The flood of 1969 washed away much of Massies Mill and what was not washed away was so damaged that it was soon torn down. Most notable to our family was the home and store of Ida Via Mahone. Also lost to the ravages of time are answers to other questions of interest such as the birthplace of my grandmother and maybe her siblings, not to mention my great grandfather Robert Mahone and his two brothers and sister, Mary. This is of some relevance since we have the letters of Susan Bowling Mahone to her son, Robert, while he was away at school in Georgia and I would like to picture the home she was writing from. As I was reading those letters, I always envisioned the only Mahone home I ever knew, which was the old store and house on River Loop Road. I knew that by 1900 that Robert and Maria lived in a separate home near his parents but assumed that Alexander and Susan lived in the house with the store. That was to me the ancestral Mahone home.

As a child I remember as we were driving along what is now Crab Tree Falls Highway into Massies Mill that my mother pointed, I think to the right, at an old building and said that is where your grandmother was born. I believe that house was there at the time of the flood but was so damaged that it was torn down. According to Ted Hughes map it was owned by a Campbell family at the time of the flood and was next to Lea’s store which still stands at the corner of Rt. 56 and Tanyard Road. In the above much earlier birds eye view of Massies Mill, there are two sizable houses along that stretch of the road. In the early days of the Mahone family in Massies Mill, this may have been property associated with the Bowling family since the log house next to the church was said to have been their home as well as a school house and post office. Don Gantt agreed that he thought this was where his mother was born, but I do not know if I ever asked Virginia Allen. I should have.

I visited Grace Mahone on February 6, 2018 and that question came arose. Her incite into the matter provided a new perspective. I knew that after Robert Mahone married Maria Nelson she combined her savings with that of her sister, Mildred Whitehead, to finance a new mercantile store for Robert and his father to run. Previously Robert had worked for 25 cents a day as a laborer and Maria had been forced to resign her job as a school teacher once she married him. Alexander Mahone had worked in other Massie’s Mill stores including that of his brother around 1870, so he would have had some experience. Alex’s father had owned a store on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, but I have no evidence that he himself had ever run a store. Only in the 1900 census was he referred to as a merchant and that was while working with Robert. I had assumed that this financing was only to open the store in the building that Alexander and Susan already owned, but Grace’s clarification was that it went much farther than that: Maria had also purchased the house for their growing family. This means that Robert and his family must have been living in another home prior to that time, perhaps the one on Rt. 56 where Evelyn Mahone was thought to have been born, likely with the rest of the Mahone family. I next called Mary Mahone Lyle, the last surviving child of Robert Mahone who was born in the building. She would have heard a great many stories as a young girl from her parents as she grew up and I wanted to see what she recalled. She had no doubt that Maria had purchased the house for Robert and that she had not just financed the store. She speculated that before that purchase they would have been living in the Bowling home (unfortunately the 1890 census was burned so we cannot confirm that assumption), but I was not able to reconcile its location except that it was near Grace Church.

Still the question lingered as to how a poorly paid school teacher and her 28-year-old sister could have saved enough money to not only buy the house and store but to stock it and finance customer’s purchases which seems to be the practice in that day.  Clues do come from Maria’s letters.  Maria and Robert were married on July 9, 1895.  Eleven months later their first child was born.  In December 1896, Maria took baby Evelyn to Ivy Cottage west of Charlottesville for a big expected Christmas reunion with the Robertson family which founded the Purina Company.  Robert is to join them shortly and she writes, “Minnie wants you to bring her ten pounds of nuts if you have more than you can sell, but not to hold them for her as she can get them here.  Also, if your raisins do not cost more than 15 cents per lb. to bring her 5 lbs.”  This is the first confirmation that Robert now has a grocery store.  In April she is again writes from Charlottesville and ends her letter with a curious comment, “Poor Minnie, she does not want to sell out, but for your sake she is going to do so.  I feel infinitely sorry for her”.   Since Minnie is the sister who invested in the store and that is the only thing presumably that she possesses to sell which would have anything to do with Robert, it would appear to be her ownership in the store that they are talking about.  For the situation to make sense though, Robert would have to be doing very well to now, after such a short time, be able to buy her out.  In early August, Maria is telling Robert that if her mother’s health improves she will be able to come home but the whole family is urging Robert to take the train to visit them an “stay a long time” implying that he has a lot of flexibility in his schedule.  If he is indeed running a business that would be close to impossible, but now we come to the most critical comment, “Eliza is quite delighted at the idea of staying with us this winter and Mother wants to stay some with us to, so I hope we can keep the house we are staying in now”.  I must assume that the “us” she is referring to is Robert and Maria, so if they already own the store and its living quarters, why is she concerned about being able to keep it?   If they acquired it in 1896 or 1897 and it had living quarters, as I am assuming, then they would be living in it and not in a separate building.  My best guess is that they only rented the building to start and that, as I originally thought, Maria and Mildred’s money was used only to pay for the inventory and anything else needed to open the store.  There likely was an existing store there that could have been sold to them while the owner retained the real estate to lease to them.  Even though the store never appeared to have been an overwhelming success, they did do well enough to eventually buy the building.  An alternate explanation could be that they did purchase the store real estate and open the business, but before the house was added to the right side of the store.  If this was the case it would have to have been completed in the next few months while Evelyn was still a very small child.  Hopefully someday someone will be able to check the county records to see when that occurred. (The original story takes a twist once it was recalled that Robert and Maria moved the store to a new location in 1902 when they purchased the final location from the estate of his uncle Cornelius Walter Mahone.)

This lends additional insight into Kinloch Mahone’s recollection that the store and what became the addition were once two buildings. He recounted that the addition was rolled on logs by oxen up next to the original building to make one combined building. This apparently could mean that it was done in the late 1800s as they were preparing for the store to open. (Kinloch was born in 1909. Did he see the buildings being combined or was this just a story he was told? Presumably we can assume now that it was after 1902 but not necessarily so since they had lived in the community for years) You can look at the photo here and see that the windows and the siding are completely different styles . Evelyn was born in 1896, a year after they married, and so she is presumably the baby hiding in the old store photo of the first store to the right. Kinloch would not have been alive to see the feat of moving the structure and Evelyn would not have remembered it, but the story was likely retold many times. If my identifications are correct, then after Evelyn’s birth all the other children of Robert Mahone were born in that building. I had thought the family had gathered to celebrate the opening of the store but now I realize that it may have been a housewarming as well. Alexander, who I think is the large man shown standing beside the seated Susan, died in April 1902, but he was able to help Robert with the store for about six years. The original structure was apparently built to be a store and there were a few in Massies Mill at the time. Perhaps this was one the Alexander worked in.

There are several photos of Susan B. Mahone at this building in her last years and after the death of her husband, so it appears that she had moved into this home sometime after 1910 to live out her last years with Robert and Maria as Robert’s siblings had moved to Lynchburg. I may still not know which building my grandmother was born in but having a better understanding of the Mahone home that our family remembers so fondly is much more valuable.