Wedding of J.E.B. Stuart’s daughter was posh event

The buildings and grounds of the Virginia Female Institute were festooned with flowers and banners for the highlight of the 1887 social season in Staunton – the marriage of Virginia Pelham Stuart, daughter of the colorful Confederate cavalry leader, Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, to Robert Page Waller of Norfolk

Virginia’s mother was Flora Cooke Stuart, headmistress of the school that would later become Stuart Hall, and hostess for the ceremony. She had assumed control of the school in 1880. Her daughter, who attended the institute, helped found its honor and library service societies.

Virginia Stuart, born in 1863 in Lynchburg, was an infant when her famous father was mortally wounded the following year at Yellow Tavern, and knew him only from stories told by her mother and the men who had fought under him. Many of those old veterans were in attendance in Staunton that day; those who could not come sent presents and messages.

Gifts were there from former Confederate generals Jubal Early, Custis Lee, Eppa Hunton and Philip Cook, and members of the Stuart Horse Guard of Richmond. A special message was held in reserve for the conclusion of the ceremony.

The Rev. Walter Q. Hullihen, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church and a former member of Stuart’s staff during the war, officiated. The groom’s brother, a lieutenant in the navy, stood with young Waller in full dress uniform.

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The Macon (Georgia) Telegraph was just one of many newspapers that both detailed the wedding and wrote effusively of her cavalryman father:

"As she stood under her bridal veil at Staunton, she heard her full maiden name for the last time – Virginia, for the state he loved so well; Pelham, for the boy artillerist who won praise on the field of battle from the immortal Lee, and who followed her illustrious father, and Stuart, over whose memory the story writer and historian love to linger.

"Virginia Pelham Stuart," the newspaper continued. "It seems a pity to have swallowed up such a heritage even in honorable matrimony."

As the ceremony ended, Hullihen produced the special message that had arrived earlier that day. It was a message of congratulations from Count Heros von Borcke, the Prussian cavalryman who had served with J.E.B. Stuart and become one of his closest confidants. Von Borcke was living in retirement his Rhenish castle where, until his death in 1895 from wounds he had received in the Civil War, he proudly flew the Confederate flag.

Virginia Pelham Stuart Waller lived with her husband in the Norfolk suburb of Ghent, where they had three children: Matthew Page Waller, Virginia Stuart Waller and Flora Stuart Waller.

In September 1898, soon after giving birth to her last child, Virginia fell seriously ill and was attended at her bedside by her mother. She died Sept. 9, 1898, just a month shy of her 35th birthday. Virginia’s mother, who would retire as headmistress of Virginia Female Institute in 1899, assumed the responsibility of raising her grandchildren.

One of those grandchildren, Virginia Stuart Waller (Davis), would graduate from the institute in 1917. In 1969, she donated to the school the battle flag her grandmother had hand-sewn for J.E.B. Stuart. In 2000, the school’s headmaster, Kevin Fox, sold the flag to a private collector. Five years later the flag fetched nearly $1 million at an auction.

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