BY CLINT SCHEMMER
THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Ditchley, one of the Northern Neck’s most storied homes, will soon have a new owner.

A Jacksonville, Fla., court has ordered that the Colonial house near Kilmarnock, seat of the first Lee of Virginia, be transferred to the Alfred I. duPont Foundation by March 22.

The transfer will fulfill the final wishes of the late Jessie Ball duPont, the Lancaster County native who purchased it with her husband, Alfred I. duPont, in 1932, according to a statement this week from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.
Jessie duPont, who died in 1970, was Ditchley’s last permanent resident, the
fund said. All of her furnishings remain in the house.

Through her last will and testament, she created the Ditchley Trust to maintain the 5,576-square-foot house and its 161 acres for lifetime use by family members she specified, the fund said. The property occupies a small neck of land on the Chesapeake Bay at Northumberland County’s eastern tip.

Born Jessie Dew Ball, she was an educator in Virginia and California who met the Delaware industrialist on one of his duck-hunting trips to the peninsula—of which her girlhood home, Ball’s Neck, is part. They corresponded for 20-plus years, and married in 1921.

Jessie duPont never forgot her Virginia roots, her interest in American history or her belief in education’s transformative power, according to a 1985 monograph. Her family, the Balls, was one of the state’s most prominent; George Washington’s mother, Mary, was a relative.

Jessie duPont was instrumental in restoring Robert E. Lee’s birthplace in Westmoreland County, and served on the historic site’s board of regents.
“She was sort of an icon in the Northern Neck,” said Jim Schepmoes, spokesman for Stratford Hall. “She supported a lot of Northern Neck organizations through her foundation.”

The Jessie Ball duPont Fund financed and endowed Stratford’s research library, now named in her honor. The fund, as well as the foundation she set up and named for her husband, are headquartered in Jacksonville, where she lived for a time. The Fourth Circuit Court there has jurisdiction over her will.

After Jessie and Alfred married, she pined for a place in the Northern Neck. They bought Ditchley for $18,000 in 1932. She had grown up in Cressfield, across Dividing Creek from the 1765 Georgian-style brick mansion, the fund said.

A 1935 Richmond Times– Dispatch article called Ditchley “one of the show places of Northumberland County,” noting that its “old kitchen has a fireplace that would readily roast an ox.”

The property encompasses the Lee–Ball family cemetery, which includes the  grave of Hancock Lee. He was the grandson of family progenitor Richard Lee of Cobbs Hall, who acquired the site in 1647. Forty years later, that original house succumbed to fire

Kendall Lee, Richard’s great-grandson, built Ditchley and named it after a Lee estate near Oxford, England.

Soon after purchasing the property, Jessie duPont wrote her cousin, “Am eager to have as many members of my family enjoy Ditchley as possible.” After Alfred’s death in 1935, she used it as a summer home and family gathering spot, the fund said.

The Ditchley Trust had managed the property since Jessie duPont’s death for her family members’ use. Circuit Judge Peter Dearing’s order will disband the trust and transfer the house and land to the grant-making foundation that Jessie duPont set up and named for her late husband, the fund said.
Dearing mediated a settlement among the trust, the foundation and family beneficiaries.

Jessie duPont’s will stipulated that the balance of the Ditchley Trust would be left to the foundation after her last beneficiary died. The trustees, long challenged by rising repair and maintenance costs, sought the court’s guidance last year on trying to carry out her wishes, the fund said.
In the fall of 2010, they declared the house—with its deteriorating heating system—to be uninhabitable.

“Including taxes, insurance and maintenance, the costs of Ditchley were rapidly consuming the balance of the endowment,” the fund said. “It was estimated that funds would be exhausted in less than five years.”

Between 1977 and 1982, to raise money for repairs, the trust weighed borrowing money from banks, creating a charitable foundation or contracting with a historical society to manage the site.

“None of these options proved worthy,” the fund said.

Clint Schemmer: 540/368-5029
cschemmer@freelancestar.com

JESSIE BALL duPONT:

Jessie Ball duPont spent some of her happiest moments at Stratford Hall, close friends said. She and her fellow directors, whom she called “Stratties,” raised many thou sands of dollars in the depths of the Great Depression to save the Lee family home.

There were no hotels near Stratford where they could stay, so the ladies—hailing from all 50 states—built log cabins, heated by stoves or fireplaces, for their semiannual meetings.

One account of duPont’s contributions says of those days:

“Miss Jessie called hers ‘Owl’s Roost’ because of the late hours that she kept. There, when the business of the day was finished, she and her cabin mate, Mrs. Granville Gray Valentine of Richmond, would entertain the other members of the board. Mrs. duPont was a born mimic and her stories were told with professional skill. New directors were asked to perform as a sort of initiation, and many a neophyte Strattie wished herself safely back at home rather than having to follow such an act as Miss Jessie’s.

“In 1935 Stratford, beautifully restored, was officially dedicat ed to the public, its mortgage paid off.

“At Stratford, as in every other endeavor touched by her gen erosity, her vision for its role in human enlightenment, par ticularly that of the young, was large.

“In 1950, she wrote to a friend, ‘Though the first desire in the mind of all Southerners is that there should be a lasting, great memorial to General Lee, I have always felt that there are also other compelling reasons why Stratford should be pre served. Being operated as a living Colonial plantation, it is one of the few places in the country which can teach the present and future generations of youngsters the self-con tained way of life adopted by the Fathers of our Country.’”

—The Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, Stratford, Virginia