“Sweet Shadows on the Teche:” How the Shadows Got Its Name
Photograph of the Shadows by I. A. Martin, 1923.
From the collection of the Shadows-on-the-Teche.
Easter 1908, attorney and author Richard H. Spencer wrote a poem as a gift for his friend Lily Weeks Hall and her son, “Willie.” Spencer titled his poem “A Dream” and obviously wrote the poem in response to the Hall family’s move in December 1907 from their “childhood’s happy home, Dear Shadows on the Teche.”
Spencer had been a friend of Lily’s for years, at least since 1872, when some of his friends in St. Louis, Missouri wrote a “tongue-in-cheek” notice concerning Spencer’s “disappearance.” The notice kidded the young attorney had left St. Louis “on a journey for some ‘Weeks’ in search of pleasure in our Southern clime, and is now in New Orleans or on the Mississippi, or he may perchance be a prisoner to some Southern heiress captured by a beautiful siren of the Teche, where he remained a willing captive...incurring much risk of being led to the sacrificial altar of Hymen [meaning marriage].”
If indeed Spencer was courting the beautiful Lily in 1872, his courtship proved unsuccessful. Lily did not marry until almost twenty years later, when she and Gilbert Hall became husband and wife in 1891. In any case, Spencer obviously remained a friend of the family, exchanging cards and letters and sending gifts to Lily’s son, William Weeks Hall, who Spencer called “Willie.”
A letter written to Weeks Hall just before Christmas 1907 indicates a close relationship with the family. “Your well executed Linehead, kindly sent to me by your mother a year ago, is a constant reminder of you. ...When I was your age Time flew with leaden wings, but now I would arrest its flight if I could. Cultivate by all means this gift of art and this love of the beautiful in Nature that you possess, and if all else fails, it will bring you pleasure and patience in the future.”
With his encouraging words and advice, Spencer sent young Weeks Hall a bound notebook in which to write or sketch. “Some day, when I am too old to go about, the atmosphere of the Teche may become more beautiful to me than the world outside. Not under Italian skies will you find Nature in all its splendor. ...You will visit Europe and look with wondering eyes and with intense delight upon the art treasures of the world in London, in Paris, in Dresden, in Munich, in Venice, in Florence, in Rome. All this and more you have before you in a life that has just begun.”
Weeks Hall’s award winning landscape featuring the Shadows.
c. 1923, oil, NT 59.67.77 A
Weeks Hall did indeed leave the Teche, going to art school in Philadelphia and then on to Europe on an art scholarship before returning to his family home in 1922. Though Weeks Hall’s aunt, Harriet Weeks Torian, began calling the family home “Shadows-on-the-Teche” in the 1890s, as far as we can determine, the Weeks property was still known as “the Weeks home” by the community and the “Home property” by family members into the 1920s. It appears it was Weeks Hall who took the refrain from the poem “Shadows on the Teche” and applied it to his newly restored home.
In 1923, when Weeks Hall painted a landscape featuring the Shadows, he titled the painting “Shadows on the Teche.” He won the 1926 Benjamin Prize for the best Louisiana landscape painted in oil, having captured the grandeur of those oaks with their trailing moss.
It is also in 1926 that we find the first letter addressed to Weeks Hall at “The Shadows-on-the-Teche.” From that time forward, Weeks Hall consistently used the name in letters and interviews and in his efforts to promote the family home as a potential museum, thereby preserving “The Shadows-on-the-Teche.”
A Dream
When shall I, an exile, cease to roam,
Far from my childhood’s happy home,
Dear “Shadows on the Teche.”
The placid stream flowing by thy door,
In my dreams at night I see once more,
Sweet “Shadows on the Teche.”
I hear the mocking-birds song at dawn,
See the moss-grown trees upon thy lawn,
Loved “Shadows on the Teche.”
See dear Father at the garden gate,
In the morn and in the evening late,
At “Shadows on the Teche.”
Mem’ry recalls those who plead in vain,
And yet ventured not to come again,
To “Shadows on the Teche.”
Sadder far, the two I loved the best,
For they both went home to their long rest,
From “Shadows on the Teche.”
Gone the shadows and the silvery stream,
Awake, I find it but an idle dream,
Of “Shadows on the Teche.”
But why should I sadly thus repine,
God wills it is best for me and mine,
On Missouri’s banks to dwell,
“Shadows on the Teche,” farewell!
Easter, 1908. Richard H. Spencer
Originally published in the Friends of the Shadows newsletter (Vol. 14), Fall edition 1995.
