Issue #20 of The Hook; published 06/20/02

BY HAWES SPENCER

The author of the new biography finds Peter Taylor's house-buying ways to be a little over-eager. And it claims the author and his wife owned a house on the James River in Palmyra. However, the river near Palmyra is the Rivanna.

"It's just riddled with errors," Eleanor Ross Taylor says of the new biography of her late husband.

However, the portrait of Peter Taylor as ardent house-trader is true, she concedes.

"I think he was sort of a frustrated architect-- as well as a frustrated interior designer," she adds. "He just loved old houses."

Eleanor Taylor says the couple once lived near Earlysville in a house called "Clover Hill." Not a driver, she says she was "trapped" in the country when the novelist was out of town.

As for the Palmyra house, it was dubbed "Stoneleigh," a large Gothic Victorian-- but it was in bad shape at the time. "It was fun to go down there," she says, "but we never spent a night."

As for the in-town swaps, they're pretty straight-forward:

917 Rugby Road

An auspicious beginning. In July 1968, the Taylors plunked down $43,500 for this handsome brick house formerly owned by William Faulkner. They sold it five years later for $63,500. (The funniest moment in local real estate history came around the year 2000 when the house, having been enlarged, was being marketed-- for nearly half a million dollars-- as the "William Faulconer House.")

1101 Rugby Road

This comfortable dwelling came into Taylor hands in May 1974, for $110,000, and he sold it three years later for $160,000.

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1841 Wayside Place

This house became the Taylor residence in June 1977 for $89,950. It's still the home of a famous poet.

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