After a tornado ripped through their family farm, Arabelle Laws’ mother, Blanche Laws, found herself alone and penniless.
It was May 1929 – five months before the stock market crash – that the Laws family was buried deep in what had been two stories of brick and mortar. Friends dug frantically, but found Arabelle’s father, Pete Laws, dead. They rushed Blanche Laws to the hospital with a fractured jaw and part of her skull crumbled. Seven-year-old Arabelle had a broken ankle; her brother Pete, 10, was unharmed.
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| Arabelle Arrington '41 received a Washington Medal in 1988 as her beloved husband, Walter, looked on. The couple spent 57 years together. |
When she returned home months later, Blanche Laws was left with little to rebuild her life but the rich soil of her southern Fauquier County dairy farm, hard work and her sterling reputation.
It was soon afterward that Blanche Laws, who took on full-time dairy farming, began to plan for her children’s education, daughter Arabelle Laws Arrington ’41 recalled recently from her Warrenton, Va., home. To her mother, education was everything. So, just eight years after losing her husband, her home and all her possessions, the young widow used her good name for collateral at the local bank and sent her daughter to college.
“We never knew of anything like scholarships back then, and we had no money,” Arrington said. “It was Fauquier Bank and Mama that put me through.”
That is why Arrington feels compelled to give back to Mary Washington – or, as she calls it “my school.” She has made generous contributions over the years, but in April she made history. Arrington pledged $5 million – the largest single gift ever made to the University – to honor her dear friend and departing president, William M. Anderson Jr.
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| Arabelle Cowne Laws from the 1941 Battlefield. |
What she has given in dollars she has matched in service; she has served on Mary Washington’s Board of Visitors, Alumni Association Board of Directors, and as president of the Foundation Board of Directors. She has inspired others to give with challenge grants, she has supported efforts to help get and keep the best faculty, and she sustains the Arrington Scholarship for children of UMW faculty and staff.
“I would like for young people not to have to struggle to pay for school,” Arrington said. “If I can alleviate some of those fears about how to pay for college, I will be happy.”
Even before she was old enough to go to school, Arrington loved learning. When her mother reviewed homework with older brother Pete, young Arabelle listened quietly and absorbed what older children were taught. By the time she started first grade at the five-room Catlett Elementary School, her teacher realized little Arabelle was no ordinary beginner.
“After that, they bumped me up to second grade,” she said.
Arabelle “just adored” her teacher, and when she told her mother she wanted to be just like that lady, right down to her profession, Blanche Laws made a promise to herself and to her daughter.
“You are going to be the first one in our family who goes to college,” Arrington remembered her saying.
By 1937, Arabelle Laws, just 15 years old, was ready to graduate from Calverton High School. She never had seen a college, she said, and didn’t really know what one was. But there was one thing she did know: She didn’t want to leave one handsome schoolmate – the boy who walked with her to Critendon’s Market and bought her lunch each day – Walter Arrington.
“But for Mama, education was the thing,” Arabelle Arrington said. Just after graduation, Blanche Laws drove her daughter 30 miles to the State Teachers College at Fredericksburg, walked into the admission office and enrolled her on the spot. The campus was the most beautiful place she had seen in her life, Arrington said, and the proximity to home meant she could see Walter on weekends. Besides, there was never any discussion of her going anywhere else.
She was homesick at first – especially when a senior’s spinal meningitis and the subsequent two-week campus quarantine kept her in Fredericksburg. But she got on with her studies in science and education and fell in love with the school. She roomed with the same “most wonderful roommate” – Dorothy Lee from Salem, Va. – for four years.
She got help from seniors memorizing Chaucer. And she participated in the science club, the public speaking sorority and the YWCA.
If Mrs. Laws couldn’t make the drive to fetch her on Friday afternoons, Arabelle caught the bus home to see her mother and Walter.
“But mostly Walter,” Arrington added.
Walter Arrington’s family had its own problems. In 1942, they were given 60 days notice to leave their 3,750-acre ancestral farm at the convergence of Fauquier, Prince William and Stafford counties to make way for Quantico Marine Corps Base. Crops were left unharvested in the fields, and things had to be sold so quickly they brought little money. Walter’s father’s health plummeted from the shock, and the devoted son left his pre-med studies at the University of Virginia to be by his side. The Arrington family moved to Warrenton, where Walter and Arabelle Arrington would make their home together for 57 years.
