Carry Me BACK A Country Ham and a Fancy Chandelier

Pamela Harriman on horseback by W. Nall, 1983

Pamela Harriman frequently rode with the Middleburg Hunt.

Photo by Janet Hitchen for The Middleburg Mystique © 2001

Carry Me BACK

A Country Ham and a Fancy Chandelier

By Jimmy Hatcher

I took a job with Governor and Mrs. Averell Harriman in 1974 after they bought Millicent West’s Willow Oaks where I’d been renting the stable. I rode as an amateur, but my friend Eve Fout showed me how to take a tax write-off for my horses.

Mrs. Harriman was the daughter of a master of fox hounds but hadn’t jumped since 1938, the year she married Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill. But the jumping came back and we started to hunt regularly.

The Harrimans’ first Christmas in Virginia was coming up and she wanted to know if I could offer any suggestions on making a planned hunt breakfast into an all-Virginia affair.

I told her my family had given me a Virginia country ham and she asked if I would get her one as well. I hadn’t yet told my parents about the Harrimans because we had been Harry Byrd Democrats until becoming Eisenhower Republicans.

But I called them in Richmond to see if they would get the Harrimans a ham. When I told mother about my job, I heard her tell father about it, and then heard him say, “My God that’s worse than Franklin Roosevelt.”

I brought the ham back after my Thanksgiving trip to Richmond and Mrs. Harriman was delighted to have it. The hunt breakfast was a lovely party encompassing both the living room and the dining room, which were usually separated by a folding partition.

The party was all sparkling in silver and white and there was a crystal chandelier over the dining room table and another one over the two small sofas in the living room.

I was sitting with Jane and Bruce Nichols on the sofas under that dazzling chandelier. Jane exclaimed she just had to have a chandelier just like the Harrimans for the house they were renting in Middleburg.

After Christmas, the Harrimans wintered in Barbados. When they came back in March, Jane Nichols was still pestering her husband about that chandelier. The week after they got back, Mrs. Harriman and I were slated to ride in the Middleburg Pair Race at Glenwood Park. I stopped by to chat and make plans.

Mrs. Harriman invited me in, and sitting on one of the sofas under that same chandelier was Sister Parish, the go-to interior decorator in America who had first decorated the White House living quarters for the Kennedys. We talked about her daughter, who had lived in Middleburg.

Then, with a toss of her head, Sister Parish looked up at the chandelier and exclaimed, “Pamela, this chandelier HAS to go. This is a country house and the chandelier is much too formal.”

Well, the chandelier then went to the governor’s mansion in Richmond, which was being done over for the new Democratic governor, Gerald Baliles. Then I went over to see Bruce Nichols and told him I thought he no longer needed to buy his wife a chandelier.