Yesterday’s post on the Cabell House is a fiber in an ongoing thread of an investigation to understand the earliest members who took part in the Virginia Glee Club. We know from the January 1871 issue of the Virginia University Magazine that “those gentlemen rooming at the Cabell House, and in that neighborhood, have made great efforts, and we understand tolerably successful ones, to form a Glee Club.” We seek now to understand who “those gentlemen” are.
But it’s hard going. The year 1871 predates Corks and Curls, and the 1870-1871 catalog doesn’t list student addresses. I’m still trying to figure out who was the proprietor of 852 West Main Street during that year; Ansel(e)m Brock died in the late 1850s and Pattie J. Daffan isn’t identified through the city directory there until 1902. But with luck we’ll turn up more evidence.