Edwina Mason: Remembering Millwood

Edwina Mason: Remembering Millwood

By Linda Roberts

Just back from a trip to Hawaii with friends, Edwina Mason invited a visitor into her photo-filled living room one recent hot summer day to talk about growing up in the Clarke County village of Millwood. Mason, now 84, has vivid memories of the tiny town and what it was like for a Black youngster in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“I was born in a four-room log cabin— two rooms down and two rooms up,” Mason said. “And I was the third in a family of nine children…six girls and three boys.”

Mason was born at home in 1937 with a mid-wife assisting her mother with the birth. “I’ve lost track of how many of the others who were also born at home,” she added.

Edwina Mason looks at a family history researched and complied by her first cousin, George Holmes, Jr. Her family members are descendants of Nathaniel Carter, a slave who worked at the Carter Hall plantation at Millwood. The village of Millwood was founded to serve the plantation’s needs.

Photo by Linda Roberts

Mason recalled the Millwood of her youth as a “tight knit little community where everyone knew everyone.” The small log cabin eventually burned, but by that time her family had already relocated to larger quarters in the heart of the village.

“I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, Mary Carter Holmes, who worked at Powhatan estate (which later became Powhatan School) doing domestic work,” she said.. Mason also did baby-sitting and helped her mother, Mary Mason, who served at dinner parties in the neighborhood.

Black children in grades one through six attended a two-room school in what is now often referred to as the Millwood community center. After sixth grade, they took a school bus to Johnson & Williams School in Berryville where Mason graduated from high school in 1954.

“I was 16 when I graduated as I skipped a grade,” she said. “I never went to an integrated school.”

In her early childhood, Mason said, Black and White kids “all played together, but as we got older we stopped…I guess we just knew it was time.”

Not allowed to go to the roller rink, the Black children still skated, but in the street. They also went swimming, but not at a pool. The creek that ran through the village was their option on hot summer days.

Carter Hall, a historic estate adjoining the village, also provided excellent water for drinking from a spring on the property. Black children played there and used their wagons to haul drinking water home in jugs.

While Millwood has one store now, the popular Locke Store. When Mason was growing up there were three general stores in the village and one belonged to her uncle, George Holmes. It was a favorite spot to visit for Mason and her brothers and sisters who eagerly sought out the store’s penny candy selection.

The Black children all attended Sunday School at St. Simon, known to many local residents as Bishop’s Chapel at Christ Episcopal Church. Mason, who moved to Berryville in 1980, now attends St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in town and remembers years ago in Millwood when she attended Shiloh Baptist Church next to what is now the post office.

“I was a Baptist in the morning and an Episcopal in the afternoon,” Mason recalled.

Mason raised two children on her own and has seven grandchildren. She’s proud of her life as a single mother.

“I didn’t give up and I did what I had to do,” she added, including domestic work and employment as a teacher’s aid in Boyce and Berryville. In 1989, she car-pooled to a new job at the Navy Federal Credit Union in Vienna and retired in 2006.

Many older residents of Millwood Mason knew have passed on and “I’m the older generation now.” More than 40 years ago, she moved to Berryville to establish her own life and “be on my own.” She doesn’t go to Millwood much any more because it makes her sad. Still, if anyone asks about her home town, “I will always say I am a Millwoodian.”