The old neighborhood
“There were no cool kids in Belmont. We grew up, we went to work, very few of us had opportunity to go on to higher education. The main thing you wanted was to get out of high school and find a good job, particularly one that wasn’t gonna break your back.” – Sonny Mawyer, 77, Belmont native.
Tommy Williams made a casual suggestion four years ago while catching up with an old friend over the phone. Why don’t we get the boys together and talk about the old days in Belmont? The idea was just to grab a cup of coffee at McDonalds, but then one of Williams’ friends suggested they invite someone else, and that guy invited someone too, and so on, until there were 32 people coming to the thing, and McDonalds wasn’t gonna cut it.
Williams was born in 1941. His parents lived in a rented house on Green Street adjacent to his grandparent’s 40-acre farm, which stretched all the way down to Moore’s Creek. They lived just outside the city line, but within the traditional boundary of Belmont, and they raised cows and chickens and grew food to feed their family. It wasn’t until his grandfather died in 1967 that the farm was finally developed.
Williams bought his grandmother’s house when she passed away, living there with his wife for 14 years, before he eventually sold it to his son, who lives there now raising his own kids. Five generations in Belmont. Williams’ 90-year-old mother still lives in the old house on Green Street.
With the guest list on his Belmont family reunion ballooning, Williams decided to secure a house. He made eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy, and laid it out with coffee and juice. Everyone who came to breakfast had grown up in Belmont, Charlottesville’s first subdivision, a sprawling neighborhood of hills, alleyways, and mom ‘n’ pop grocery shops that was carved out of farmland 121 years before.
It had been a long time since any of them had seen each other, and so breakfast lasted ’til 1pm. Before they parted company, the group dubbed themselves The Belmont Boys, agreeing to meet every year to preserve and expand the history of the place they came from.
Head east on Belmont Avenue from Avon, and just after you cross Church Street, stop in the middle of the block, turn to your left, and look at number 759. It doesn’t look like much. A brick building, slightly larger than average, with a modern looking front section sticking out like a snout and two older looking wings once painted white, now slowly turning pink as the paint evaporates off of the brick.
What you’re looking at is the back of the original Belle-Mont mansion reconfigured as the front of an apartment building. There’s some dispute as to when and by whom the house was built, but the following scenario convinced me: In 1813, a man named John Winn bought 551 acres of land southeast of tiny Downtown Charlottesville, land that already had a small house dating from around 1790. Winn replaced that house in 1820 with what stands there today.
Walk around the block to Hinton Avenue, behind the Methodist Church that takes up the other half of the lot, and you’ll see a more imposing façade, rendered in Classical style, with four square columns stretching two stories up to a triangular pediment. This is more or less what you would have seen if you’d stood there 192 years ago, before the past was swallowed up by the modern world.
When Winn died, the estate was sold in 1847 to the spectacularly named Slaughter W. Ficklin. After doing his part for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ficklin came home and set about turning his new home into one of the best livestock farms in the country. His love of horses extended to racing, and he had a track built somewhere along what is now Avon Extended. After Ficklin’s death, his son sold 300 acres in 1891 to the Belmont Land Company, which surveyed it, mapped it, and laid down a grid of streets and avenues separating 1,500 lots, birthing one of the first housing subdivisions in the country.
For the first 70 years of its life, long before the real estate frenzy at the turn of this century, Belmont was home to a tight knit, almost insular community. William “Sonny” Mawyer, whose grandparents came to Belmont in the “horse and buggy days,” and who was born there himself in 1935, called it a “self contained part of Charlottesville;” a “hard working, you might say God fearing, neighborhood.”
Belmont’s original settlers were mostly upper middle class families looking, as upper middle class families often do, to escape from the growing city nearby, and they began building houses in the area around the original Belmont mansion. But the construction of the bridge across the railroad tracks in 1905, as well as the thriving railroad and manufacturing businesses nearby, meant that more and more working class families were arriving, establishing themselves at the south end of the neighborhood around Belmont Park. By the 1920s, when Belmont was in the throes of its first housing boom, it was solidly blue collar.
Mawyer lived with his grandparents, his mother and his half-sister in a big yellow house on Douglas Avenue, right across the street from where Joan Schatzman would move some 60 years later. The Mawyers had a barn where they kept chickens and a few other animals, and there was nothing between them and the railroad tracks but a big field. The Great Depression still lingered and Sonny’s grandpa supported the family on what he made delivering freight for the railroad. Still, when the occasional hobo wandered up looking for food, they were always guaranteed a sandwich and a night in the barn.
Back then, Belmont was easy to define. It was home, Mawyer said, to “the people that did the work.” Many of the young men didn’t finish high school, preferring instead to start working with their fathers when they were 16 or 17, “laying cinder block, or brick, or pouring concrete.”
Mawyer: “[The mills] took care of their employees, they built little houses … over towards Belmont Park and Elliot Avenue, those little four and five bedroom cinderblock houses … You [could] buy your house at $100 a month … and [if] something happens to you, the wife can stay in the house. And there’s more than likely still some families that go back that far.”
If you were young in Belmont at that time, life centered around Belmont Park, where summer nights meant reel-to-reel movies, and days meant picnics in the grass with everybody coming and bringing food. The kids were there every day, taking part in a plethora of city-sponsored activities: neighborhood vs. neighborhood baseball games, badminton, horseshoes, basketball…
“Certain things were expected of you,” Mawyer says. “If you came out of Belmont, you had to have some good reason that you wasn’t going to participate in sports.”
Not all of the fun was officially sanctioned. They used to swim in the old stone quarry where Quarry Park is now, and camp out in the park at night, dodging the policeman who came to see about the noise. Skipping school was the biggest vice, that and a little drinking and fighting.
It seemed like everyone in Belmont back then had a nickname. There was Peanut, Snake Eye, Peter Rabbit, Poogy, and Fakey. And then there were the Payne brothers and their cousin, who lived in five adjacent houses on Elliott Avenue and were known as Piggy, Big Boy, Mouthy, Hickey, and Poo Poo.
Belmont people were tough people, even old Poo Poo Payne. They were used to physical labor and strict discipline. As Sonny Mawyer put it, “You just grew up with the expectations of what you were supposed to do, and most everybody did it.”
A hundred and thirty people came to this year’s breakfast, and new people contact Wiliams about it every day. As the date nears, he goes down the list of members and calls each one to see if they’re coming. He also calls a few holdouts, cajoling them to stop by, knowing that if they do, they’ll love it. Williams is retired, and while running the Belmont Boys gives him something to do, it’s also important work, an accomplishment. He’s proud of what he’s done.
They come from all over Virginia, from Florida, New York, West Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina. There are no guest speakers, no schedule or rules, just people moving from table to table talking to old friends, asking, Do you remember that place? Do you remember this person? That old story?
The youngest Belmont Boy is 56, the oldest 84. Just last month saw the funeral of 74-year-old Randolph Norford, who as a boy in Belmont fell out of a tree at the corner of Avon and Bolling and broke his arm, and who Williams remembers as the best marble shooter in the neighborhood.