On October 7, 2006, John Broughton, President of the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, Inc., placed a granite marker at the flagpole to honor Erie and Betty Perry that day. Here is what he said.
“It is indeed an honor and privilege for me to deliver these remarks as we honor the Perry Family with the first placement of a polished granite marker here at the main flagpole of Laurel Hill. This marker is placed in recognition of the many contributions by this family, not only to the formative years of the Trust, but to its continuation and indeed to its survival. Now, if you will permit me a small amount of humor to introduce the theme of my remarks, I would like to relate this short anecdote. Many of you, I am sure, recall the name of Rudyard Kipling, the famous English author of such works as Gunga Din, The Road to Mandalay and many, many more tales. Well, the story goes that it was circulated throughout London that Kipling was paid a shilling for every word that he wrote. So, a group of enterprising students at Oxford sent Mr. Kipling a letter containing a shilling and asked that he send them one of his words. The unexpected reply came back with one word, ‘Thanks.’
And that one word ‘Thanks’ is the reason we are gathered here today. Thanks to a family whose vision, dedication, and perseverance in the cause of insuring that this historic property known as Laurel Hill would never be desecrated by the presence of a private home on this lovely knoll, or heaven forbid a housing development, is at long last being recognized.
Every organization, be it the largest corporate entity or the smallest civic group, has to undergo a beginning stage. This stage of its life cycle is arguably its most important. For it is at this stage that the seeds are sown that more often than not portend success or failure for an embryonic enterprise. It was no different for the Trust that exists today. At the outset, I realized that my words cannot do justice to this subject, that it is an impossible task to adequately express here today what the contributions of this family have meant to both the Trust and to Laurel Hill itself. Perhaps the best thing I can do is to illuminate some of the sacrifices they made, to replay a few of the highlights of the important events in which they were instrumental here at Laurel Hill and some of their “digging in the dirt” physical accomplishments.
Now the difficult task before me is to try to condense what the Perry Family has meant to Laurel Hill. I have to ask that you turn the pages back to some thirty seven years ago to see a nine year old boy riding on the road to Mount Airy with his mother who sees the historical marker beside the road amongst the brush that says, ‘Stuart’s Birthplace.’ He wonders what it is all about. It was the point, that the family and Laurel Hill begin its journey together. For only a mother’s love and desire to support her son’s new found interest in history in general and James Stuart in particular could have stoked the fire that has burned to this day. Of one thing there can be no doubt that the contributions her son was to make in the years yet to come to save the Laurel Hill Farm from falling into private hands were a direct result of her willing sacrifice of time, money and sometimes great inconvenience to insure that his interest was fostered and nurtured throughout adolescence. George and Icy Bowman Brown, the then owners of the present day Laurel Hill were, I am sure, surprised to see this mother and son standing at their front door a little ill at ease. As the questions tumbled out of this little boy, George Brown being a quintessential grandfatherly type took him under his wing and spent endless days after that first meeting to walk over every nook and cranny of Laurel Hill with him and answered the endless questions that the imagination of a little boy engendered. As the years passed this little boy who had roamed Laurel Hill imagining that he was the reincarnation of a small James Stuart looking for a hornet’s nest to knock down, and riding bareback furiously over the hills, finished the education that Patrick County could provide. I am sure to his mother’s relief he matriculated at VPI majoring in history and studied under the renowned Civil War Professor James I. Robertson, Jr.
When the year 1990 arrived, it became apparent that the health of both George and Icy Bowman Brown was failing, and that Laurel Hill would soon be for sale. Thomas, along with other members of the Stuart Civil War Round Table set about to form an organization to raise the necessary funds to purchase Laurel Hill and thus save this valuable piece of historic property for future generations to see and enjoy. This was an incredibly difficult undertaking involving almost every conceivable method fund raising during which time it is difficult to adequately portray the involvement of Mr. and Mrs. Perry who gave unselfishly of their time, money and just plain hard work to reach the seemingly unreachable goal of raising nearly seventy five thousand dollars. But they did. And the Trust was born.
In those early years funds were short, exhaustion had set in from months of back breaking travel in fundraisers and it seemed that the mountain had been climbed, and all the climbers were prostrate. Not so the Perrys. For now, when it was needed most Erie and Betty Perry kicked into high gear. They provided gravel for what was then euphemistically called a road, Mrs. Perry designed and planted a flower garden which graces the entrance to Laurel Hill to this day, and then in a moment of inspiration she planted the lovely forsythia bushes at the entrance whose yellow blooms herald the arrival of spring each year. In her words, Yellow for the cavalry.’ Her beautiful day lilies continue each year to brighten our scene as if they are there to remind us all of the lovely lady who planted them there. For these and contributions too numerous to mention we are gathered here today to place this memorial in honor of a family without whose generosity, time, and labor it is entirely possible that we would not have the ground to place it on. While the words “Thank You” seemingly are inadequate they are rendered from the hearts of all of us whose privilege it is today lead Laurel Hill into the future.
So, in closing, let me say the sobriquet “First Lady of Laurel Hill” rests rightly on the mantle of Betty Hobbs Perry.”
My mother passed away on February 28, 2021. She was born outside Augusta, Georgia, on May 4, 1932, to Floyd Thomas and Elizabeth Prescott Hobbs, who preceded her in death along with a sister, Kathryn, and brother, Ed, and her husband of 63 years, Erie Meredith Perry. Betty was a member of Haymore Baptist Church in Mount Airy. She came to Patrick County in 1959 with her educator husband. She worked for Dr. A. K. Tulliddge in Claudville before beginning a forty plus year career at Quality Mills/Cross Creek Apparel. She worked at Georgia-Pacific in Augusta for a decade before meeting Perry, who was stationed at Fort Gordon in the Signal Corps of the U. S. Army. They were married in 1957.
My mother got the idea to plant the forsythia at J. E. B. Stuart’s Birthplace from a John Wayne movie, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. “Yellow for the cavalry,” she would say, noting J. E. B. Stuart’s role as a cavalryman in our nation’s history. Those plants blooming all over Laurel Hill came to Ararat from Augusta, Georgia, where my maternal grandfather, Floyd Thomas Hobbs, transplanted them and brought the flowers to his youngest daughter, whom he called “Doodely.” He and my grandmother, Elizabeth Prescott Hobbs, lived at 1815 Fenwick Street, and his house was a blaze of color, whether it was azaleas, roses, or forsythia. During World War II, he helped build ships in Savannah and worked as a mechanic afterward, but he had a green thumb. My mother later transplanted the forsythia to Laurel Hill. She cared for the flowers there until dementia that almost every woman in her family got, starting around the age of eighty, took her ability to care for the flowers. She grew up a few miles from the Augusta National Golf Club and went to The Masters for free while working at Georgia-Pacific. Masters week was special in her house, and it was for me this week when I saw the forsythia blooming at the place she helped to save: Laurel Hill.
