Two of Lexington’s homespun African American philosophers — Phil Nunn and Spottswood Styles, contemporaries who flourished separately in the late 19th and early 20th centuries— are celebrated in new “Rockbridge Anecdotes.”
One of the new “Anecdotes” examines the life of Phil Nunn, a gentle, eccentric, hard-working, impeccably honest, universally admired handyman, born in 1866, who lived in The Castle on South Randolph Street and died in 1938. His captivating tale ranges from his turbulent love life to a complicated and idiosyncratic view of money.
The second “Anecdote” centers on Spottswood Styles (1869-1946), by trade a mechanic but by instinct and passion a poet whose works ranged from deliberately unrefined to whimsically sophisticated. The eminent poet Robert Frost, looking over some of Styles’ work, said he had “a very poetic mind.” Though largely forgotten today, Styles’ poems were published frequently in both area weekly newspapers, the Gazette and the County News.
Two poems by Styles are reprinted in the “Anecdote,” including a broadly comic take on the high cost of dying.
Both “Anecdotes” stem from talks given in the 1960s to the Rockbridge Historical Society — the article about Nunn by Anne Brandon Heiner Knox, RHS vice president, editor and frequent speaker, and the one about Styles by W. Houston Barclay, local businessman and historian.
“Anecdotes” are the less serious, more whimsical younger sibling of the scholarly online history journal “Rockbridge Epilogues.” They can be read, without restriction, at www.RockbridgeAnecdotes. org.
