Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman (18 January 1832–24 October 1908), preservationist, was born in Saline County, Missouri, and was the daughter of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851), writer, judge, and well-known advocate for states' rights, and his third wife, Lucy Ann Smith Tucker. She was christened Cynthia Smith Tucker, but her middle name was later changed to Beverley. The family moved to Williamsburg in 1834 when her father became law professor at the College of William and Mary. She briefly attended a Loudoun County boarding school but otherwise was educated at home and by her cousin Elizabeth Tucker Coalter Bryan in Gloucester County. On 8 July 1852 Tucker married Henry Augustine Washington, a professor at William and Mary and later editor of the nine-volume Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853–1854). They had two daughters, both of whom died young, before her husband's death on 28 February 1858 in Washington, D.C., of a gunshot wound through the eye.

On 29 October 1861 she married Williamsburg native Charles Washington Coleman, a surgeon in the Confederate army. During the Civil War, Coleman nursed injured soldiers and presided over a local sewing society at the college hospital, although by the spring of 1863 she had sought refuge in North Carolina. Afterward she returned to Williamsburg, where her husband practiced medicine. Coleman attempted to open a school for girls late in the 1860s, but her plans never advanced beyond lessons for a handful of day students. Part of the reason might have been her growing family. Between 1862 and 1874 the Colemans had four sons and two daughters, of whom one son was stillborn and one daughter died in childhood. Another son, Charles Washington Coleman (1862–1932), published poetry in such magazines as Century and surveyed "The Recent Movement in Southern Literature" for Harper's New Monthly Magazine in May 1887, and a third son, George Preston Coleman, served as state highway commissioner for nine years beginning in December 1913.

After the death of her younger daughter, Catharine Brooke Coleman, in September 1883, Coleman looked for a way to memorialize her. The following February she organized her daughter's friends into a benevolent association known as the Catharine Memorial Society. They made small items to sell for the benefit of Bruton Parish Church and gathered ivy and early daffodils for sale in New York City's flower markets. Coleman's eloquent fund-raising letters appeared in newspapers and the Southern Churchman. The group of children, spearheaded by Coleman and several other local women, pulled weeds and cleaned the crumbling tombstones in the church's graveyard. They also raised considerable sums of money to repair the gravestones, wall, and main building. After an escalating altercation with the rector about the use of their donations, Coleman transferred her focus from the church to other historic structures in Williamsburg.

Concerned about what she perceived as a moral crisis in the United States as modern society appeared to abandon its cultural traditions, Coleman became interested in creating a women's historical association to protect the visible symbols of Virginia's illustrious past. In 1888 she met Mary Jeffery Galt, a Norfolk resident who was organizing a group to preserve the state's colonial structures. Coleman held the first official meeting of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (later Preservation Virginia) at her house on 4 January 1889, and the group received its charter on 13 February. Coleman became director of the Williamsburg chapter, known as the Colonial Capital Branch, and concentrated her efforts in that city, while Galt's Norfolk Branch focused on preserving Jamestown Island. The two formidable leaders did not get along, and the branches operated separately within the organization. To defuse tensions between the cofounders, Ellen Bernard Fowle Lee, the governor's wife, agreed to serve as the APVA's first president.

Coleman's ties to Virginia society through her friendships and familial connections helped the infant association thrive. In 1889 the APVA acquired the powder magazine in Williamsburg, from which the colony's last royal governor had removed the gunpowder in April 1775 in hopes of thwarting the Virginia patriots. The Colonial Capital Branch preserved the decaying structure and opened it as a small museum. The branch also raised funds to provide memorial tablets for various other Williamsburg structures. Coleman successfully obtained the donation to the APVA of the site of the colonial Capitol, of which only brick foundations remained. She served as branch director until her resignation in December 1899. She was a vice president of the APVA from 1889 until 1905, when she became an honorary vice president, and was the association's historian from 1898 to 1900. She also traveled around the state organizing other local chapters and making speeches. Recognized by the APVA as one of its most enthusiastic leaders, Coleman withdrew from her work as a result of poor health in the months before her death.

In 1892 Coleman became a charter member of the Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Virginia (later the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia). She served as the Virginia society's historian from 1893 to 1894 and again from 1895 to 1898 and was a vice president from 1904 to 1907. In her later years Coleman wrote vignettes of Virginia and southern history. None of her work seems to have been published, although her stipulation that her name be removed before any of her creations appeared in print makes identification difficult. Her second husband died on 15 September 1894. Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman died at her Williamsburg residence on 24 October 1908 and was buried in the graveyard at Bruton Parish Church, where the preservation impulse had first led her to work.

Sources Consulted:
Birth, marriage, and death dates in Coleman family Bible records (1820–1902), Accession 28205, Library of Virginia (LVA); Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, 16 July 1852; Marriage Register, Williamsburg (1861), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA; Coleman correspondence in several collections, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; biographical information, correspondence, and other materials in Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), Colonial Capitol Branch Records (1898–1980), Brown-Coalter-Tucker Papers (1839–1929), and Tucker-Coleman Papers, all Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.; APVA Yearbook (1896–1908); Janet C. Kimbrough, "The Early History of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities: A Personal Account," Virginia Cavalcade 30 (1980): 68–75; James M. Lindgren, "'Whatever Is Un-Virginian Is Wrong': The APVA's Sense of the Old Dominion," Virginia Cavalcade 38 (1989): 112–123; Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (1993), including portrait on 138; Will Molineux, "The Memory of a Little Girl and Williamsburg's Restoration," Colonial Williamsburg 23 (spring 2001): 26–35; Carol Kettenburg Dubbs, Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War (2002), portrait on 217; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 24 Oct. 1908, Richmond Times Dispatch, 25 Oct. 1908, and Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, 31 Oct. 1908.

Image courtesy of Special Collections, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Emma L. Powers.

How to cite this page:
Emma L. Powers,"Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman (1832–1908)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Coleman_Cynthia_B_T, accessed [today's date]).

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