The Ghosts of Ivymont
Volume 12, Number 3
Issue 551
Very often, clients and other visitors to my office ask, “is this place haunted?” This is because my office is one of only a few public places in our area that makes the home of their modern business a restored 1800s plantation house. To state it more succinctly, people get a little spooked when they see my office: a supposedly technologically-modern professional office in a converted residence that is over 150 years old. And, by the way, “of course our office is haunted; the ghosts teach me things every day.”
In 1996, I spent nine months restoring a 2,200 square foot pre-civil war farmhouse that had its land taken away from it when a shopping center was built about a decade before. The developer of the shopping center had proffered the renovation of the house as a condition of zoning and even named the entire center after the home, but they never got around to restoring it before they went bankrupt and the newly-built shopping center went up for auction. The new owner of the shopping center at first didn’t see the economics of restoring the Ivymont Manor, so they just let it sit there until I stumbled across it and pitched the idea of moving my offices there.
Although its official name is “The Historic 1850s Ivymont Manor House,” the only really historic thing about this house is that it is still here. A completely wooden structure on a brick foundation is a rarity because of fire. We have beat the odds to be here. Ivymont is one of only two original surviving plantation houses within this stretch of Midlothian Turnpike; the other one being a restaurant, a much larger late 1700s building--a true wayside tavern. Regretfully, the tavern had a fire two weeks ago, so that makes Ivymont the only surviving 18th or 19th Century structure converted to business use left around. That tavern’s ghosts--real or imagined, past or present--appear to have gotten the best of it. The owners of the restaurant have stated publicly that they will reopen but they didn’t say “when.” For now, that building’s ghosts are fully-contained as the windows are boarded-up with plywood.
Shortly after I opened my accounting firm in the restored Ivymont Manor House, the original developer of the shopping center came by to congratulate me and to give me a plaque that the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors had given him years before that should be displayed on the building. During our conversation, I told him about how I’d already been asked a dozen times about Ivymont supposedly being haunted. He proceeded to tell me a few things that he’d been told by descendents of the family that lived there for a hundred and so years: 1) A little girl caught her dress on fire in the parlor on Christmas Day in the 1920s or 1930s and died; 2) that she was buried in the family cemetery that had been where a K-Mart’s lawn and garden center now was; and 3) that there was an Indian buried in the cornfield.
Well, I can say that I have 99% of all my professional meetings right in the parlor where the little girl died, that the K-Mart hasn’t been around for a couple of years (now a vacant building and the graves are gone) and that people park their cars where the Indian supposedly rests. We’ve moved on from these things but we remember and are interested in the history that may be present.
These old traditional ghosts of Ivymont--the girl, the people buried in the old cemetery and the Indian-- don’t bother me very much; I respect them by knowing that they are there, in some way--real or imagined. I do know that I’m the steward of their memories--at least for awhile--of where they once dwelled, made their homes and died.
I am pleased that we do have our own “official” ghost of Ivymont who checks our sanity and our working hours every now and then. When I have been around way too late at night or in the wee hours of the morning working on a project, I’ve heard the high-heels of a lady ghost walking around on our 1850s heart-pine floors. A few staff members over the years have heard the lady walking, too, though I‘ve always doubted whether saying they had heard it was said just to please the boss. When blessed to hear it, the noise just reminds me that I work in a place I love--a historical setting in an old building that I saved from overdevelopment. These things are normal when you work in a place where others lived their lives. I welcome the noise of the high-heels as a sign that Ivymont has been dressed-up for the occasion of our occupancy of it as a professional accounting office.
I’m constantly haunted by other modern events and personages too, as all business owners should be if they cared enough to pause to think about their memories. I’m haunted by a lot of business spirits, the good, the bad and the ugly. First, the ghosts of former employees, associates and clients who have come to Ivymont for extended periods and then left for one reason or another and, second, the ghosts of professional triumphs and tragedies involving particular events.
Have you ever thought about the fact that the shadows of how we conduct ourselves as responsible business professionals with a fiduciary duty to serve the public are constantly present during subsequent events? On the walls at Ivymont, I stare at these shadows every day because I work in the same rooms where both good and bad things have happened under my care during the few years that I have been here. And I spend a lot of time thinking about the people that occupied the same space to live their lives 140 or so years before I came along to save the place. I spend the vast majority of my time in the same room every day where a plantation owner negotiated the sale of his crops starting in the 1850s. It is the setting for me to sit down and receive all of my clients’ year-end tax return information.
Upstairs, the same room that is our library is the room where the plantation owner and his wife made their bedroom, sired their children and, probably, died. We now Xerox 1,100 customers’ tax returns there and we hold meetings to help clients, among other things, sell their businesses.
In my conference room, I see the shadows of my own meetings that have gone well and ones that have gone badly for one reason or another. My burden is that I remember them all--that’s the only way that I can improve as a professional. I learn from the prior experiences and go to the next one with increased knowledge.
The same room that an employee cried over her conduct while being reprimanded has seen another joyous because they were hired or received a raise. In the same room where a brand new client yelled and yelled at me because they owed so much in taxes is where another sat with me for the last time as we were doing their estate planning shortly before they died. The same room where I exchanged Christmas presents with a former employee is the same room where I mediated a client’s divorce. The same floor where children play on the floor while the adults “talk taxes” is the same room where older persons with Alzheimer’s have struggled to get their memory focused on income and deductions. The same walls look upon the same table where I celebrated two people getting married after helping two get divorced just one half-hour before. These are the types of comparisons and contrasts that I carry around with me each and every day--the triumphs and tragedies of the Ivymont Manor House.
Readers of my writings know that the only reason that I love what I do so much is because of the people that I love as my family--my clients and my employees. Sometimes an employee’s spirit will reach out to me from the past and grab me to make their shadows on the wall even more vivid. Recently, we’ve been receiving a number of telephone calls (almost on a daily basis) from the credit card companies of a former employee. They ask for her by her full given name, not the name we knew her by. That’s her ghost coming back to be mischievous and to remind me how much she is missed. Every now and then, I get to interact with the four CPAs that I’ve grown. Sometimes, they come back to visit and we joyously face their ghosts by looking around for the shadows on the wall while at the same time they just want to see once more where they got their professional careers started.
A business owner who only thinks about the present day, tomorrow and, maybe, into next week, or who is “all business” and nothing else simply doesn’t get it. The best way to become more successful in the future is to constantly analyze, reanalyze and overanalyze the strengths, weaknesses, successes and failures of the past as a certain and sure way to get a glimpse of what the future might have in-store. By reviewing the historical aspects of “wins” and “losses” and “successes” and “failures,” the future can be planned for much more successfully. In my opinion, it can even be predicted.
Simply said, it is the ghosts and shadows of events surrounding my actions of the past that make me have a chance for better success in the future. I embrace my ghosts of the past and I want to take them with me to the future to help me meet the new ones. My ghosts are a sign that I tried, did my best and that something meaningful was attempted to be accomplished.
The ghosts of employees and clients haunt and burden me every moment of every day. Sometimes it is overwhelming and others it is the greatest joy in the world. This burden brings out so much historical emotion that sometimes it is difficult to overcome. The only thing that ultimately takes me away from chasing the ghosts of my past is my zeal and passion to want to introduce them to the ghosts of the future.
With me, in every single thing I do, there is no learning curve; I carry the sum total of all things past around with me to the next interaction that I will have. Having a reverence for the ghosts of the past makes me a much more successful person for the next Herculean task that I have to accept responsibility for.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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