Ellen Lane (Jett) McCormick

(1833-1908)

The Woman Who Saved Clermont the First Time.

A teenage Ellen Lane Jett, at her family’s Plantation, Ellerslie, Rappahannock Co., VA 

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. Six years later, during the Civil War, she became a refugee, along with her first four children (her five-year-old firstborn son and both her parents died in this period).  After the War, she and Edward began rebuilding at Clermont with paid labor, only to have him die in 1870, and, with his loss, the banks foreclosed on the widow for their pre-War debt, the equivalent of over half a million in 2025 dollars.  

To save for her children what even then was considered “historic” Clermont from the wreck, she sold every other farm and property they had bought, becoming one of the first white property owners in Clarke County to sell land to African Americans,   This included the creation of the largest freed people’s community in the county from her sale of 31 1-acre lots, for which she provided the financing at 6%  interest, on a parcel of Clermont land between the farm and Berryville. This deal was made through the agency of another remarkable woman, Josephine Williams, who Ellen had formerly enslaved, now an independent businesswoman in Berryville, and who bought the first two lots. It was these freed people and others who, paradoxically, helped her save Clermont, which ultimately descended to her great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Williams, who, at her death in 2004, gave the farm to the Commonwealth of Virginia as a historic site.

At her widowhood at age 37, Ellen McCormick had more to worry about than foreclosure and fending off financial ruin. She was now the head of household not only for her five living children, Elvira 12, Dawson 10, Anne 8, Albert 4 and James 2, but also for her 22-year old step-daughter Florinda (by Edward’s first wife who had died very young), and periodic foster mother and manager of the guardian accounts for the orphaned children of Edward’s sister Ann and her husband John Stribling, both dead in the War. To keep Clermont productive and earning income, she hired a tenant farmer on shares to take over the agricultural operations of the highly diversified farm, which had been her husband’s area of expertise. For the next 38 years, she cared for her family, the elderly of the previous generation, and Clermont, becoming a businesswoman herself in the process.

Ellen Lane Jett McCormick, after her husband Edward’s death in 1870.

Ellen McCormick had been born into one elite southern family and married into another, one that valued education (her husband was a graduate of Princeton) and the professions, in addition to making the large estates they owned profitable using enslaved labor. She, along with other Virginians in her position after the War, recognized that farming in rural Virginia, even on a large scale, was not going to be a basis for the productive and successful lives she expected her children and grandchildren would live in a new century.  She made sure they had the education they needed, including the girls, and encouraged them to take the opportunities available in an expanding America moving into its place on the world stage. Her two daughters married prominent businessmen, one son became a businessman in New York City, and two sons became medical doctors, one of whom became an admiral in the U.S. Navy in charge of health services, and the other running public health services for the City of Norfolk.

She was 60 and had been widowed for 23 years when her last child finished his medical education in 1893. Five years later, we see her in the photo with eight of her grandchildren (with three more to come), all of whom spent summers with her at Clermont, with their parents visiting when they could. At the same time, she created a vital improvement, signing an easement with the Town of Berryville to allow water from their new reservoir on the Blue Ridge to be piped through Clermont to the Town.  This provided free, safe water to be delivered under pressure to the house for the first time at the end of the 19th century.  Eight years into the 20th century, she died at 75 at Clermont on a spring day, the place she had fought to save for her family, with family around her.