The following history is an excerpt taken from  an article published in the 1994 Bulletin of the Northumberland County Historical Society, "The Human Side of a Centuries-old Landmark" by Robert E. Robinson*

Since at least 1795, and probably from much earlier, Rice's Hotel/Hughlett's Tavern (RHHT) has been a landmark in the Northumberland County seat at Heathsville. Over its long history the structure has provided shelter, food, drink, and opportunities to socialize and mingle to generations of Virginians whether they lived in the colonial era or watched television as man took the first steps on the moon. In the words of one authority, the hotel/tavern's unique importance as a designated site on the Virginia Register and National Register of Historic Places is the fact that again and again this building has been altered to meet the needs of the ordinary Virginians who patronized it. 

As circumstances of daily living in Heathsville and the Northern Neck were affected by war, peace, depression, prosperity, slavery, freedom, technology, and economic adjustment, owners of the hotel/tavern adapted the structure to provide what changing times required. Fortunately, in most of these changes old materials were recycled in the new modification. Like the proverbial cat, RHHT has had many lives. Today with the help of historical architects and archaeologists, evidence of the hotel/tavern's past can be examined and studied in every part of the structure. Unlike more famous landmarks identified with a single historical personality, RHHT offers a wide panorama of Virginia life from its early beginnings almost to the present day. 2 

This article focuses on people who are known to have lived, worked, and visited the landmark when it was an ongoing enterprise. The principal information comes from a series of interviews and correspondence conducted between February 1992 and October 1994 with twenty-five individuals who shared their own or others' personal recollections of the hotel/tavern's past. 

Family Life in the Hotel / Tavern 

As a business enterprise throughout most of its two centuries of operation, RHHT patrons were usually transients. Like other courthouse taverns in Virginia during the colonial era and later, patrons came because of the proximity of the courthouse. When the court sat at Northumberland's courthouse, across the road from RHHT, judges, lawyers and their clients, court clerks, sequestered jurors, and, members of the press sought food, drink, and shelter at the nearby tavern. When the tavern expanded into a hotel in the 1830s, transients continued to come, along with traveling salesmen, teamsters, steamboat passengers, and truck drivers. Leila Palmer Sandy, whose aunt Leila Palmer Rice and her husband, J. G. Rice, Sr., were proprietors of the hotel from 1909 until the mid‑ 1930s, remembers visiting the hotel as a child. "Most of my aunt's guests were traveling salesmen," she says. "As a rule local people did not go to the hotel for meals. My aunt catered mostly to traveling people."3 

But some clients, Mrs. Sandy says, were permanent boarders. And the hotel was home not only to her aunt and uncle but also to their children, Mrs. Sandy's cousins. Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Rice, Sr., had six children, five of whom lived into adulthood. RHHT has witnessed family life throughout its history.4 

"The land on which Rice's Hotel (originally Hughlett's Tavern) stands was part of a grant of 900 acres taken up by John Hughlett in 1663," according to the nomination for historic designation submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, and filed at the Library of Congress. It was from this land that the four‑acre courthouse square was taken and the first courthouse at the site was built about 1681. Exactly when the original Hughlett's Tavern was opened has not yet been determined, but three generations after the death of the original owner, his great‑grandson, known as John Hughlett the elder, wrote in his 1795 will that "the rents of the ordinary be put to the use of schooling and raising my gran(d)son John Hughlett." The same will bequeathed the "land and plantation joining the Courthouse" to his son John Hughlett "if he returns. But if he should not return" the land was to go to the grandson.5

Thus, the earliest legal reference currently available about Hughlett's Tavern reflects a grandfather's concern for the welfare of a grandson whose father had been missing many years and would eventually be presumed dead. The grandson who inherited under the 1795 will probably never lived at the tavern, because the Hughlett family plantation was nearby. The record does show that by 1812 the grandson applied for a license to operate the tavern and by 1823 he was mortgaging the property. The following year the tavern was purchased by Griffin H. Foushee.6

             Over the next forty years, ownership of RHHT passed through many per­sons. It may not have been until John and Felicia Rice became the proprietors that the structure became a family home as well as a facility catering to transients. The Rices had been married in 1854 and became the parents of three children, John W., James A., and Lizzie John and Felicia owned a number of properties in Heathsville before selling them and purchasing Hughlett's Tavern a year after the Civil War ended.7   For the first time, RHHT was called Rice's Hotel. Legend is that John and Felicia converted the property into a fashionable establishment. John died in 1892, but his wife continued to operate the hotel into the first decade of the new century. Before her death, about 1909, the hotel was leased to her cousin George Daniel Shirley, a Northumberland farmer and businessman. 

