Page 9 - Demo

Margaret Henry Penick Nuttle, who died in July 2009, was very much a daughter of Lynchburg. Though she never lived full time in the Hill City, she had a special love of the place and its people. In
the last years of her life she became a generous benefactress of a number of civic undertakings, including the Old City Cemetery, Historic Sandusky, Academy of Fine Arts, and Point
of Honor. Her generosity and her ambitions for Central Virginia were eclectic and widespread.
Mrs. Nuttle’s great aunt was the renowned Lynchburg resident Elvira Miller. Miss Ella, as Lynchburg knew her in her day, or Aunt Ella, as she was to Mrs. Nuttle, lived all of her 104 years and 11 months in her father’s house at 114 Harrison Street. It was Aunt Ella that Mrs. Nuttle visited as a child and as a young woman. Together they would visit Red Hill, Patrick Henry’s last residence, near Brookneal, which was, and still is, considered to
Margaret Ann Henry, Patrick Henry’s granddaughter and great grandmother
of Margaret Nuttle.
be a family property.
Named for Governor
Henry and also after his granddaughter (Margaret
Ann Henry Miller),
Margaret Henry Penick
Nuttle was Governor Henry’s great x 3 granddaughter and his number one booster.
After Patrick Henry died, Red Hill was inherited by his youngest son, John Henry (married to Elvira McClelland). Their daughter, Margaret Ann, married William Alexander Miller. Of that couple’s numerous children, Elvira “Miss Ella” Miller was one and her sister Florence another. Florence married John Collins Dabney and they had a daughter named Margaret Henry Dabney (see “The Paper Trail” sidebar). Miss Dabney was successfully courted by a Culpeper man, Sydnor Barksdale Penick, and after three sons in quick succession, Margaret Henry Dabney Penick presented her husband with a daughter, Margaret Henry.
Miss Ella, as Lynchburg knew her in her day, or Aunt Ella, as she was to Mrs. Nuttle, lived all of her 104 years and 11 months in her father’s house at 114 Harrison Street.
Elvira Miller, (Miss Ella), right, with her sister Florence (Margaret Nuttle’s grandmother) as young women
The Best of Both
Margaret H. P. Nuttle was, surprisingly, born in
Bloomfield, New Jersey. Her father, S. B. Penick, had some
ten years or so earlier started his own pharmaceutical company
with capital raised among relatives in the Lynchburg business community.
Its success required him to leave the Virginia–North Carolina areas where the botanicals for his pharmaceutical firm were gathered and to establish himself in the commerce capital of New York. He commuted between the city and Bloomfield, and then he moved the family to Montclair, New Jersey.
When her parents registered her
for school at Montclair’s prestigious Kimberley Academy, Margaret Henry Penick, as she was known then, was found to qualify for the second grade. She could already read at age six and also knew her numbers and a few sums. It was an appropriate accomplishment for a girl whose relatives had included schoolmasters on both sides: the
Millers and the Penicks. When in her eighties, Mrs. Nuttle discovered among her mother’s papers a record of her Kimberly admission. It amused her very much and made her feel, she confided, a little less cowed by the fact that her brother, Barksdale Junior, had been Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton.
Throughout Margaret’s years as a schoolgirl, she was her mother’s right- hand assistant in the management of
the Montclair household, tending to the needs of her father, three older brothers, and later her younger sister, Florence Miller Penick, “more beautiful and more outgoing than I ever was or will be.” She was also the family’s guide for all the visitors they entertained from Virginia, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. It was her responsibility—starting at ten years old—to steer these family groups onto public transportation, get them into
FALL/WINTER 2010 