In 1941, Arabelle Laws graduated from what was by then Mary Washington College. Walter Arrington was still at U.Va., so the young sweethearts wrote letters – Arabelle Arrington still has every one – and he drove from Charlottesville most every weekend to see her.
“He must have burned up three cars going back and forth,” Arrington said. “Those were some fun times.”
Arabelle used her education to teach at high schools in Remington, Arlington and Warrenton. When a couple in Catlett asked the young lady to teach their deaf teenage daughter, Arabelle took on the challenge and gained not only a student but a friend. In March 1946, when Walter and Arabelle married, the girl was a bridesmaid.
By that time, Arrington had “had it with teaching,” she said, and Walter needed her at the Warrenton Chrysler dealership the couple started as newlyweds.
“We operated our business together for 41 years,” Arrington said. “We worked side by side, and I never killed him and he never killed me either.”
Just three years into the marriage and on the advice of Walter Arrington’s father, the couple bought Alwington Farm, where Arrington still lives today. A reliable farm manager allowed the couple to keep the auto business, raise 400 head of beef cattle and cultivate the crops to feed them. But the work was nearly constant.
The Arringtons, who had no children, found time for their beloved 11 nieces and nephews. And Arabelle Arrington found time for her alma mater. She first served as the alumni fund chair in 1966 and was appointed to the Board of Visitors in 1975.
In 1976, Mary Washington’s bright young executive vice president got the attention of the Fauquier County businesswoman. William M. Anderson Jr., just in from the West Virginia Board of Regents, had a vision for the school even then, Arrington said, and was the kind of leader it needed. So when it came time to choose a new president in 1983, Anderson had her support.
“I could look ahead and see what he was going to do for the college,” Arrington said.
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| Arabelle Arrington received an honorary doctorate at commencement in 1998 from President William M. Anderson Jr. and Phillip L. Hall, dean of faculty. |
Today, Anderson and Arrington are fast friends, often lunching together in Warrenton. She attended every graduation of the Anderson presidency, from 1984 to the May 2006 ceremony. Anderson was there in 1988 when the school recognized her exemplary service with a Washington Medal. In 1998, when Mary Washington awarded Arrington an honorary doctorate, Anderson stood with her on the dais.
Arrington liked Anderson from the beginning, she said; he is a caring and concerned man who always put Mary Washington first. But for a hard worker like Arrington, there has to be more to a leader than heart – he has to get results. And that is just what Anderson delivered to the school.
Sitting in her living room in Warrenton, Arrington listed just a few of the changes at Mary Washington after Anderson took the helm in 1983: an art gallery, a new library, a science center, a fitness center, and a tennis center. Her favorite is the elegant Jepson Alumni Executive Center.
After Anderson suffered an aneurysm in 1996 that kept him in the hospital for weeks and in therapy for months, Arrington told him: “That aneurysm slowed your legs down, but it sure did speed up your brain – you’ve got more ideas than ever.”
“I told him ‘If you think of it, it will happen,’ ” she said. “And it did.”
Arrington’s affection for Anderson may be rooted in their similarities – both dream big, both get results, and both are dedicated to Mary Washington.
Arrington’s business acumen has made her not only a wealthy woman, but also a prominent philanthropist. When she and Walter Arrington began to disperse parcels of the 450-acre Alwington Farm in the late 1990s, they sold acreage to Wal-Mart. After Walter died at age 83 in 2003, she sold another plot to Home Depot. But the couple also donated land from the farm to Warrenton Baptist Church and to Fauquier County for James G. Brumfield Elementary. Arrington has been generous to the Red Cross (who helped her family after the 1929 tornado), to countless charities and to her nieces and nephews.
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| Anderson gave longtime friend Arabelle Arrington a congratulatory kiss at the April 2005 ceremony to celebrate the naming of Arrington Hall. |
And, of course, there are her other children – the ones who attend her alma mater – the ones she wants to help get the type of education she had.
“Above all schools,” she said, “I have a special place in my heart for Mary Washington.”