Founder

Elizabeth Rust Williams, Donor of Clermont

“The past is never over” as Jacques Le Goff the French medieval historian says, in view of its continuing reconstruction and ever-renewed representation, and in fact it is very present, known and unknown, in each of our lives. The life of Elizabeth Rust Williams (1945-2004) illustrates this point just as well as the active and visible presence of the past in the cultural landscape of Clermont Farm, and in what she, her family, and ourselves have written (and “forgotten” or discarded) about the history of the place, which her family owned for 185 years. She came from a family that was extremely conscious of its history and that of its extended kin, as well as of the places in which they lived. Connecting with history through the portal of Clermont can be in part about connecting with Elizabeth’s story.
While Elizabeth Williams had no children, she decided that it would be the citizens of Virginia, and more particularly, the people of Clarke County, Virginia, who would be her heirs. At her death in 2004 at age 59 she bequeathed her 360-acre 18th century homestead to the citizens of the Commonwealth via the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR), believing that the gift, valued at $10 million and accepted by Act of the General Assembly in 2005, would provide the best long-term protection and study potential for the entire cultural landscape whose human history runs back beyond European immigration to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730’s (and forced relocation of enslaved Africans) to at least the Early Archaic period (8,000-6,500 BCE) or earlier.
On the other hand, she was ahead of her time in believing that the sustainability of most historic sites depends in large part on their integration with and value to the local community. To represent this local interest and to give it standing and a distinct role in the farm's future under state ownership, she created what became the non-profit Clermont Foundation, governed by a dozen citizens from the region, to whom she bequeathed all her other assets, to fund and manage the site in partnership with VDHR.
Elizabeth was born on June 19, 1945, an only child to a lawyer father (Edward McCormick Williams, 1903-1981) whose family had bought the farm in 1819 and to a mother (Caroline Caverly Rust, 1907-1981) who came from a prominent family in next-door Loudoun County, both from Scots-Irish and English backgrounds.   She had a traditional elite education, starting at Powhatan, a private K-8 school with classmates from the leading families in the county, including Drew Gilpin Faust (southern historian, president of Harvard) and then boarding school at Madeira in 1960. While her parents had conventional views, these included education for women.
Before going to school, she was taught how to read by an elderly cousin, Rose Mortimer Ellzey MacDonald (1871-1953). Rose herself was a model for Elizabeth, who brought the past into Elizabeth’s present. Elizabeth guarded all her life the silk crazy-quilt given to her by Rose, and made by her while traveling in Europe as a child with her father, the US Fisheries Commissioner in the Cleveland Administration. Rose MacDonald was a (single until married at 75) woman who as a child was a friend (and later biographer) of Mrs. Robert E. Lee, was educated at Shepherd College and William and Mary, who catalogued the Fearing Collection on Fish Culture at Harvard and fifty years of publications of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, administered Clarke County’s rural schools and invented the first hot lunch program there as a teaching device for girls, was an antiquarian and collector, wrote histories and public school textbooks, was a friend of Governor Harry S. Byrd Sr. (whose home was in Clarke County), was appointed the County’s first Juvenile and Domestic Relations judge (without a law degree) and became in 1930 the first female member of the Virginia State Board of Education, serving until her death in 1953.
While Elizabeth Williams was the great-grand-daughter of a family who a hundred years earlier in 1860 had enslaved 28 Africans on Clermont, as a young adult she faced times almost as socially tumultuous as her great-grandparents did: a country divided over the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the sexual revolution and introduction of birth control pills, the Women's movement, etc. She graduated from George Washington University with a degree in journalism in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive in the war in Vietnam, student protests around the world, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June. She became a reporter and free-lance journalist for the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Daily News, spending much of the next ten years in Philadelphia as an investigative and features reporter.
She married back in Clarke County in 1979 but the marriage did not work out. Not following the life script of her ancestors in marriage and children, she went to law school, an alternative previously limited to a long line of men in her family.    Her father Edward McCormick Williams had been Clarke County’s longest serving Commonwealth’s Attorney (1936-72), her cousin Province McCormick the second longest (1840-1865) and another, Marshall McCormick, from 1871-1880, while yet another, Francis McCormick, served as the County’s Presiding Justice from 1856-1860. She graduated from American University with a J.D. in 1981 and returned to Berryville. She became one of the first two women (along with Mary Ellen Kerr Hobert) admitted to the County Bar, developed her own successful rural practice with both black and white clients, (with many of whom she bartered services), and became the first female judge (substitute J&DR) of the 26th Virginia Circuit Court. She died in office as Commissioner of Accounts and Commissioner in Chancery for Clarke County.
She received accolades from her peers (President of the Clarke Bar 1983-88, Outstanding Woman Attorney of Virginia 1986, Exceptional Pro Bono Service 1993). She was a hunter and gave an annual hunter’s dinner for the people who volunteered help with the farming in exchange for hunting rights. She loved her farm and its animals, as well as her many companion dogs and tuxedo cats.
She turned her writing skills to history, organizing the family’s 185 years of archives at Clermont and writing a history of the farm beginning with its survey by George Washington in 1750, describing the four families who subsequently owned it, and recognizing that for a 110-year period it was built and financed by the enslaved labor of African Americans. This research and history (hampered only by an older cousin’s deliberate destruction in the late 1950’s of all family records about the purchase, use, and lives of enslaved workers on the farm), as much as Elizabeth’s professional accomplishments, would have pleased her historian cousin Rose MacDonald.
Elizabeth Williams was a highly intelligent woman of very forthright views, not "one of the boys" nor "hail fellow well met" but a loyal friend, regarded by some as rather eccentric, always the only-child she was born as. She had acerbic relationships with town and county officials and others regarding anything she thought might result in intrusion or development of Clermont’s historic agricultural landscape. At 59 she bravely faced an early, unpleasant death (July 8, 2004) from cancer, and accomplished in its face the permanent protection and adaptation to a new life for public benefit of the landscape and buildings she and her family had loved so long,