Lilla Pool Price (1848-1914) & Lilla Price Savino (1883-1939)

Lilla Pool Price

Music Teacher, Composer, Musician, Poet

Born April 20, 1848, Washington, North Carolina

Died September 2, 1914, Portsmouth, Virginia

Lilla Price Savino

Poet, Housewife

Born November 6, 1881, presumably in Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Died December 23, 1939, at home, Portsmouth, Virginia

Lilla Pool Price and Lilla May Price Savino were mother and daughter, both native to North Carolina and both contributors of verse to Weird Tales.

Lilla Pool Price was born on April 20, 1848, in Washington, Beaufort County, North Carolina. (Called The Original Washington, it was the first city in America named for George Washington.) Her parents were James M. Pool, a jeweler, and Laura Matilda (Bamford) Pool, a musician and after his death a schoolteacher. For thirty years she played organ at Christ Church in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. 

Teaching ran in the Bamford family. Lilla's grandfather, Joseph Bamford, was an English immigrant and a professor of music. Like her mother and grandfather before her, Lilla Pool was an accomplished musician. She was also a composer and wrote the music for "Carolina" and "The Banks of the Old Pasquotank," with lyrics by her cousin Bettie Freshwater Pool. (Yes, that was really her name.) Lilla Pool Price's poetry was published in a book called The Chant of the Seasons and Other Poems.

Lilla Pool married Charles C. Price of Pennsylvania. The couple had one daughter, Lilla Mae Price. Born on November 6, 1881, presumably in Elizabeth City, the daughter Lilla married an Italian shoemaker, Frank Saverio Savino (1878-1936), on October 5, 1906, in Union County, North Carolina. The Savino family lived in Portsmouth, Virginia, for many years afterward. During those years, Lilla Price Savino began reading, then writing letters to, Weird Tales. The first appeared in the March 1925 issue. Seven more followed before the decade ended, as did the two poems composed by women of the Price family. Lilla Pool Price's poem, "A Grave," came first. It was published in the June 1926 issue of Weird Tales. "The Haunted Castle" was Lilla Price Savino's contribution. It was published in the April 1928 issue.

According to Literature in the Albemarle by Bettie Freshwater Pool (1915), Lilla Pool Price's husband died young, leaving her a widow with a daughter. Bettie Freshwater Pool wrote of her cousin:

She was for a number of years a recluse, and possessed many of the eccentricities of genius. The people of Elizabeth City will long remember the old house on Main Street, shaded by old trees--the house where the Banshee walked and the piano talked. Here dwelt the recluse, the musical genius of North Carolina. How often in the silence of the night that old piano under those skilled fingers would "make the welkin ring," and all along the street people would stop spellbound, listening to the witching music.

The 1910 census was her last, for Lilla Pool Price died on September 2, 1914, in Portsmouth, Virginia. I presume that she went there to live with her daughter. The daughter, Lilla Mae Price Savino, survived her by a quarter century. She died on November 6, 1939, and is buried at Christ Episcopal Church Memorial Garden in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, as is her mother and her husband, who also preceded her in death.

Lilla Pool Price's Poem in Weird Tales

"A Grave" (June 1926)

Lilla Price Savino's Poem & Letters in Weird Tales

"The Haunted Castle" (April 1928)

Letters to "The Eyrie":

• Mar. 1925
• June 1925
• Nov. 1925
• Mar. 1926
• Feb. 1928
• Dec. 1928
• Aug. 1929
• Nov. 1929

Further Reading

You can find an excerpt from Literature of the Albemarle on the website Find-A-Grave, here. The entire text of the book can be found on the website of the Eastern North Carolina Digital Library, here. You can read about Bettie Freshwater Pool (1860-1928) at the website Documenting the South, here. Incidentally, Bettie's first book was called The Eyrie and Other Southern Stories (1905). She could not have known that her young cousin would one day write to a letters column of a very similar name.

Author and songwriter Bettie Freshwater Pool wrote about herself and her cousin, Lilla Pool Price, in Literature of the Albemarle. She also authored a collection of tales called The Eyrie and Other Southern Stories (1905). Almost two decades later, after she and her cousin had died, Weird Tales began using the title "The Eyrie" for its letters column.

A little to the southeast of Elizabeth City and across Albemarle Sound lies Roanoke Island, the setting for one of the first weird tales to take place in America. Established in 1585, the English colony at Roanoke disappeared mysteriously, its members never to be seen again. The Roanoke Colony was in the news again last week when researchers from the British Museum revealed that they had discovered an image of a fort on a 425-year-old map of the area. The image has been hidden for centuries under a pastedown and shows a fort in what is now Bertie County, farther up Albemarle Sound. Maybe someday soon there will be other clues as to the fate of the Roanoke colonists.

Among those colonists was Virginia Dare, first English child born in America. A romantic myth has grown up around the girl with the improbably symbolic name. The image is of a young European woman living in the wild, perhaps even transformed into a white doe. The statue shown above is from the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, North Carolina.

Virginia Dare's image has been used in commerce and popular culture for more than a century. This postcard from the 1907 Jamestown Exposition and showing the baptism of Virginia Dare is one example.

Virginia Dare has also been used as a brand name for wine . . .

And tobacco. Here she looks a little more coquettish. The image of the swan evokes the myth of Leda and the Swan.

The image of Virginia Dare has also been used on postage stamps. This one was issued in 1937, thirty years too late to use it on your Virginia Dare postcard.

Finally, if wine is a little out of your league, you might try Virginia Dare Ginger Ale, part of a line of soft drinks that included root beer, lemon soda, and grape soda. 

Corrected and revised on December 18, 2020.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley