Mary Wingfield Scott (30 July 1895–9 August 1983), historic preservationist, was born in Richmond, Virginia, and was the daughter of James Hamilton Scott and Mary Wingfield Scott. Scott's father died when she was a young girl, and she grew up in a socially prominent family surrounded by accomplished women who were involved in public service. The prosperous family traveled often, and she had opportunities to make extended trips to Europe. Scott had fond memories of her widowed grandmother Sarah Frances Branch Scott, whose dominant personality made a deep impression. Toward the end of Scott's life she acknowledged that "I was not a very nice child.… Mother knew too well what a hell-cat I was." Regular church attendance and an education at Virginia Randolph Ellett's School (later Saint Catherine's School) did little to curb her rebellious spirit.
After going to boarding school at Saint Timothy's in Maryland, Scott attended Bryn Mawr College for two years (1914 to 1916), and after World War I enrolled in Barnard College, where she studied romance languages and graduated in 1921. She returned to Richmond to teach at Westhampton College, first as an associate professor of modern languages until 1926 and then as an associate professor of French until 1928. At the urging of her life partner, Virginia Reese Withers, Scott enrolled in the Department of Art History in the graduate school of the University of Chicago. She received a master's degree and a doctorate with a dissertation published in 1936 as Art and Artists in Balzac's Comédie Humaine.
In 1927 Scott and Withers adopted two boys. In a posthumously published autobiographical commentary, Scott explained that since her twenties she "saw no prospect of getting married" and "thought of adopting a child." Her unconventional lifestyle caused "quite…a sensation" in conservative Richmond but that never seemed to deter her from living an independent life.
Scott's travels spurred her interest in historic preservation. During her extensive trips to Europe, she saw how old buildings were an integral part of their local communities in the years prior to the destruction of the First World War. In New Orleans she saw the effects of the city's historic preservation efforts. Inspired by what she saw, Scott turned her attention to her hometown of Richmond. She began the research on the architecture of Richmond that led to the publication of two influential books, Houses of Old Richmond (1941) and Old Richmond Neighborhoods (1950), in which she expanded her research to include African American sites. Scott's books were based on scholarly research, and she used primary source materials such as deed books, insurance policies, newspapers, and photographs. She saw her mission as educating the public on the value of preserving Richmond's pre–Civil War architectural heritage, but she later remembered, "I didn't have very much support in those days. I worked hard, but most people didn't care. People never thought about preservation."
Many of the endangered buildings were dilapidated and located in blighted neighborhoods, but Scott tried to convince the city's business and professional families that the buildings were worth saving and could be renovated for other purposes. She criticized landlords who let historic buildings deteriorate in low-income neighborhoods and called for "a fair division of decent places to live" for white and Black residents, acknowledging that "nothing creates worse race-relations than inequitable exploitation of housing-space." One threatened site was the Adam Craig house, one of the few remaining eighteenth-century buildings in Richmond. In 1935 Scott and others, including her cousin Elisabeth Strother Scott Bocock, formed the William Byrd Branch of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (later Preservation Virginia) for the purpose of preserving the abandoned house.
Scott recognized the social realities of preserving buildings in urban neighborhoods, and she acknowledged that finding a use for properties there was as difficult as raising the money to buy them. After the Craig house was stabilized, it served from 1938 until 1941 as the Craig House Art Center, which hosted art classes for African Americans and was a creative example of Scott's early focus on adaptive reuse.
Scott realized that she could not rescue each of the hundreds of antebellum buildings in Richmond, but she spent the rest of her career sharing her historic preservation vision. In addition to her two books, she published Old Richmond News, a newsletter for members of the William Byrd Branch. As editor, she tried to prevent the destruction of architecturally significant buildings and educate homeowners on renovations and the relationships of buildings to their neighborhoods. She featured articles about the successful restoration of some buildings and the purchase by the Byrd Branch of the Ann Carrington house and the Ellen Glasgow house. In addition to the newsletter and her other publications, Scott promoted historic preservation through exhibitions at the Valentine Museum, neighborhood walking tours, and reminding city officials of the value of tourist dollars.
