James Taylor Ellyson (20 May 1847–18 March 1919), lieutenant governor of Virginia and Confederate veterans' and memorial associations leader, was born in Richmond and was the son of Elizabeth Pinkney Barns (or Barnes) Ellyson and Henry Keeling Ellyson, a printer and later a longtime corresponding secretary of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. J. Taylor Ellyson, as he was known, attended Richmond schools and Hampden-Sydney College before enlisting in Confederate service on 19 April 1864. He joined Company K of the 1st Regiment Virginia Artillery (later the 2d Company, Richmond Howitzers) and served on detached duty from 31 October 1864 until 28 February 1865. He surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Ellyson attended Columbian College (later the George Washington University), in Washington, D.C., and Richmond College (later part of the University of Richmond) before undertaking studies in law, history and literature, and moral and natural philosophy at the University of Virginia during the 1867–1868 and 1868–1869 academic years. In 1869 he began working as a stationery- and bookseller in Richmond. Ellyson married Lora Effie Hotchkiss on 2 December 1869 in Albemarle County. They had one daughter, who married Frank Thomas Crump, longtime treasurer of the Baptist General Association of Virginia.
Baptist Lay Leader
Like his father and his younger brother William Ellyson, both of whom were Baptist lay leaders, Ellyson was a dedicated Baptist. He served as corresponding secretary of the Virginia Baptist Education Board from 1874 until his death. He won election three times as president of the Baptist General Association of Virginia, in 1890, 1891, and 1892, and once as a vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, in 1895. Ellyson worked as the business manager of the Religious Herald from 1880 until 1888, when he and a partner bought a half-interest in the paper. He subsequently served until January 1893 as secretary and treasurer of the Religious Herald Company, which published the Baptist organ.
Political Career Begins
Beginning in 1878 Ellyson represented Monroe Ward on Richmond's common council, of which he served as president from 1882 to 1885. He also chaired the Richmond school board from 1884 until 1900. Ellyson was elected in 1885 to represent the city of Richmond and Henrico County in the Senate of Virginia. During his four-year term, he sat on the Committees on Roads and Internal Navigation, on County, City, and Town Organizations (as chair during the 1887–1888 session), and on the Library (as chair during the 1885–1886 and 1887 sessions). Returning to local politics, in 1888 he began the first of three two-year terms as mayor of Richmond, an office his father had held briefly in 1870.
Ellyson had begun working with local Democratic Party committees and clubs at least by 1878. After Basil Brown Gordon, the state Democratic Committee chair, became ill in 1890, Ellyson was elected to that position. When Gordon recovered in 1892, Ellyson resigned, only to return in 1893 when Gordon left the office permanently. Ellyson remained chair until 1916 and also was Virginia's member on the Democratic National Committee from 1896 to 1900 and again from 1903 to 1916. He sought the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1897, but support for free silver and general sentiment preferring a candidate not from Richmond led to victory for James Hoge Tyler.
Following his defeat, Ellyson devoted time to business pursuits. He served as president of the Old Dominion Building and Loan Association and sat on the boards of the Allegheny Coal Land Company, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, the Virginia and West Virginia Mineral and Timber Association, and the Washington Southern Railway Company. He sat on the board of trustees of Richmond College from 1891 to 1919 (as president from 1908 to 1919) and chaired the committee that laid out the new campus located west of downtown Richmond during the 1910s.
Confederate Memorial Associations
Ellyson displayed devotion in memorializing the Confederacy and belonged to many veterans' organizations, including the Pegram Battalion Association; the Richmond Howitzer Association; R. E. Lee Camp No. 1, Confederate Veterans; and the George E. Pickett Camp, Confederate Veterans. As president of the Confederate Memorial Association from 1906 to 1919, he helped in the construction of Battle Abbey (the Confederate Memorial Institute), in Richmond; he also conceived of, secured the funding for, and commissioned its murals celebrating the Confederacy. (The artist ultimately paid tribute to Ellyson's support by painting his face on the figure of an artilleryman struggling to position a cannon in the snow.) While Richmond's mayor, Ellyson assisted in preserving the former White House of the Confederacy, which was then being used as a school and was slated to be torn down, by overseeing its transfer to the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, of which his wife was a member.
Two years after Jefferson Davis died, Ellyson traveled to New York with a delegation to convince Varina Howell Davis to have the former Confederate president's remains moved from New Orleans to Richmond. Because of their efforts, she chose Richmond over other cities, and in 1893 Davis was reinterred at Hollywood Cemetery. Ellyson was a founder in 1889, incorporator in 1890, and president of the Jefferson Davis Monument Association, which later joined with the United Confederate Veterans to raise money for a Richmond monument honoring Davis. Ellyson helped secure funds for other memorials in Richmond, including the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument. He also served as a governor of the Jamestown Exposition Company, which oversaw the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition, and secured funding from the financier Thomas Fortune Ryan for the reproduction of paintings published in The London Company of Virginia: A Brief Account of Its Transactions in Colonizing Virginia (1908). His organization activity was ably matched by that of his wife, a longtime president of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (later Preservation Virginia).
Lieutenant Governor
Although he had initially declared himself uninterested in the office, Ellyson garnered 64.5 percent of the vote and defeated four other candidates in 1905 to win election to the first of three consecutive terms as lieutenant governor of Virginia. In 1914 he cast the deciding vote in the Senate of Virginia in favor of an enabling act calling for a statewide referendum on the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The referendum that September brought statewide Prohibition to Virginia in 1916. Both Ellyson, who had the backing of the state Democratic Party leadership, and Attorney General John Garland Pollard sought the gubernatorial nomination in 1917, but they lost in the primary to Westmoreland Delaware Davis, who had endorsed local option in the contentious issue of prohibition of alcohol. After a period of ill health, James Taylor Ellyson died at his Richmond home on 18 March 1919 from heart disease. One obituary headline declared him the "best known man in the state" for his longtime political, Baptist, and Confederate memorial activities. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Louis H. Manarin, Officers of the Senate of Virginia, 1776–1996 (1997), 132–135 (portrait on 132), Woodford B. Hackley, Faces on the Wall: Brief Sketches of the Men and Women Whose Portraits and Busts Were on the Campus of the University of Richmond in 1955 (1972), 29–30, and William Wirt Henry and Ainsworth R. Spofford, Eminent and Representative Men of Virginia and the District of Columbia of the Nineteenth Century (1893), 438–440; passport application (with self-reported birth date and birthplace), 26 July 1899, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, and Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, both in National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marriage Register, Albemarle Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 3 Dec. 1869; Richmond Dispatch, 6 July 1890; Harrisonburg Rockingham Register, 30 Oct. 1891; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 Mar. 1905; Ellyson correspondence in Papers of James Taylor Ellyson, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., in Ellyson-Hotchkiss Family Collection and Ellyson Scrapbooks, both Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va., and in various collections at Library of Virginia and Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; William M. S. Rasmussen, "Making the Confederate Murals: Studies by Charles Hoffbauer," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 (1993): 455; Death Certificate, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 18 Mar. 1919 (quotation), Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 Mar. 1919, and Danville Register, 20 Mar. 1919; memorials in Richmond News Leader, 19, 21 Mar. 1919, Religious Herald, 27 Mar. 1919, and Confederate Veteran 27 (June 1919): 226.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia, State Art Collection.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Peter C. Luebke.
How to cite this page:
Peter C. Luebke,"James Taylor Ellyson (1847–1919)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Ellyson_James_Taylor, accessed [today's date]).
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