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BILLY DEW: An Influential Middleburg Architect
BILLY DEW: An Influential Middleburg Architect
By Denis Cotter
The renowned local architect, William Bland Dew, Jr. (19082000) – known to all simply as Billy Dew – started his practice in Middleburg in the late 1930s. Over the next sixty years –with a hiatus for World War II and its immediate aftermath – he would remain in Middleburg, designing many of the town’s significant buildings and many fine homes in the surrounding area.
Dew’s birthplace was 140 miles southwest of Middleburg at Sweet Briar College in Amherst County, Virginia. Founded in 1901, Sweet Briar remains a private women’s liberal arts college and Dew’s father, William Sr. was its first treasurer and business manager – a position he held for four decades until his death.
Dew’s mother Natalie was the sister of Nathaniel Manson, chair of the school’s first Board of Directors. William and Natalie had two children – Polly Carey, born the year the college opened its doors to students in 1906, and younger brother Billy, born eighteen months later.
A 1956 history of Sweet Briar captures an idyllic early cameo of the future architect:
“The entire Dew family was an addition to the zest and life of Sweet Briar. Mrs. Dew, who was Mr. Manson’s younger sister, was lovely, gracious, and beloved of everyone. She and her husband lived with laughter on their lips. They had two precious and very individual children, Polly Carey, a rosy blonde who just knew things naturally, and Billy who had started his career in art and architecture by the age of three when he used to stretch out on the floor of Miss Benedict’s office and draw, using paper and pencil bestowed by the president.”
At age 10, young Billy was sent to Virginia Episcopal, an all-boy boarding school fifteen miles away in Lynchburg. His father had decided that the rural, isolated, and overwhelmingly female environment at Sweet Briar was not best for the child’s education. At VES, Dew endured serious pneumonia and a bout with tuberculosis but recovered and often competed as an athlete.
Over one summer, he stayed for a week at the French neo-classical Nemours mansion and gardens in Wilmington, Delaware – one of the magnificent homes of industrialist Alfred DuPont. The awestruck Dew soaked in the details of the 52room house and its lavish grounds. There was even a bowling alley in the basement – a feature he would recreate in his design for the Middleburg Community Center decades later.
Dew entered the University of Virginia in 1926, where he became interested in art and seriously considered becoming an artist, much to his father’s chagrin. He graduated in 1930 with a Bachelors degree in architecture, a few months after the Great Depression had begun. There were virtually no jobs for newly graduated architects, so he worked as a carpenter’s helper in Lynchburg.
His sister married in February, 1932 and shortly afterwards, a college friend convinced him to go with him to Europe and study architecture by the “traveland-sketch” method. Dew was fortunate to have received a small inheritance that made the trip possible.
With his father’s additional financial assistance, he spent nearly three years in Europe, visiting France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Spain. He made drawings and watercolors of artistic and architectural masterpieces across the continent – a collection that became the initial portfolio of his abilities.
Coming home, Dew’s uncle Henry invited him to live in south Florida. After a stint as a hotel desk clerk, and as an architect for the Volk and Mass firm, he joined the prestigious Palm Beach architectural firm of Treanor and Fatio. Their wealthy society clients in Palm Beach were not suffering from the Depression and there was plenty of work.
Dew enjoyed the high-end projects, but the long hours were wearying, and the harsh Florida sunlight took a devastating toll on his eyesight. He fell quite ill from a tropical fever and was not sure he would work as an architect again. He returned to Sweet Briar to recuperate.
He soon recovered and started working at a high town, he found “a large, 18th century inn, then in great disrepair and closed. Its stonework, general look, and simple details, seemed just the right thing to go with the attractive, unspoiled old town.”
It was then called The Middleburg Inn. The building had been slated for demolition, but was purchased by three investors – William Stephenson, Jack Vietor, and George Garrett – intent on saving it as accommodation for the foxhunting set. They renamed it the Red Fox Inn and it became Dew’s first major Middleburg commission.
He was responsible for the inn’s complete redesign, remodeling, and restoration. He used the finest local craftsmen and his own extraordinary design skills to adapt the historic structure without sacrificing its original beauty. The English-style tavern sign that still hangs at the building’s corner of Washington and Madison Streets was designed and painted by Dew himself.
The Red Fox Inn had barely been restored when America entered World War II in 1942. Dew, then 33, applied for a commission in the U.S. Navy, but X-rays revealed spots on his lungs, a relic of his adolescent health problems, and his application was rejected. He worked instead at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., supporting Naval Intelligence.
His draftsmanship skills landed him in the Identification and Characteristics Section, where he made drawings from photographs to help identify enemy ships and planes. Later, he worked in an aircraft plant that made engines for B-29 bombers. He designed special carriers to transport engine parts within the plants.
After the war, Dew practiced for a short while in New York but ultimately returned to Middleburg. His first main project there was the 1948 Middleburg Community Center. This included not only the iconic stucco-and-limestone Federal style building, but also the entire grounds, including the swimming pool, playing field, and gardens.
Funded by the patrons of the MCC, he simultaneously designed the Marshall Street Community Center for black residents because the town, like the rest of Virginia, was still strictly segregated. Other designs included the current Atlantic Union Bank, his own office on Washington Street, and the ABC liquor store with its fanlight doorways emulating the arched doorways of the Middleburg Community Center.
Dew built a solid architectural practice for himself, wryly calling himself “a society architect.” He was licensed in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. and was a member of the American Institute of Architects. He designed commercial buildings in Leesburg and Hamilton and designed or remodeled many significant homes in Virginia and Washington. Local projects included Rockburn Farm in Marshall, Foxlease Farm in Upperville, and Fieldstone Farm in Purcellville.
In the late 1970s, Bill Turnure, a recently graduated architect from Notre Dame in search of employment, visited the American Institute of Architects office in Mclean. He picked up a small strip of paper with the words “William Dew, telephone number, Middleburg, Virginia.” This led to a productive conversation and Turnure came to Middleburg to work for Dew for eight years before setting out on a long career of his own.
Turnure, who retired to South Carolina several years ago, recalled that Dew purchased land in Middleburg just west of town to build a house for himself. He designed it down to the last detail, but he was never able to make the commitment to actually start construction.
Dew was a fixture of the Middleburg scene. Highly sociable, an enthusiastic dancer, avid tennis player and excellent company, he actively participated in the horse country lifestyle. His memoir recalled several romances throughout his life, though he never married.
A special highlight of Dew’s time in Middleburg came in 1998 with the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Community Center. Two years later, the building would serve as the location for his standing-room only memorial service.
Dew had been a regular diner for breakfast and lunch at the now-gone Coach Stop restaurant, a few yards from his office. “The Billy Dew breakfast” was on the menu in his honor – two poached eggs, orange juice, toast and marmalade, coffee. In Richmond, the General Assembly agreed to a joint resolution that noted with sadness the passing of “an influential architect and leading citizen of Middleburg.”
