Qualla: Anne Spencer House

Anne Spencer House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Anne Spencer wrote her poems in a one-room cottage at the back of her garden. She called it Edankraal — a private word built from "Edward," her husband's name, her own "Anne," and the Afrikaans word kraal, for enclosure. The garden is what survives most vividly today: a long, narrow strip behind the Pierce Street house in Lynchburg, laid out by Edward Spencer in beds and arbors, planted thick with the irises and tea roses and trumpet vines Anne loved. Marian Anderson sang there once, after segregated Lynchburg hotels would not house her. Langston Hughes walked the paths. Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. and James Weldon Johnson and George Washington Carver and W. E. B. Du Bois all came through this gate. The poet lived in this house from 1903 until her death in 1975, and her garden was the unofficial Black intellectual salon of the upper South.

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Anne Spencer House: A Poet First, Always

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Anne Spencer was born Annie Bethel Bannister in 1882, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents in Henry County, Virginia. She moved to Lynchburg as a young woman, married Edward Spencer in 1901, and from the early 1920s onward published poems that James Weldon Johnson collected ...

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Anne Spencer House: Edward Built It Twice

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. The Pierce Street house went up in 1903, a two-story shingle residence in a modified Queen Anne style — hip-roofed on one side, gable on the other, with a two-bay facade carefully balanced. Edward Spencer designed and built it himself, and then over the next several decades he re...

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Anne Spencer House: Edankraal and the Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Behind the house Edward laid out a long garden with paths, pergolas, a small pond, and a fountain centered on a cast figure that Anne loved. At the back of the garden he built her a single-room writing studio. She named it Edankraal. She wrote there for fifty years, with the gard...

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Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Anne Spencer House: Museum, Garden, and Living Archive

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Loslazos, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Anne Spencer's death in 1975, the family preserved the house intact and opened it to the public in 1977. The garden was restored in the 1980s with the help of horticulturists and members of the family who remembered exactly which beds held which bulbs. In July 2022 the Nati...

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Image: Loslazos | CC BY-SA 4.0