Catherine Douglas Shirley, wife of the late Wellington Hill Shirley, Sr., remembers meeting her husband's father, George Daniel Shirley, in the early 1930s before her marriage. She recalls he was a rather stout man, not very tall. "He was nice looking," she says, "a good businessman. He owned the family property, Sycamore Hill. He did not actually farm himself, but he saw that all the work got done. He was into a lot of things, selling fertilizer and things like that."8 

During his life, George Daniel Shirley had three wives and became the father of eleven children. From about 1906 to 1909 when he leased the hotel, Shirley lived with his family at the Heathsville hotel under a new name, Shirley's Hotel. A 1907 news item appearing in the Northumberland Echo contains an expression of thanks and appreciation by the Shirley family to citizens of Heathsville for assistance in saving the hotel when a number of other buildings in the community were destroyed by fire.9 

Another branch of the Rice family became Rice's Hotel residents in 1909 when James G. Rice, Sr., and his wife, Leila Palmer Rice, purchased the property from‑heirs of Felicia Rice. Their family proprietorship would endure for most of the twentieth century. 

Leila Sandy recalls that when she was old enough to drive her family's horse and buggy, she would be allowed to drive from the farm on what is now Route 624 into Heathsville to spend the day at Rice's Hotel. 

"When I arrived at the hotel, Uncle Jimmy would take the horse, unhitch him from the buggy, and take him down and feed and water him," she says. The stable was close to and behind the old county jail. "When I was ready to go home, Uncle Jimmy would bring the horse up, hitch him to the buggy, and bring him up to the post in front of the hotel."10 

Mrs. Sandy's cousins who lived at Rice's Hotel in those days included Loman J. Rice, Kathryne G. Rice, Charlotte Rice, Seltine Rice (who was also known as Sallye), and James G. Rice, Jr. Loman, the oldest, was about 22 when his parents acquired the property; Kathryne was about 15; Charlotte was about 13; Seltine, 9; and James G. Rice, Jr., 4. An older daughter, Nevice, had died of pneumonia before the family acquired the hotel. 

From about 1885, Mrs. Sandy says, her Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Leila had operated Romney Farm near the present Northumberland High School. "They had been there practically all their lives," she recalls. "But when Uncle Jimmy's health failed and he couldn't farm anymore, they decided to buy the hotel. My Aunt Leila took the plow by the horns and operated the place. I think she was very successful with it." 

It is reported in Heathsville, Yesterday and Today that Mrs. Leila Palmer Rice's parents, Joseph and Ann Gresham Palmer, were proprietor's of Palmer's Hotel in Heathsville from 1866 until about 1890. So perhaps Mrs. Rice had opportunity to observe within her own family what was required to manage a hotel successfully.11 

As the years passed into the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Mrs. Rice would see her children grow up and begin families, of their own. 

Daughter Charlotte would become the wife of Earl Cassius Pusey and the mother of three children by him. A year later daughter Kathryne would marry Grover G. Watkins and add babies of her own to the family circle. In 1922 Loman Rice would marry Mamie Pearson Stoneham.  The younger Rice children, Seltine/Sallye and James G. Rice, Jr., would also marry.12 

In 1928 a new generation of the Rice family would again call Rice's Hotel home. Following the death of Earl Pusey, Charlotte Rice Pusey returned to the hotel operated by her parents. To accommodate her young family, which included children Palmer, Ann, and Constance, an apartment at the south end of the structure was added. 

In addition to the immediate families of owners, sometimes other relatives were hotel residents. Rudolph Rice of Sharps, Virginia, says his father, Asa S. Rice, came to Heathsville in 1879 upon graduation from an Alabama teacher's, college. He was a cousin of John Rice, the Rice's Hotel owner at that time. Asa taught school in Heathsville and boarded at the hotel before his marriage. Later he would study law and become Northumberland County commonwealth attorney.13 

James G. Rice, Jr., who was born about 1905, inherited the Rice's Hotel property following the death of his mother in 1940. During the World War II era and the decades that followed, the 24‑room structure was divided into a number of apartments. Many Northumberland newlyweds had their first home in a Rice's Hotel apartment and saw the arrival of their first children under its ancient roof. In 1990 Cecelia Fallin Rice, widow of James G. Rice, Jr., deeded the property and 1.2 acres of land to the Northumberland County Historical Society.14 By 1992 the Rice's Hotel/ Hughlett's Tavern Foundation, Inc., was created by the historical society to oversee restoration of the historic resource. 

*Before retirement Robert E. Robinson had a career as a broadcast journalist, magazine writer, and publications director for the Social Security Administration. He and his wife, Martha, live in Lewisetta, Virginia. 

1. National Park. Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Rice's Hotel (Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1992), 9.

2. Jonathan Spodak, AIA. Seminar: A Future for the Rice's Hotel. Heathsville, Va., March 8, 1994.

3.Interview with Leila Palmer Sandy, Northumberland County, Feb. 19, 1992.

4. Carolyn H. Jett, July 20, 1994, letter to author.

5. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form, 9.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Jett, Heathsville, Yesterday and Today (Heathsville, Va.: Woman's Club of Northumberland County, 1980), 39.

8. Interview with Catherine Douglas Shirley and Wellington Hill Shirley, Jr., Northumberland County, Feb. 20,1992.

9. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form, 15.

10. Sandy interview.

11. Jett, Heathsville, Yesterday and Today, 28.

12. Jett, July 20, 1994, letter to author.

13. Interview with Charles Rudolph Rice, Sharps, Va., June 29, 1994.

14. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form, 16.