Cleydael's Belgian Roots:

What's in a Name?

People constantly ask where Cleydael got its name. Most think it sounds Celtic. In fact, it's Belgian.

Cleydael was named for Kasteel Cleydael (Cleydael Castle), the ancestral home of Mrs. Stuart's mother, Rosalie Eugenia Stier, near Antwerp Belgium. The oldest part of the castle dates from 1304 and it is now an exclusive golf club, hotel, resort and conference center. (www.Cleydael.com)


The ORIGINAL Cleydael is
significantly larger than it's namesake!

Mrs. Stuart's maternal grandparents, Baron Henri Joseph Stier and Marie Louise Peeters Stier and their three children came to America in 1793 to escape the French Revolution, settling first in Philadelphia, then Annapolis and lastly the countryside outside the new Federal City of Washington, DC. There, Baron Stier began building Riversdale, a substantial manor house which is still standing in the town that bears its name. Young Rosalie married American George Calvert, a grandson of the 5th Lord Baltimore, and stayed behind in America when her parents and brother and sister moved back home to Belgium after it was safe to do so in the early 1800's, at Napoleon's invitation.

In her published letters (Mistress of Riversdale) Rosalie Stier Calvert makes reference to her brother visiting their father at Cleydael. Rosalie had always wanted to get back to Belgium and visit her parents at Cleydael but something always intervened -- a drop in the price of tobacco leaving the land-rich Calverts short of ready cash, personal illness, a sick or dying child (she lost four children of her children to illness), a troublesome investment that needed watching, or the War of 1812 making transatlantic travel impossible. Finally, her own illnes prevented her coming and she died at the age of 42, never to see her beloved Cleydael again.

It was left up to her youngest surviving daughter Julia, who had been only eight years old when her mother died, to make the pilgrimage on her behalf. As a teenager, she visited her aunt and uncle at Cleydael and the memory was precious to her as it brought her closer to the mother she'd hardly known. When her husband bought the unattratively named "Neck Quarter" plantation in 1845, it was renamed in Rosalie Eugenia Stier Calvert.

How to Pronounce Cleydael:

When we first looked at Cleydael and put down the contract to buy it, we were unsure how to pronounce it. Most of our visitors are too. Initially, I had pronounced it "CLY-dale", taking General Robert E. Lee as my guide. I had assumed that when he'd misspelled the name of the house in his December 8, 1861 letter to his daugnter Annie and wrote, “You must have had a pleasant time at 'Clydale’," that this must have been a phonetic spelling. I was quickly corrected by local realtors and county officials, who all seemed to pronounce it "CLAY-dale", which what people tend to call the executive subdivision which has sprouted up around the old house. Confused, I emailed Belgian friends in the Antwerp area to ask them, figuring that the Stuarts must have pronounced it in the same was as the original in Belgium, as Mrs. Stuart had visited there herself. It's hard, across languages, to spell phonetically in an email and we never made phone contact, despite successive attempts to play "phone tag". Reassured by various King George County locals (who turned out mostly to be in-comers like myself), I got into the habit of calling the house CLAY-dale.

Oops. Turns out General Lee was right! I went to the King George Historical Society's annual picnic. A great many of the Society's members are descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the county and they really know their stuff. I was introduced and gave a short talk saying how excited my mother and I were to be the new stewards of "CLAY-dale" and that we looked forward to getting involved in the Historical Society. I got to meet one of Dr. Stuart's descendants, and everyone was frightfully nice and too kind to correct me, except for one gentleman, who made a pointed attempt to ask me how I liked "CLY-dale" with a snort of derision. I quickly picked up on this point and asked, "Oh, then it IS CLY-dale! I kept calling it that, and kept getting corrected." I thank him for his candor and being more concerned with accuracy than whether I was embarassed. At least he saved me from further embarassment and from sounding like an ignorant Philistine who doesn't know the name of her own house!

The pronounciation of "CLY-dale" is further reinforced by information my mother found online when looking for information on a local Catholic congregation to join. The online history of St. Anthony's Catholic Church states that "Lumber for the church was bought from the Graham D. Richardson sawmill, located on his farm "Cledysdale", and was hauled on wagons by Carter and Webster Grymes to this site." We have also seen references to the farm being spelled "Clydesdale" a natural mispronunciation for a place pronounced "CLY-dale" but an unnatural contrivance if the farm were indeed called "CLAY-dale" as per the modern usage.

In addition, we bought a video of Belgian singer Helmut Loti, giving an outdoor concert at Cleydael Castle. Alas, the video was useless as a source of photographs of the castle itself, but at one stage Loti said a word about the castle, which he clearly pronounced CLY-dale (actually, it was more like CLY-del or a "schwa sound" like CLY-dull, but clearly CLY, not CLAY.)

So now you know. When in doubt, listen to Robert E. Lee!

Cleydael is a private home. please respect our privacy and do not visit without an invitation. (Unless, of course, you're somebody we know, in which case y'all come!!
-- but phone first and give us a heads up and be expected to be handed a paint brush!)

Cleydael's History:
History & Owners |  Architecture | The Stuarts | What's in a Name? | | Calverts & Stiers
Lee Connections|  | Other Relations | African Americans | Booth at Cleydael
Jo-Anne Coe: In Memoriam
Photo Album |  Location | Links
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Contact us: Cleydael@aol.com