There was much more to Michael Miley (1841-1918) than his celebrated photographs of Robert E. Lee and the Rockbridge County mountains, according to David Ellington, who points out that Miley was also a chemist who solved the dilemma problem of light-refracted halos in early photographs, as well as a pioneer in color photography.
And Miley was a husband and father who, in the mid-1870s, built a house on White Street and enveloped it with exotic gardens and a year-round greenhouse. Ellington and his family now live in that house, and he tells the story of the house and its namesake in a new “Rockbridge Epilogue,” the online local history series. Ellington wrote his article originally for the Fortnightly Club, the centuryold Rockbridge intellectual discussion group.
Miley and his wife, Martha Mackey Miley, reared three sons, all born in the 1870s, in the house. The middle son, Henry, eventually joined his father in the photography business, working alongside him in pioneering research that involved superimposing red, yellow and blue tints to create a single image.
At home on White Street, Michael Miley cultivated “enormous beds of flowers and vegetables,” Dr. Ellington writes, and experimented with grafting apple varieties — even working through the winters to such an extent that Henry Miley said the family burned as much coal in the greenhouse as they did in the residence proper.
The article has illustrations from 1900 and from today showing the house and some of its details. Ellington is a Virginia Military Institute graduate who retired after four decades of general medical practice in Lexington. He and his wife, Jane, a Lexington native, acquired the house in 1984, when it was 109 years old.
The article, “Home Sweet Home,” and its 60 predecessor ”Epilogues” can be read freely at www.HistoricRockbridge. org.
“PEACHES.” a very early, experimental color photograph made by Michael Miley shortly after 1900. (courtesy of Washington and Lee University Special Collections)
