Thomas Nelson Page (1853 - 1922)

Born 23 Apr 1853 in Oakland Plantation, Beaverdam, Hanover County, Virginia

Ancestors

Husband of Anne Seddon (Bruce) Page — married 28 Jul 1886 (to 21 Dec 1888) in Charlotte, Virginia, United States

Husband of Florence Wentworth (Lathrop) Page — married 6 Jun 1893 in Dupage, Illinois, USA

Died 1 Nov 1922 at age 69 in Oakland Plantation, Beaverdam, Hanover, Virginia

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Biography

Thomas Nelson Page was born in 1853, one of the Nelson family's plantations in Oakland, in Hanover, Virginia. He was the son of John Page and Elizabeth Burwell Nelson. His father was a lawyer and plantation owner. He is a descendent of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia^[1].

The Civil War broke out when he was 8. His once-wealthy family became impoverished during Reconstruction, when he was a teenager.

He attended Washington College; however, he left due to financial reasons after 3 years. To earn money, he tutored the children of cousins in Kentucky. Then from 1873-1874 he attended the law school at the University of Virginia. He was a member of the Delta Psi fraternity.

He was admitted to the Virginia Bar Association and was practicing law in Richmond, VA, from 1876-1893. He also began a writing career during this time. Upon retiring from his law practice, he moved to Washington D.C. and also lived part time in York Harbor, Maine.

On 28 Jul 1886, in Charlotte, Virginia, he married Anne Seddon Bruce. She died just over two years later on 21 Dec 1888, from a throat hemorrhage.

He married a second time, on 6 Jun 1893, in Dupage, Illinois, to Florence Lathrop. They had no children.

He wrote 18 books by 1912. He popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His fiction writing style featured a nostalgic view of the South. He depicted enslaved people as faithful, happy and simple, slotted into a paternalistic society. He helped popularize the images of cheerful and devoted Mammies and Sambos in his early books, became one of the first writers to introduce a literary black brute. They even served as a kind of imaginative precursor to Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel Gone with the Wind (1936).

He was appointed as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. There he supported the Czechoslovak Legion in Italy[1]. He eventually learned Italian, formed beneficial relationships with Italian government officials, and accurately reported on the Italian state during World War I^[2]. He resigned in 1919, after a disagreement with President Wilson over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He returned home to Oakland, Hanover, Virginia.

Page was an activist in stimulating the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities to mobilize to save historical sites at Yorktown and elsewhere, from loss to development. He was involved in gaining Federal funding to build a seawall at Jamestown in 1900, protecting a site where the remains of James Fort were later discovered by archaeologists working on the Jamestown Rediscovery project.

He passed away at Oakland, age 69, in 1922. He was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C.

A full list of his publications can be found on his Wikipedia page [2].

Sources

1. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Families_of_Virginia
2. ↑ Dauer, Richard Paul. "Thomas Nelson Page, Diplomat" (MA, College of William and Mary, 1972)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nelson_Page

• https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/page-thomas-nelson-1853-1922/

• https://archive.org/details/thomasnelsonpage0000unse

• [3] The Cabells and Their Kin: A Memorial Volume of History, Biography, and Genealogy Alexander Brown January 1, 1895 Houghton, Mifflin & Company: Wife, Marriage, Ancestors page 338, 339

• Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age: 2006, Harmony Books, by Donna M. Lucey

• https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/L87B-QFB with links to family and source records from multiple contributors.