by Kevin Cummings, Messenger Staff Writer
“…Rebel’s Rest (is) an allusion to the unsettled life, movings and home burnings of the four previous years; being glad, indeed, to be at rest on this broad mountain top, endeared and sanctified by the memories of great events and the great men who had here assembled in by-gone years.’
Major George Rainsford Fairbanks wrote those words about his family’s beloved Sewanee sanctuary, Rebel’s Rest, which was built in 1866. During the Civil War the Union Army had burned their first Sewanee home, Rainsford Place. Late on the rainy night of July 23, an unexplained fire destroyed much of Rebel’s Rest.
The home now belongs to the University of the South, which had utilized it as a guest house. According to historian Waring McCrady, the family’s land lease expired in 1966 after 100 years, and Rainsford Fairbanks Glass Dudney, the granddaughter of Major Fairbanks, donated the house to the University.
Dudney’s memories of her grandparents’ house are chronicled in the book “Rebel’s Rest Remembers.” She describes a gingerbread-gabled room above the dining room which served as a “jail” where children were sent for bad behavior. The other children conspired with the prisoner, who would drop a string from the window and friends would tie on little matchboxes filled with scraps of bread or bacon, or a hunk of apple, she said.
“The old house on the Mountain, with its woods and rocks, trees to climb and secret hiding places both inside and out, was the perfect place for children to grow up in,” Dudney said. “We must have been incredibly noisy, and I’m sure Rebel’s Rest remembers us to this day.”
Rebel’s Rest holds a lot of modern memories too, including one for Laura Candler, who had her Watson Fellowship interview there in 2008.
“(It was) a tense hour sitting across the dining room table from the director of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, trying to convince him to give me $28,000 to spend a year traveling around the world studying clouds,” Candler said. “I told him stories and even sang a song in a foreign language. It was a memorable hour, and being in that old room looking out through those watery windowpanes somehow made me relax a little. In the end, I got the fellowship.”
Elizabeth Yates has always loved the old Fairbanks’ home.
“Not a lot of special or particular memories to share, just a tremendous sense of loss. Rebel’s Rest has been a glorious fixture for me for my entire life in Sewanee, very soon [it will be] 75 years,” she said. “…It hurts my heart to see this ruin, though I know the capable hands of ‘the fixers’ employed by this great University can work their magic and make it strong and grand once again. So there’s always hope.”
Sewanee English professor Virginia Craighill attended the Sewanee Writers Conference in 1990, before she was on the faculty, and met at Rebel’s Rest with Howard Nemerov, her workshop and manuscript leader.
“He had been terrifying in the workshop, and several students were devastated by his critique of their poems,” she said. “I had my individual meeting with him one afternoon at Rebel’s Rest, where he was staying, and I steeled myself for his soul-destroying evaluation of my work.
“We sat in the rocking chairs on the porch on a sunny July afternoon as the light dappled the ground below the wisteria, and something about the atmosphere of Southern hospitality and gentility must have mellowed him, for he was kind and helpful and specific,” she said.
Craighill and Nemerov corresponded once or twice that fall, and he died of esophageal cancer the next summer.
Mike Jones graduated from Sewanee in 1965. In January of that year, during Hell Week, the SAE house burned. The University allowed the fraternity to use Rebel’s Rest until their house could be rebuilt.
“We were told to guard, protect and treasure this great legacy. In other words, any real damage and we’d catch hell,” Jones said. “As I recall, no lasting damage was done but the warning did not minimize the beer drinking and partying. As I remember, some genius had even converted a soft drink machine into a beer vendor.
“As I was in my last semester and my participation in fraternity had somewhat dwindled, I don’t remember much more except it was a grand old place, occupied by ghosts and frat boys. In Rebel’s Rest you not only saw “early Sewanee” — you felt it, too.”
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