Patricia Mitchell, outside her home in Chatham, Virginia, 1999.
Patricia Mitchell, outside her home in Chatham, Virginia, 1999.
Patricia Sue Beaver Mitchell, 74, entered Heaven on February 18, 2024, from the Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit at Grand Strand Medical Center, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Beginning the previous day when she and her husband Henry were on their customary afternoon neighborhood walk together, she had unexpectedly suffered two spontaneous brain hemorrhages which were inexorably fatal.
Patricia was born November 11, 1949, in Danville, Virginia, the daughter of John Lewis Beaver and Reba Sue Jones Beaver. The family resided at Dry Fork, Virginia.
She is survived by her husband of 55 years, Henry Helvey Mitchell, and their children and families Sarah Mitchell of Myrtle Beach; David and Katie Mitchell and their sons Timothy and Jude of Chatham, Virginia; and Jonathan and Hannah Mitchell and their daughter Hadassah and sons Yahkin, Tzion, and Moshe of Altavista, Virginia.
Patricia is widely known as a researcher and writer of food history, and the author of well over one hundred titles, most of them still in print and available at museums and historical sites throughout the United States. Her extensive web presence includes her site FoodHistory.com.
Patricia and Henry's inseparable romantic relationship began as teenagers, when their newly-consolidated Chatham High School opened and she bumped into him rounding a corner. Without her contact lenses at that moment, she mistook him for her athletic cousin and asked him for an autographed school photo. Astounded at the interest of this pretty little girl, Henry of course honored her request. Eventually they discovered that their families' histories were remarkably intertwined for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. They concluded that their bond was no accident at all, planned from the beginning of time by the great Unseen Hand.
Patricia excelled in journalism and drama, encouraged and mentored by her teachers Eva Cooper and Mary Lynn Lander. She completed her high school requirements a year early, and continued her attention to those topics and to Henry at Virginia Tech. Patricia and Henry, she a sophomore, he a senior, eloped and on September 3, 1968, were married at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Patricia accompanied Henry as after graduation he received an Air Force commission and they traveled to assignments in Biloxi, Mississippi, where they fell in love with the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and then to Dayton, Ohio. Henry received an early-out due to the winding down of the Vietnam conflict, and they moved to New Orleans' French Quarter.
In New Orleans they enthusiastically immersed themselves in the arts community and the Southern Renaissance philosophy. They found to their surprise that it was a match to Henry's upbringing in rural Virginia, his parents' having been involved in similar activities since the 1920s — his mother Mary Helvey Mitchell in fine art, and his father J. T. W. “Trubie” Mitchell in music and photography. Henry and Patricia purchased a bankrupt store and redubbed it “Mitchells Regional Crafts and Art.” Their shop specialized in local art and handcrafted jewelry. It was a salute to all of their parents. The Mitchell family art connection is immediately obvious. John and Reba Beaver were co-owners of the Chatham Jewelry Company back in Virginia. Patricia and Henry's store was unusual in the Quarter in that they accepted no consignments. They insisted on purchasing all their merchandise outright and up-front. Patricia had an unshakable personal code that valued authenticity above all, no pretense, no ceremony. So she would not sell anything to a customer if she had not already put her own money where her mouth was!
Patricia and Henry then began publishing a magazine The Community Standard while living in an upstairs slave quarter apartment. All these activities took place at the same address, 612 Royal Street, said to have been the birthplace in the 1930s of the New Orleans Renaissance movement. The magazine featured local personalities in various categories each month, and restaurant articles along with a restaurant rating guide. In their shop the restaurant rating form was available for visitors to fill out. The resulting notebook compilation on a shop table was sought out by New Orleans chefs and restaurateurs seeking feedback, a very early precursor to today's “Yelp” and similar online services.
In 1975 Patricia experienced a strong internal tug to move back to their hometown of Chatham, Virginia. There they purchased the historic Sims House, which itself had Mississippi/Louisiana connections and an architectural similarity to 612 Royal Street, and began its restoration, and within the coming few years welcomed their three children. In 1985 they opened the house as a bed-and-breakfast. Requests from guests for Patricia's recipes led young daughter Sarah to instruct her mother to stop tediously writing out the recipes and instead include them in small cookbooks available for sale.
Patricia did so in 1986, and her publishing career began. Friends Patrick and Donna Daily (Patrick was director of patriot Patrick Henry's home Red Hill) were dinner guests one evening when Patrick asked if he could purchase a quantity of the little books for resale at his museum. He called a few days later to ask for a restock, and suggested further projects focused on particular periods of American history. Patricia began to fill his request, fully annotating the books with her research references, and the books spread by word of mouth throughout the American museum community.
Patricia's internal urge to leave New Orleans for their hometown was puzzling to her friends, and even to Henry, as they seemed to have found success and their milieu within the New Orleans arts community. But Patricia readily expressed that something was missing. The obvious part was family. She wanted a family of her own, and the French Quarter was not an easy place to raise children. The not-so-obvious part involved the world of the spirit, and she felt she needed some quiet and time to reconnect her family roots in order to figure out that void.
A voracious reader and researcher, she came across the book Something More by Christian writer Catherine Marshall, and she and Henry carefully studied it and then repeated the study along with the other members of the young adult Sunday School class at their home church. Writer Marshall laid out the Holy Spirit's presence and power that were so often being ignored within well-meaning mainstream Christianity. It struck a deep chord with Patricia and Henry, who had been exposed to non-Christian spiritualist activities in Biloxi and New Orleans.
Then on Patricia's birthday, November 11, 1975, in the cold ramshackle kitchen of their newly-purchased house, she tuned their portable TV to the Phil Donahue Show. In Dayton, Patricia and Henry had lived in an apartment in close proximity to Donahue's studio, and had encountered him on the street from time to time, but they had never joined his show audience. On this occasion the guest was to be one of Patricia's heroes: chef Graham Kerr, known as the Galloping Gourmet. To Patricia's surprise, when the November 11 program began, Kerr announced that he and his wife Treena had recently experienced a momentous conversion to Jesus. Kerr, at the time the greater media star relative to Donahue, took over the show and turned it into a come-to-Jesus revival. On his prompting, Patricia and Henry knelt on their kitchen floor and pledged their lives to Jesus, turning their since-childhood Christian tradition into a compelling life Force. The Unseen Hand they had long sensed now consciously became their Friend, Counselor, and Director.
Alongside her writing career, Patricia developed other enthusiasms. Because of medical conditions which had begun to appear in her teen years, she became a nutrition and whole-foods proponent, a pattern which boosted her health and strength through her childbearing years. When her oldest child Sarah reached school age, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted home-school legislation. Patricia herself had participated in public education at Chatham Elementary School, Chatham High School, Virginia Tech, and Wright State University, but had found the most satisfaction in honing self-directed research skills. So she became one of the first pioneers in the new Virginia home-school movement, and devoted her next twenty years to teaching her own three children.
Her early medical issues eventually were revealed as related to chronic multiple hyponatremia, a complex electrolyte imbalance, leading to other difficult and dangerous conditions. As a result, her activities were increasingly restricted as the years passed.
Patricia and Henry's life together took many creative turns, not always comfortable but always appropriate to needs and events that were unfolding. They ruefully recognized their own many personal similarities to their multi-great-grandparents Adam and Eve, including that they were always seeking an Eden on this earth. They realized that Eden is an impossible goal, but also that it is a useful impetus to “use what you are given” and “brighten the corner where you are,” a very brief condensation of Renaissance ideals. In later years Patricia and Henry found the location and neighbors of the Seagate Community in Myrtle Beach to be their perfect place. It is touchingly appropriate that Patricia stepped home to eternal Heaven while enjoying a walk with Henry along the sidewalks of her heaven on Earth.
Copyright © 2024 Henry H. Mitchell.