One night Miss Nellie’s clothing caught fire from the open fireplace in the back parlor. She died as a result of the burns.

After her death, the Weaver house suffered further at the hands of destructive tenants, and vandals added their indignities to the structure.

Then about 1950, Mrs. Erroldine Hay Bateman bought the property and began its restoration. Her task seemed almost hopeless, but she saw beyond the dingy banners of peeling wallpaper, the cheap partitions that changed grand rooms into makeshift apartments, the leaky roof, and the rotting floors. Mrs. Bateman saw the enduring beauty that William Weaver had built into his house, and she set about to reclaim it.

Mrs. Bateman named the house Errolton.

One day as she and her son, Douglas Batemen, were supervising some basic repairs in the double parlor, they happened to see the window pane on which Miss Nellie had scratched her name years earlier. Most of the windows had been broken, but the pane with NELLIE on it remained intact.

"We must save that pane," Mrs. Bateman said. "It will be a touching reminder of Miss Nellie and her life in this house."

Unfortunately, a careless workman broke the pane. There was no way to salvage the pieces, so a new pane of glass had to be put in the window.

As the restoration progressed, Errolton became as beautiful as Mrs. Bateman had known it would be. The house seemed to come alive, almost as though it were resurrected, in response to the love and attention given it.

The restoration was nearly finished by the mid-1950s when Mr. And Mrs. Douglas Bateman moved into Errolton. She completed work in the upstairs bedrooms and added her inheritance of fine pieces of furniture to the house.

One afternoon not many years ago, Mrs. Douglas Bateman was walking through the back parlor when she noticed that the sun was shining through the window and was striking a sofa she had recently upholstered in blue. She did not want the sunlight to fade her sofa, so she went over to the window to pull the shade down.

As she reached for the shade, Mrs. Batemen noticed what appeared to be dust on the windowpane. She ran her hand across it, and the glass felt rough. Stepping back, she looked at the pane and saw etched there the word

NELLIE

The word occupied the same position on the pane and in the window as the autographed pane that had been destroyed by the careless workman.