Mt. Alto

 by Alan M. Bruns

(draft)

 

Mt. Alto is a high ridge around the end of which the Rockfish flowed in a great bend. It is the southern end of a group of mountains that extends southwest from Charlottesville.

 

Old maps show a "Mt. Alto" village atop the ridge, about where the William Gianninis live.

 

The first Giannini, Antonio, came from Italy, a vintner imported by Jefferson's neighbor, Mazzei, from his home area in Tuscany. Antonio and others helped build Mazzei's home, "Colle," near Monticello.

 

John Warren Fenwick, 1800-63, ancestor of my school-mates Evelyn and Billy Giannini, built a plantation along the top of the ridge B a home, a store, a blacksmith shop and a community school, among other things. The area's first post office was at Mt. Alto [the name was changed when it was moved down to the riverbank village].

 

The road from a surviving 1847 home he built, along the ridge to the Ramsey home, which is well uphill from the Gilmer, Llnarth, on Rt.. 626, had two schools and at least one church.

 

At the other end of the road is the home where the Gianninis I knew grew up, Billy's retirement home, and the cabins built by Dr. Margaret Nolting and successor owners. Those cabins are at the edge of a high bluff overlooking a horseshoe bend in the Rockfish.

 

 

In my childhood the old Howardsville bank building was the home of a Mr. Branham, who had been a longtime mail carrier before Hunter Fenwick. Branham had used a horse cart.

 

Beside the church on the hillside is the Masonic Hall, and behind that is the Fenwick home. Eva Helen, my schoolmate, and her older sister, Virginia, lived there. Their father, Hunter, was rural mail carrier and Democratic precinct chairman).

 

In his youth, Billy had been a fishing companion [and student] of Fred Cobbs. Fred and his brother Jimmy (they had been students of my father's in his single year as a teacher, 1916).

 

Fred, well-known in my time as an expert on catfish, when younger had worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway at Gladstone, and was known as an amazingly fast counter of numbers on moving train cars. He did taxes for many Howardsvillians, Giannini told me.

 

On our return from three years in Charlottesville, schoolmates (when I was in the fifth and sixth grades) included Evelyn and Billy Giannini and Margaret Trice, whose home was downhill on "Mt. Alto" from the Gianninis and whose father presided at the depot. Margaret led the girls' gang that "ran" our school when I was in fifth grade.

 

Between those homes lived schoolmates Margaret, Mary and Charlie Clements, with whom my younger brother Scott used to swim where the Rockfish joins the James.

 

The old  "Howardsville Turnpike" to the Shenandoah Valley through Rockfish Gap crosses Mt. Alto near the Fenwick-Giannini homes.

 

The late Helen McLean, Hunter Fenwick's sister, was postmistress following  Grady Fenwick's tenure. She lived in the Mt. Alto house her grandfather built in 1847. Another sister was Mrs. Curtis Vernon Giannini from nearby Schuyler, a soapstone [talc] quarrying community.

 

Helen was the last A real daughter@ of the Scottsville United Daughters of the Confederacy. Her father, John Warren Fenwick=s son William Wood Fenwick, served in the Confederate Army [in Howardsville=s old men and boys= company?].

 

Other Fenwick siblings of that generation were Mary Elizabeth, who became Mrs. John White, and [???} Lena, who became Mrs. Burcher, and lived within sight of Howardsville in adjacent Nelson County.

 

Hunter Fenwick's brother-in-law, Frank Wells, built us a kitchen table in the 1940s from the cypress floorboards of one of my grandfather's water-catching cisterns at Dungannon. It has spent much of its 50-plus years' existence in dining rooms, admired as an "antique."

 

The Wells were adopted children of an English family that lived on a farm along the Nelson County side of the Rockfish River. The original ford (crossing) of the Rockfish was on their land, well upstream from the present bridge.

 

Dr. Nolting=s cabin on a cliff high above a horseshoe bend in the Rockfish River I thought was the most magnificent house site imaginable. The cabin is still there. Billy Giannini, who became a state geologist, and his wife Alice, who is from Schuyler, built a house that shares this view.

 

Dr. Nolting and Miss Courtney Irving lived and worked in Richmond, but their "office" during long summer vacations was the tiny building beside the Irving store, once used as a library.