University News

At 106, UVA trailblazer thrives in the house she’s loved for decades

Virginia Stokes can claim two accomplishments few others can.

The first is her age: At 106, she still lives mostly independently in the house she and her husband moved into in 1957. The second is she is among the first women to graduate from the University of Virginia.

Stokes’ home includes a study filled with books. When graduate students rented rooms in Recoleta, they could come to the study to work peacefully. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

Stokes received a bachelor’s degree in arts in 1948, at a time when the University’s student body was almost exclusively male. Few female students received degrees or certificates from the College of Arts & Sciences, where Stokes earned her degree. UVA did not become fully coeducational until 1970, when 350 female first-year students and 100 transfer students enrolled and joined the University’s Class of 1974.

Before 1970, most of the University did not accept undergraduate women as a matter of course. There were some women on Grounds, though; the School of Education and Human Development, then known as the Curry Memorial School of Education, began admitting women in 1920, and the student population there became majority female in 1922, according to Virginia Magazine. The School of Nursing admitted only women until 1952, with a few rare exceptions before then. Before coeducation, more than 30,000 women earned degrees or certificates from UVA.

“It wasn’t any different than doing anything else,” Stokes said of attending a male-dominated university.

Stokes came to Charlottesville in 1940 from Pilgrim, Kentucky, a small town in the state’s eastern mountains. Her grandparents raised her on a horse farm there, until she went to Charleston, West Virginia, to attend high school. Her reason for moving to Charlottesville was simple.

Get ready for the ride — shop the Team Store.

“When you’re from Pilgrim, Kentucky, and you get the chance to move, you take it,” Stokes said.

In 1943, she began taking classes in the evenings at UVA, as women were permitted to do, though most were unable to attend UVA as full-time students. She paid her tuition in part by working in the University’s main library, then called Alderman Library, now Shannon Library.

When the United States entered World War II, many UVA students suspended their educations to fight in the war, leaving room for some female students to take classes with the remaining men on Grounds.

“We had a tough beginning,” Stokes said. But still, she and the other women in her courses came to enjoy their experience. Stokes said she had a “very good time tooting around with everybody.”

Just before graduating, Stokes married her fiance, Bill, who was working on his doctoral degree in history. The couple tended bar and waited on party guests at Recoleta, the home of UVA music professor Harry Rogers Pratt and his wife Agnes Rothery Pratt. The two couples became friends. According to a report from the Office of the Architect, the Stokeses were married in front of the fireplace at Recoleta.

the back yard and patio of ’Recoleta‘ on an overcast afternoon

Each morning, Stokes feeds the birds from her back patio, pictured here. The garden also includes a pond filled with goldfish. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

The Spanish-style house, designed by Rogers Pratt, was considered ostentatious when it was built in 1940. With a rosy pink exterior, interior courtyard, a fountain full of goldfish and a terracotta tile roof, it stood out in a neighborhood full of red brick Jeffersonian-style houses. The owners of the houses next door planted trees and other vegetation to block the sight of Recoleta, according to Stokes’ godson, David Strider, who works at UVA Health as a nurse practitioner.

Many neighbors still considered it an eyesore in 1957, when the Stokeses inherited the house after both the Pratts died, on the condition they cover the house’s mortgage.

Recoleta is now on the National Historic Registry. It has also been home to a number of UVA students, especially those in the schools of Law and Medicine. Stokes rented out bedrooms in the house’s east wing to supplement her income as a business manager at the St. Anne’s-Belfield School. With six bedrooms, six bathrooms, two kitchens and a garden, there was ample space for students, especially since the east wing could be blocked off from the rest of the house.

Stokes was the business manager at St. Anne’s-Belfield until 1991, when she retired. Her former tenants at Recoleta, many of them now in their 70s and 80s, still come to visit her.

In 2004, Stokes donated a conservation easement for Recoleta to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. In 2015, the University purchased Recoleta, giving Stokes a life tenancy to the property. Recoleta joins a collection of nearby houses, including Morea and Sprigg Lane, that belonged to significant UVA professors and administrators.

“You can’t beat this place,” Stokes said.