Margaret Virginia Preston—known as “Margie” to her friends and family—was born in 1854 to James and Catherine Preston.  Just four years prior, James and Catherine had moved from Abingdon, VA to a 1,000+ acre farm in Eden’s Ridge, TN that James’s father, John Montgomery Preston, had deeded to him as a wedding present.  JM Preston had acquired this land in a trade with John Gaines, who had operated a stagecoach stop, post office, and currency exchange on the farm—resulting in the name “Exchange Place.”  James and Catherine referred to the property as their “Tennessee Farm,” and it promised to be a fruitful place to raise crops, livestock, and a family.  And with frequent sojourns back to Abingdon to visit relatives, they were able to enjoy the benefits of both town and country life.

We have Margie Preston to thank for giving us a glimpse of Preston family life in Tennessee and Virginia in the 19^th century.  Just before her death in 1948, she dictated her memories to her niece Ellen Stuart.  The resulting manuscript, entitled “Margie’s Book,” has become a vital primary source for the living historians at Exchange Place. 

In the book, Margie provides information ranging from genealogy to household inventories to verbal portraits of her family members . She notes that her grandfather, John Montgomery Preston, “lived in many houses, all brick.”  (His enormous mansion at Seven Mile Ford is still standing and visible from Interstate 81.)  She gives the only known descriptions we have of her parents, James and Catherine.  James, she remembers, had an “all-round beard,” while Catherine had “brown hair, lovely brown eyes, lovely teeth and a dark complexion.” 

Margie also offers details about the fashionable clothing the Preston children wore and often lavish food the family ate:

Mama made the children dresses in white (pique with a ruffle on each side of a front pleat), bonnets and ginghams for Sunday School…Margie and Sister had lemon color barages [sic], white leghorn hats with white ribbon streamers….

Suppers those days were served at midnight or one o’clock…The menu was Sally Lunn, hot turkey, oysters, ham, rolls, chicken salad.  Dessert was ice cream and sherbet.  Birds nest—candied peel—eggs fitted wth blanc mange and gelatin, jelly molded in the middle.

Margie’s anecdotes of life on the Southern home front during the Civil War are particularly colorful and intriguing.  She remembers her mother caring for wounded Confederate soldiers in the Main House and school house at Exchange Place.  In one story, Margie remembers Yankee soldiers searching the house and finding a “tall bottle of alum water that Ma had used to set the dye in some clothes.”  The soldier thinks the alum is whiskey and drinks it.  When Margie laughs at him, he glares at her and says, “You little Rebel devil!”

She also provides some of the only known descriptions of the people enslaved by her family.  She recounts stories of Aunt Easter and Aunt Susan, cooks at “The Tennessee Farm,” and of Stuart McClanahan, butler at her grandfather’s house at Seven Mile Ford, who had “wonderful long curly hair down to his shoulders.” 

Unfortunately, there is no known likeness of Margie, yet one probably exists because all three of her sisters were professionally photographed.  While we can only guess at what she looked like, we do have something even more valuable—her memories.