor Center and Library, and to our docent Mary Ann at Salubria.