Date:  ca. 1915

Image Number:  EEcdEE01

Comments:  Cliffside sits on a steep hill overlooking Scottsville and was built in 1835 for Dr. Gilly M. Lewis, a local doctor and owner of Albemarle Mill on the Hardware River.  Long the home of the Lewis family, Cliffside also served as the headquarters of Generals Philip Sheridan and Armstrong Custer during the Union raid of Scottsville in March 1865.  Later Captain John L. Pitts bought Cliffside for his son, Marion Arthur Pitts, and in the above photo Elizabeth (Holladay) Pitts, his daughter-in-law, is shown standing on the home's front steps.  In 1929, Virginia Moore, author of Scottsville on the James, purchased Cliffside and lived there until her death in 1993.  At right is a current photo of Cliffside.

The Ginger House, a one-story frame office and school, is the only surviving outbuilding on the Cliffside property.  Beginning in the mid-1800s, the Lewis family used this outbuilding as a schoolhouse for their children and employed private tutors.  Nearby the Ginger House is a small family cemetery.  According to a Virginia W.P.A. Historical Inventory Report, dated November 10, 1936, the cemetery contains several unmarked graves as well as two grave stones bearing the following names and dates:

The top photo of Elizabeth Holladay Pitts at Cliffside is from the Eleanor Evans collection.  Eleanor resides in Suffolk, Virginia, and is the granddaughter of Lucy Mason Holladay and her husband, Archibald Douglas Kincaid, and the grandniece of Elizabeth Holladay Pitts.