Named for his father’s best friend at Princeton, Albert lost his father near his 4th birthday. He grew up in Clermont in the aftermath of the Civil War, then graduated from medical school at the U. of Maryland and from the U.S. Naval Academy. An 1889 group photograph with Assistant Surgeon Albert M.D.

James Lee was not a docile slave and was considered by his owners to be a bad influence on other slaves. For this, he was sold in 1855 by his owner, Edward McCormick of Clermont, to Joseph Bruin, who, between 1844 and 1861, when Federal troops closed him up, was the most notorious slave trader in Alexandria, Va.

Josephine Williams was a woman who moved from enslavement at Clermont plantation in Clarke County, VA, to freedom at Emancipation, when she became a successful businesswoman in Berryville, married Phillip Williams, and led the founding of an independent community for freed people, Josephine City (today Josephine Street in Berryville), which was both a shelter from and a place of resistance to the re-emerging white supremacy in post-Civil War Virginia.

The story of Clermont is a story of continuity and persistence. Of farming the land, of families, individuals, and buildings, rather than the story of one big battle or one big person. We see the continuity in this photo, taken over 125 years ago, in the life spans of the individuals pictured, beginning with Ellen Jett McCormick’s birth in 1833 and her granddaughter Edith Jett McCormick’s death in 1997, across 164 years, the same distance in American history as from 1776 until 1940, from the Revolution to WWII.

Ellen Lane Jett McCormick was a woman with a remarkable life trajectory. Born in 1833 in Rappahannock County, Virginia, on a plantation twice as large as Clermont, with twice as many enslaved people, in 1856, she married Edward McCormick of Clermont, whom she expanded and built into a wheat-based powerhouse.

In 1850, Edward McCormick was in his first few years of managing Clermont, his farm with 407 improved acres, with the labor of 23 enslaved people he owned. He had been orphaned at 12, was sent to Princeton by his uncle and guardian Dr. Cyrus McCormick, graduated in 1845, and inherited Clermont. He was married to his first wife, Mary Elizabeth Stribling McCormick (who would die just three years later), had a daughter, Florinda, and an infant daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who died that year, 1850.  They lived in the 1755-56 house and its adjacent parts.