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The Ritchie House was built in 1706, by a member of the Merriwether family, in Essex County Virginia. It was the home of Archibald Ritchie, Archibald Ritchie, Jr. and the Birthplace of Thomas Ritchie who was the founder and editor of the Richmond Enquirer. The Enquirer was a very important newspaper during the antebellum, civil war and post civil war periods in Virginia and throughout the South.
The Ritchie House was also the boyhood home of my late father-in-law, William Dandridge Andrews. My husband William Forrest Andrews III was also raised in the beautiful Ritchie House. The original paneling from two rooms at the Ritchie House are now permanent exhibits at the Winterthur Museum.
It was a great honor to be selected for this project, because of the prestigious location but also the challenge of the job, as well as the legacy of leaving an enduring pictorial history of Essex County and the families the mural was built around.
Photographs simply cannot convey the scale, the feeling or the presence of the actual mural, but they can give you an incomplete glimpse.
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| The Ritchie House Mural in the Law Offices of Dillard and Katona, Prince Street, Tappahannock is 43' Long and was completed in the second quarter of 2006. This mural has been seen by many people in person and in print. As a result, I have received many wonderful inquiries, notes, emails and phone calls from people who have seen the mural, in person and have been so profoundly affected by it. As you stand in the hallway, near the conference room, the mural's positioning and power of persuasion, beckons you to come in and travel back in time, to Essex County and Tappahannock around 1760. |
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