Qualla: Violet Bank Museum

Violet Bank Museum: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mojo Hand, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a tree on the lawn. A cucumber magnolia, branches spreading low and wide, its trunk gnarled with the slow violence of two and a half centuries of Virginia weather. Beneath it the Marquis de Lafayette is said to have made camp in the summer of 1781, and beneath it Robert E. Lee pitched his headquarters tent eighty-three years later. Whether either claim is precisely true is contested, but the tree is still there, and the house behind it is still there, and what the place actually offers is the strange durability of a single piece of ground.

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Image: Mojo Hand | CC BY-SA 4.0

Violet Bank Museum: Thomas Shore's Hill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mojo Hand, CC BY-SA 4.0. The estate began with a real estate transaction. In 1777 Thomas Shore bought 144 acres on Archer's Hill from the heirs of John Martin and built a two-story clapboard house, finished in 1778, fitting the canonical two-over-two center-hall plan of late colonial Tidewater Virginia. ...

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Image: Mojo Hand | CC BY-SA 4.0

Violet Bank Museum: Lafayette's Headquarters

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. In March 1781, Baron von Steuben and his Virginia militia fought a skirmish on the hillside against British troops under Major General William Phillips. A month later, in April, the twenty-three-year-old Lafayette returned to the same ground. Phillips noted the position in dispat...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Violet Bank Museum: Fire and Federal Design

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mojo Hand, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original house caught fire in 1810, supposedly on a Sunday while the family was at church. By then Thomas Shore had been dead a decade, and his much younger widow Jane Grey had remarried, to Henry Haxall of the Haxall milling family in Richmond. The chimney stacks and foundat...

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Image: Mojo Hand | CC BY-SA 4.0

Violet Bank Museum: Lee's Headquarters

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mojo Hand, CC BY-SA 4.0. From June through September 1864, during the Siege of Petersburg, Robert E. Lee made Violet Bank his headquarters. The property was held in trust by Thomas Shore's grandson, Thomas Gilliam. From the lawn Lee could watch the trenches across the river. Part of the main house served...

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Image: Mojo Hand | CC BY-SA 4.0

Violet Bank Museum: Dairy Barn to Museum

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corvokarasu at en.wikipedia, Public domain. The history that followed is the strangest part. In 1905 the Greater Petersburg Realty Corporation bought the house and turned it into a dairy farm, knocking out walls on the first floor so the structure could be used as a cattle barn. In 1914 the company decided to subdivide the...

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Image: Corvokarasu at en.wikipedia | Public domain