Inside

Five years ago, Waite Rawls looked at the Greek Revival Yarbrough home on East Broad and was captivated by, among other things, its gigantic windows, which bring light into almost every room. Malou Rawls was in Chicago, closing on the sale of their home there, when her husband called and said to her, “‘Malou, this house is going to sell today.” Waite Rawls was right­—he bought it before his wife even saw it, and today Malou is happy with the decision. “You don’t get that much natural light in old houses, or even in new, modern houses,” Malou says. The Yarbrough house’s English basement is also unusually bright, as the house is set high above Broad Street.

The house was built by William Yarbrough, who, with Miles Turpin, owned Turpin and Yarbrough Tobacco Co., housed in the nearby Pohlig building. The partners married sisters and built identical houses next door to one another. “Nobody wanted to have the nicer house or the worse house,” says Waite, the director of the Museum of the Confederacy. Work was completed in the summer of 1861; the war had started in April. By the end of the 19th century, the basement had been converted to a doctor’s office and examination rooms, and the mosaic tile floor in that room today dates to that period. In the 1940s and ’50s, the main house and two-story servants’ quarters held 13 apartments. That was before S. Douglas Fleet bought the property in 1967 and began to restore it.

Church Hill’s preservationist movement got its start in the late 1950s. That’s when a handful of forward-thinking ladies began to buy and restore properties. They included Elisabeth Scott Bocock and Louise Catterall, who in 1956 founded Historic Richmond Foundation (HRF), which later merged with the William Byrd branch of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. APVA was started by Mary Wingfield Scott to save the Adam Craig house in Shockoe Bottom, Richmond’s second-oldest structure and childhood home of Jane Craig Stanard—the subject of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “To Helen.”

By all accounts, the female preservationists were a resourceful group. There are stories that Mrs. Scott, upon hearing of, say, a bank closing, would get in touch with the board chairman to talk him out of the woodwork. Mrs. Bocock paneled the ground floor of one her houses entirely with doors from Caravati’s architectural salvage. Doug Fleet, an HRF president whose mother and sister were 1930s residents of the Adam Craig House, worked closely with Mrs. Bocock on several projects—one of which was the 1972 relocation of a Federal triple house that sat on property designated to become the expanded Richmond Public Library. The group divided the house to fit the lots available on the Hill: Two were set down on Franklin Street, and the third was put behind them on Grace Street.