April 22, 2019 / Joanne Yeck

Buckingham County Houses: Indian Gap

Indian Gap. Courtesy Charlie Henneman.

For decades, a large collection of Bolling-Hubard papers have been housed at the Buckingham County farm “Indian Gap.” Current owner, Charlie Henneman, described the property and some of its inhabitants as follows:

[The dwelling house at Indian Gap] was built by my great grandmother Marion Hubard Henneman, the daughter of Robert T. Hubard Jr. and Sallie Edmonds Hubard. Marion was raised at Chellowe and was a school teacher in Farmville when she met my great grandfather John Bell Henneman, when he was a professor at Hampden Sydney. They married and moved to Tennessee where he was a professor at Sewanee and an early editor of The Sewanee Review. Dr. Henneman died of cancer in 1908 at the age of 44, and Marion returned home to Buckingham with two small boys, John (my grandfather) and Richard.

She built Indian Gap in 1910 on her land which had been part of the Chellowe estate. Indian Gap was an operating farm for several decades, and I have very early memories of my grandfather in a tobacco field in a place that is now planted in pines. My grandfather retired there in 1966 after a 40 year career in New York, and I grew up visiting my grandparents there.

I was told as a child that the house is named for the gap in the rocky ridge that passes through the property, which was supposedly a well-used migration path for native peoples traveling from Tidewater to the Piedmont. (The house still contains a sizable collection of arrow heads accumulated by Hubard ancestors, and we continue to find them on the property to this day).