The Harris Sisters – Florence, Nannie, and Etta – were the daughters of Martha J. (Minor) Harris and Lafayette Harris. After Lafayette died in 1856, Martha supported the family by operating a millinery and dry-goods shop in what is now known as the Harris Building, at 474–476 Valley Street.
The building, constructed about 1840 with commercial space below and living quarters above, became both their home and workplace. Martha Harris sold women’s goods—lace, fabric, corsets, and hats—and her daughters assisted with sewing and tending the store.
In 1876, Florence married the Reverend McCutcheon and moved to Waynesboro.
The other two sisters, Nannie and Etta, never married. They remained with their mother and helped run the shop. Each attracted some rather colorful suitors, however, and both were, for a time, engaged to be married.
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Nannie Harris, an Astronomer’s North Star
Nannie attracted the attentions of John Jones. Jones rode to Charlottesville all the way from Ohio – on a Penny-farthing bicycle – to help found the observatory at University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He was so smitten with Nannie that he regularly biked 35 miles from the observatory just to see her. He even rode out from Charlottesville, over the Blue Ridge Mountains at Rockfish Gap, and down to Waynesboro, fording streams and dodging drunk ruffians, to visit with Nannie at her sister Florence’s home. Mind you, this was in the late 1800s, when roads were made for horses and wagons – rough, rutted, and muddy.
His journals, full of references to their courtship and details of life in Victorian Albemarle, can be found here:
The couple made plans to live in Roanoke, where John had secured suitable income as a teacher. Sadly, Nannie died in 1885 shortly before they could marry.
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Etta Harris, a Scottsville Milliner
Etta Harris was born in Scottsville in 1857, shortly after her father died, leaving her mother to support herself and the family when all three daughters were under the age of four.
Mother Martha took over the operation of the family’s dry goods store on the west side of Valley Street, and soon converted it to a millinery. Etta became an expert seamstress, and helped her mother run the store that sold pretty hats, lace, and corsets. An astute business woman, when her mother died in 1905 Etta continued operating the millinery herself through 1930.
She never married, but in one local legend took a pot shot at her fiancé with a rifle from the upstairs window of the Harris Building. Billy Beal, her longtime bachelor suitor, lived just across Valley Street in a cottage called “The Palace.” No one ever knew why she did it; but the engagement, unsurprisingly, broke off shortly thereafter.
Katherine Ellis of Scottsville remembered Etta:
“The lady who ran the millinery store was Etta Harris, the daughter of Lafayette Harris and his wife, Martha Jane (Minor) Harris. Etta was a first cousin of my grandfather, Charles Bascom Harris, Sr. When I was a little girl, I remember Cousin Etta surrounded herself with lots of little poodles. Tom Bruce, Jr., told me that when he was a little boy, they always referred to Miss Etta’s dogs as “Etta Dogs!”
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