None of the folks at the Danville Historical Society ever met Avicia Thorpe, who was 112 years old when she died in 2020. Neither did Lisa Jones, who runs the Vintage Boutique in Danville.
But by combing through the hundreds of thousands of possessions she left behind, they began to get an idea of who she was: a teacher, a wife, a community servant, a philanthropist.
Thorpe, who was the oldest person in Virginia at the time of her death, has no living descendants in Danville. She never had any children, and neither did most of her nine siblings.
Her house in Danville, however, preserved her memory perhaps better than any person could. It was full of items that provided a glimpse into her life, both the mundane and the extraordinary.
“It became clear, after going through this stuff and reading about her, that she was just a really giving, wonderful person,” said Robin Marcato, executive director of the historical society.
Thorpe kept everything from telephone bills and grocery lists (which were stored in containers including a church collection box) to handmade dresses and undergarments.
Many items reflect little-known histories of Danville, especially parts of its Black history.
“The Avicia Thorpe estate was a sort of time capsule filled with details about African American life in Danville,” said Karice Luck-Brimmer, a local Black historian and genealogist who knew Thorpe when she was alive.
It took months for the historical society to move the entire collection from Thorpe’s house to its location on Cabell Street.
The group is keeping a select few of Thorpe’s belongings for display, but many of the pieces have been given to the institutions they are associated with, like the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Other items will be available for the community to purchase.
Clothes, shoes and jewelry from Thorpe’s collection will be on sale at the Vintage Boutique in Danville starting Sunday and continuing throughout the month.
Proceeds will go to one of Thorpe’s only living relatives, a great-niece who lives in a nursing home in New York.
The theme for the sale is “100 Years of Fashion,” said Jones, who co-owns the Vintage Boutique with Roslyn Preston.
Not only do Thorpe’s pieces tell the story of fashion through the decades, but they provide insight into who she was as a person and what she liked to wear, Jones said.
“I think it’s something that people will be amazed at as they walk through and look,” Jones said.
Moving thousands of items from a full house to a vintage store
The historical society got an email last year from the guardian of Thorpe’s great-niece, who is in her 80s, Marcato said. The email suggested that the historical society might be interested in some of the pieces in Thorpe’s house.
Thorpe died in 2020, a few months shy of her 113th birthday. She had been a schoolteacher in Danville for decades and remained involved in the community even after her retirement.
She was active with the YWCA, the local NAACP chapter, her church and other groups. She was married to the Rev. C.M. Thorpe for nearly 20 years until he died in 1963, and she never remarried.
After talking with a lawyer for Thorpe’s estate, the historical society began to sift through the treasure trove that was her house. From the beginning, the group intended to organize a sale through a local vintage store to celebrate Thorpe’s life, Marcato said.
“It would bring in money for [Thorpe’s great-niece], and it would support a local business,” Marcato said. “I think she would want that.”
First, though, it had to be moved and organized.
It took over three months for Marcato and the two Danville Historical Society archivists, Joe Scott and Cody Foster, to move Thorpe’s collection from her house to the society’s location on Cabell Street.
“The house had no electricity, so in April when we started, it wasn’t too bad,” Marcato said. As the summer began, though, it turned into hot, difficult work.
It is the largest collection that the historical society has received from a single individual. Scott said they don’t even have a ballpark number of items in the collection — it’s far too many to count.
Marcato, Scott and Foster are still discovering and organizing items, nearly a year after they first visited the house.
They don’t pass over anything, even if it looks uninteresting. Some of Thorpe’s handwritten recipes were wadded up on pieces of paper that looked like trash in the bottom of a box, Marcato said.
Even utility bills have a story, she said. “In its own way, it’s incredibly fascinating to watch how utilities and phone bills have changed through the decades, because she kept them, of course.”
They anticipate that the work will continue for several more years, Scott said.
Along the way, Marcato and Jones have been selecting clothing items, hats, handbags, jewelry and purses to be sold at the Vintage Boutique.
The store, which opened in 2013 and moved to its current location on Union Street just before the pandemic, was inspired by “the women and men we looked up to during our youth,” Jones said.
“Both Roslyn and I were brought up in the ’60s and ’70s. … We were childhood friends, and we always liked fashion and shopping and going through grandma’s closet and trying on grandma’s clothes,” Jones said. “The boutique grew out of the conception of just liking fashion and shopping and just hanging out, you know, doing girl stuff.”
Jones didn’t know Thorpe during her youth, but she knew of the older woman’s reputation in the community later on in life. She was amazed by the collection, and she has spent a lot of time cleaning and moving the items.
“Her items from the ’60s and ’70s of course caught my eye because those are the decades I gravitate toward,” she said. “I like the ’20s too, which were the flappers and the beadings and the pearls.”
The collection includes many Easter outfits, which are timely and appropriate, Jones said, since much of her advertising for the sale has been through the city’s Black churches.
Thorpe also had collected more than 500 pieces of jewelry, Jones said, much of it from her travels. Thorpe visited around four dozen countries over the course of her life, Marcato said.
About 70% of the proceeds from the sale will go to Thorpe’s great-niece, with the remainder to the boutique, Jones said.
“A lot of her stuff will go back into the community, and I think she would absolutely love that,” Marcato said.
How one woman viewed her community
You can learn a lot about someone from sifting through what they kept, said Marcato.
For example, Thorpe was generous. Her papers included stacks of receipts for donations she had given to local organizations and charities.
She was also “clearly very much in love” with her husband, said Marcato, who found boxes of handwritten poetry both to and from him.
Her possessions also provide insight into Danville’s history, especially its Black history — events and people and places that there is little record of otherwise.
Thorpe penned histories of institutions that no longer exist, like the Danville Industrial High School, which was once the only Black private high school in the city. It opened in 1885 and burned down in 1926.
The historical society has little material on early Black education in Danville, Foster said.
“She kept so much Danville history, including stuff that I don’t think she herself would’ve been involved in,” Marcato said. “She had an Oddfellows program from around 1906” — two years before she was born.
On the other hand, some items reflect pieces of Danville history that Thorpe was intimately involved with.
“We found notes from 1944 on a meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation group, which was an early civil rights group,” Marcato said. “She took the notes for the meeting. … They were talking about civil rights for decades before the 1960s.”
Thorpe’s collection also included not only several of her own written histories on Black churches and institutions, but also published books on topics like Black legislators in Danville.
Much of the Black history portion of her collection will be handled by Luck-Brimmer and by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, Marcato said.
Thorpe was “a meticulous keeper of items that we can now refer to as artifacts,” Luck-Brimmer said. “Having been born in 1908, the same year her beloved AKA sorority was founded, you can imagine all the history she had that spanned a century.”
Luck-Brimmer’s last memory of Thorpe was when she took her 99-year-old cousin, Audrey Harris, to visit Thorpe in the nursing home.
Harris was in town for the class reunion for Langston High School, Danville’s only Black high school for years.
“She said, ‘Can you take me to see my teacher?’ I’m looking at her like she’s nuts, thinking, ‘You are in your 90s, what teacher could you possibly have that’s alive?’” Luck-Brimmer said. “And then we came upon Mrs. Thorpe.”
During their visit, Thorpe recited a poem that she’d written for herself on her birthday, Luck-Brimmer said. “She wrote a poem to herself every year,” she said.
Though they never met, what Marcato has learned about Thorpe from her collection has been “extraordinary.”
“She was a really lovely woman,” she said. “She was really intelligent and loved her community, and clearly believed in giving back to the community. That’s what her life was.”
