Mary Jeffery Galt (26 September 1844–30 June 1922), preservationist, was born in Norfolk and was the daughter of Mary Williams Ware Galt and William Richard Galt. She grew up in Norfolk and in Botetourt County. A niece of sculptor Alexander Galt, she showed talent in art as a young girl and later opened a studio, taught art, and exhibited her sculpture and paintings. In June 1888, Galt became interested in preservation after seeing an article about a seventeenth-century Gloucester County ruin that had recently collapsed. Taking the example of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, which was formed in 1856 to preserve George Washington's home, she traveled to Richmond in October 1888 to obtain support for an organization she informally called the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities to preserve colonial monuments. She raised money both inside and outside Virginia, including in New York, and endeavored to compile a list of endangered structures.
During Galt's trip to Richmond, she met Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman, who lived in Williamsburg and had similar interests. On 4 January 1889, Coleman hosted the meeting at which the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA, later Preservation Virginia) was formally established. The APVA, which included Galt among its original incorporators, received a formal charter of incorporation in February. In the early years, Galt, Coleman, and other leaders of the APVA such as Richmonder Isobel Lamont Stewart Bryan, sought to preserve sites in Williamsburg and Jamestown as well as the Fredericksburg home of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother.
The APVA, through its selective restoration work and its consistent restriction of membership to elite white Virginians, promoted traditional values and conservative politics. Under the umbrella of preservation and with a predominantly female leadership, the APVA was instrumental in advancing a socially and racially exclusive vision of Virginia's prominent role in American history, coexistent with other contemporary organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution (founded in 1890) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894), both of which shared leadership and membership with the APVA.
Despite what could have been a harmonious cooperation of like-minded women within the APVA, it quickly became clear that Galt and Coleman clashed in temperament and philosophy, and they began to work for the cause separately. Coleman became director of the APVA's Williamsburg branch and concentrated on the preservation of decaying structures in the colonial capital. Galt became head of the Norfolk branch, while also later serving as an APVA vice president (1896–1898) and honorary vice president (1898–1922). In 1889 she engineered the APVA's purchase of the decaying early-eighteenth-century Powder Magazine in Williamsburg, and in 1903 she arranged for the organization's purchase of what was known as the Debtors Prison that was built in Williamsburg about 1711.
Effectively excluded by Coleman from most of the APVA's work in Williamsburg, Galt turned her attention to the restoration of Jamestown, the site of the first permanent English colony in North America. Because the settlement there in 1607 predated English settlements in New England, the site represented to many Virginians the state's claim to national historical preeminence. After 1699, however, when English settlers moved the capital to Williamsburg, Jamestown fell into ruins. By the end of the nineteenth century, all that was left above ground was a brick church tower and a partially walled graveyard with some tombstones. For the APVA the restoration of Jamestown became vital, and in 1892, largely because of Galt's work, the General Assembly gave the organization the church ruin and graveyard. A year later, the APVA received from a private owner 22.5 acres of the island.
Galt soon began overseeing preservation work at the Jamestown site. Using the guidance of engineers, the APVA stabilized the church tower ruins, repaired the graveyard wall, removed vegetation, and enclosed the property with wire netting and a fence to discourage relic hunters. Galt's artistic background contributed to her belief that preservation measures should make as few permanent alterations to the structures and site as possible. As Galt had urged as early as 1889, the APVA also sought federal funding for a seawall to limit erosion, which was completed early in the 1900s. Recognizing the APVA's efforts, while also echoing the era's triumphalist spirit, in 1896 the Norfolk Virginian commented on the restoration, "The work goes on steadily, though often it is very hard and very wearing on these brave and patriotic women, and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities should grow nearer and dearer to the heart of every true Virginian."
Although not trained as an archaeologist, Galt supervised and participated in excavations at the site, including inside the seventeenth-century church, where she helped uncover evidence of an earlier foundation and of long-buried grave markers. Taking a progressive approach, she consulted existing historical records and attempted to document what she found. In 1901 the Jamestown excavation included the opening of multiple graves (the contents of which were later reinterred elsewhere on the site) and the discovery of other material including glass shards from the old church's windows. During this period, Galt and the APVA did not excavate the site exhaustively, and after the National Park Service purchased 1,500 acres of the island in 1934 the APVA limited excavations at its site, which allowed for significantly advanced archaeological practices and tools that late in the twentieth century unearthed major discoveries, including the footprint of the 1607 James Fort.
Despite Galt's important work, it was largely overshadowed by her conflict with Coleman, who successfully pushed Galt out of the upper echelons of the organization and who was sometimes credited as founding the APVA. Their conflict had painful consequences. In private, Galt admitted that the conflict had driven her to New York City early in the 1900s. After returning to Virginia by 1910, a decade later Galt had moved once again to New York City where she resided with a nephew and, notably, continued her artwork.
Galt never married and had no children. During a trip from New York to Virginia, she fell ill and was hospitalized. Mary Jeffery Galt died of cancer at Riverside Hospital, in Newport News, on 30 June 1922 and was buried in Elmwood Cemetery, in Norfolk. Her obituaries acknowledged Galt as the founder of the organization, as did the APVA following a committee's determination that Galt was the founder and Coleman was the organizer of the association. In 2007 the Library of Virginia named Mary Jeffery Galt a Virginia Women in History honoree, and in 2019 her name was included on the Wall of Honor at the Virginia Women's Monument at Capitol Square, in Richmond.
Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates in Death Certificate, Newport News, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Mary Jeffery Galt, "Memoirs of Her Childhood," typescript, ca. 1910, with full names of parents, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; letters in Galt Papers, III (1750–1991), Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg; Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities Records, 1890–1974, Accession 32900, LVA; Norfolk Virginian, 6 May 1896 (quotation); Yearbook of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1896); Janet C. Kimbrough, "The Early History of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, A Personal Account," Virginia Cavalcade 30 (1980): 68–75 (portrait on 71); Mrs. Catesby G. Jones Jr. [Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones] and Mrs. Joseph L. McClane Jr. [Elizabeth Cofer McClane], The Norfolk Branch, 1888–1984, Renamed The Southeastern Branch, 1984–1989, of The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1989); James M. Lindgren, "'For the Sake of Our Future': The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the Regeneration of Traditionalism," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989): 47–74; James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (1993); Robert Zimmerman, "Lost City," Sciences (Sept./Oct. 2000), 16–19; obituaries in Virginian-Pilot and Norfolk Landmark, 1 July 1922, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 July 1922.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leila Christenbury.
How to cite this page:
Leila Christenbury, "Mary Jeffery Galt (1844–1922)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Galt_Mary_Jeffery, accessed [today's date]).
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