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National Geographic : 1974 Jul
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T4 Mixing pills and politics: In the dim light of John Galt's Apothecary Shop (upper) in Colonial Williamsburg, Howard Atkins and his assistant practice the 18th-century art of "rolling pills" for colds and fevers. The store's 200-year-old account books record Patrick Henry's purchases during his eleven years as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, which met at Williamsburg. years ago by six young actors from New York City. As one of them, Muriel McAuley, told us, they went south to Richmond, then stumbled upon Hanover Tavern, "a magnificent der elict, with spongy floors and listing porches, without heat or plumbing, so we naturally fell in love with it." In their publicity the Barksdalers do not neglect the fact that Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, and Cornwallis slept there. But clearly their hearts, which they like to think of as rambunctious, belong to the memory that Patrick Henry, whom nobody doubted was rambunctious, lived there. A Man of Ideals - and Ambitions The young man who vaulted from the Hanover Tavern into so large a place in American history had absorbed from his readings a full quota of The Idea. Perhaps as much as Adams, he took it to mean indepen dence plus political and social churnings. Yet Henry was as eager for money and status as any young Virginian of his day. He spoke in moving and undoubtedly sin cere words of his love for mankind and often he was, in the words of a friend, "gentle, gentle" in personal relations. Less admiring acquaintances handed down stories of how he would ride off for considerable periods of self-aggrandizement, leaving an ailing wife and a brood of children to be cared for by relatives. Henry would rise to commanding political power in Virginia; he did it largely as a loner, giving himself little to the Adams-like wheel ing and dealing. Essentially Patrick Henry was-out of the abrasions of his background, soaring idealism, and rampant ego-the popular tribune, satisfying inner needs and outer hopes simul taneously by storming against the status quo. Not surprisingly, the high points of his career came in three speeches of torrential assault. The first was delivered in the Hanover courthouse, situated far back on a broad, lovely greensward. Built about 1735, it con tinues to be used with no important alteration in its tidy red-brick design. Inside, large squares of slate support a place of dignified simplicity for the judge, jury, and eight rows of solid-oak benches. In the 18th century the Hanover courthouse looked the way a courtroom should look; it looks that way in 1974. National Geographic,July 1974
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