First in a two-part series
Eva Burton Leaf was born on Nov. 27, 1880 to Lucy and Columbus “Lum” Burton. At some point in time, Eva’s daughter Elizabeth Leaf wrote a short unpublished history of Eva’s life that speaks to cultural changes that have occurred from then until now in Rivah Country.
“My mother must have been a chubby baby, a roly-poly, laughing little girl, with Hackney coloring — dark hair, hazel eyes and olive skin tone,” she wrote.
Lum was a Civil War veteran from Gloucester County. He married Lucy Hackney from Hackneyville, which is today the Middlesex County community known as Remlik (in the flats.) Eva evidently got many of her physical traits from her Hackney heritage.
Lum and Lucy established Burton House, a boarding house on Watling Street in Urbanna just up the street from Burton’s Steamboat Wharf, owned and operated by Lum. They built a large home near the wharf to accommodate their family and to take in boarders arriving to town via steamboat.
Eva was home schooled by an aunt who came to live at Burton House and was later sent to Lancaster County for secondary schooling. While at the school hardly a week, Eva “became miserably homesick and she was promptly returned and immediately took her place in the Burton House kitchen and started to develop her culinary ability, delicacies of supreme delight to the palate: oyster pie, banana cream pie with paper-thin crusts, minnie-ha-ha cake made from white frosting with nuts and raisins, rolls as light as a cloud, and her favorites were chocolate fudge, taffy and sea-foam candy. She gloried in rich food and became more and more buxom as time went on. Most of her life she weighted in at more than 200 pounds.
“She was naturally talented in music — played the guitar without notes or lessons and she could sing in both alto and soprano ranges. Evenings at Burton house were joyous occasions. Musicians and singers would gather under the old trees where blinking lights of fireflies rose and fell to the rhythm of the lapping tides on Urbanna Creek.
“Eva had a friend, Dugan, from Rosegill (across the creek) who played the violin which joined with the talents of the Burtons created music so pure and true in tone as to flutter the heart and stir the soul,” wrote Elizabeth.
“Then one day the steamer unloaded Mr. Leaf, a Spanish American war veteran, who had lost a leg in the Philippines. He was doubly damned because he was a Yankee and an Episcopalian,” she wrote.
Lum and Lucy were devoted members of Urbanna Methodist Church-South. “Both Methodist and the Baptists united in the certainty that Episcopalians were headed straight to hell because they danced, played cards and drank bourbon and other fine liquors.”
“But somehow in the magic of the summerhouse (on the Burton House lawn) Eva and Mr. Leaf developed an inconceivable attachment.”
(The second and final part of this series will appear in the fall edition of the Rivah. Burton House on Watling Street in Urbanna caught on fire and burned to the ground on Jan. 6, 2018.)