Near the end of World War II, Scott predicted that peacetime prosperity would mean an increase in commercial building that could endanger even more sites. In 1944 she purchased four houses in Oregon Hill, a historically white, working class neighborhood that was slated for clearance by the city. Her efforts to save the neighborhood were partially successful. She encouraged her Old Richmond News readers to become more involved politically with local government so that they could influence future development. She turned her attention to the city's planning commission and proposed that it include a representative from historic organizations who would also champion her goals of the preservation of landmarks, landscaping, tree-planting, and cleaner streets, the removal of billboards, and enforcement of building inspection to prevent continued deterioration of historic homes. Scott was an early advocate of what became standard best practices of modern historic preservation. She recommended creating funds to purchase and restore threatened buildings and advocated planned giving through bequests, both of which became popular historic preservation tools.
Scott became an increasingly public and vocal critic of city government, and she did not hesitate to express her frustration with the "bulldozing brotherhood." When rezoning threatened Linden Row, an architecturally significant block of Greek Revival houses, Scott bought most of the buildings and helped restore and save them. She could not save everything. Federal urban renewal programs and highway projects were a powerful threat to entire neighborhoods. In the 1950s and 1960s urban renewal projects displaced many homeowners in Jackson Ward, a historically African American neighborhood that contained many antebellum houses. Despite Scott's protests, she could not stop the spread of public housing and federal highway programs.
Scott lived long enough to see some of her vision for historic preservation realized. Her emphasis on adaptive reuse, appropriate renovations, and protecting neighborhoods through historical district zoning later became accepted practices in the field of preservation. Her training as an architectural historian and her publications gave her a position of authority, and she used her position to spread her philosophy that historic preservation could benefit all the residents of a community. She helped shift the focus from preserving traditional elite sites to a modern emphasis on saving buildings that help tell the social history of the built environment.
Scott's pioneering work was recognized by numerous organizations, with awards from the American Association for State and Local History in 1963, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1968, and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in 1975. She was named an honorary member of the Virginia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1951 and of the national organization in 1982. Through her leadership, vision, and sometimes sheer force of will, Scott helped preserve some of Richmond's rich architectural heritage. She once remarked to a reporter, "I never thought this was what I would do with my life, but I did it.… I did it because it was something I had to do." Mary Wingfield Scott died of an acute pulmonary embolism at a Richmond hospital on 9 August 1983 and was buried in the city's Hollywood Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Kay C. Peninger, "Mary Wingfield Scott: A Rebel with a Rubble Cause" (M.A. thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011); autobiographical writings include "Eighty-Six Years at St. Paul's," unpublished manuscript dated 1982, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond (first quotation), Scott, "712—Hail and Farewell," Richmond Quarterly 5 (Spring 1983), 27–32, and "The Making of an Architectural Historian," ed. Elizabeth S. Scott, Richmond Quarterly 8 (Summer 1985): 20–36, (Fall 1985): 4–56 (second and third quotations on 51, 52); Virginia R. Withers, "The Making of an Architectural Historian: Mary Wingfield Scott," ed. Elizabeth S. Scott, Richmond Quarterly 8 (Winter 1985), 47–52; collected autobiographical and biographical essays, Winkie: Mary Wingfield Scott n.p., n.d. [ca. 2010]); feature articles with portrait in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 Apr. 1957, 15 Apr. 1979 (fourth, sixth, and seventh quotations); Old Richmond News 3 (1 Feb. 1946), fifth quotation; obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond News Leader, both 10 Aug. 1983; editorial tribute in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 Aug. 1983.
Image courtesy of University of Richmond The Web (1927).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Frances S. Pollard.
How to cite this page:
Frances S. Pollard, "Mary Wingfield Scott (1895–1983)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Scott_Mary_Wingfield, accessed [today's date]).
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