Osa Lee Yates slept here

The former Home for Needy Confederate Women, now the VMFA Pauley Center, was designed using the original plans for the White House in Washington. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

I never saw a ghost walking the hallways of the Pauley Center at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts -- not once in the 10 years I worked in what was once the Home For Needy Confederate Women.

I do remember a security guard telling me one morning that she had heard muffled footsteps in the middle of the night. She said she looked all over the building and never saw or heard anything more.

The Home for Needy Confederate Women was chartered in 1898 by the Virginia General Assembly to provide a home for impoverished widows, sisters and daughters of former Confederate soldiers. The home originally opened at 1726 Grove Ave. In 1904 it was moved to 3 E. Grace St. After a fire in 1916, the home's board decided it needed a much sturdier structure. They rebuilt in the early 1930s on what are now the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Facing Sheppard Street, the new stone-and-concrete Home for Needy Confederate Women was modeled after the White House in Washington.

By 1989, only nine women remained, and the residents were moved to a nursing home in Chesterfield. The building reverted to the state, which conveyed it to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

When the museum assumed responsibility for the property, it was in bad shape. In a basement food-preparation area, dead cockroaches literally covered the floor. Paint was peeling in sheets. Electrical and fire-suppression systems were outdated.

Beginning in 1995, the museum spent millions of dollars to refurbish the grand old building and retrofit it to house offices and educational facilities. In 1999, I was among those assigned offices in the "new" building's north wing.

(We called it the north wing, because it was truly on the north side of the building. When the Confederate women were living there, it was called the west wing. If they had called it the north wing back then, none of the Confederate women, ardent Southerners all, would have agreed to live in it.)

We quickly fell in love with our new home. It was bright, airy, and completely up-to-date.

In the central portion of the building, the reception rooms were decorated with antiques, and an enormous Persian carpet was installed in the parlor. The formal dining room was furnished with reproductions, including custom wallpaper based on an 1815 French design. (The office staff surprised me with a birthday celebration in the dining room one year; we used paper cups and plates.)

Because of its exterior resemblance to the White House, a few movies were filmed in the Pauley Center while I worked there. Filming sometimes meant problems. We were forever being told not to make noise during the filming of "The Contender," for example, and sometimes we had to go outside to get from one wing to another because film crews had taken over the central formal rooms.

But life was pleasant for those of us with offices in the Pauley Center -- away from the faster pace of the main museum and less open to constant interruptions.

I posted a sign on my office door that said, "Osa Lee Yates Slept Here." Mrs. Yates was one of the last of the Confederate women to live in the facility. I have no idea which bedroom was hers, but I wanted to make some connection between us state workers and the building's history.

Ten years later, as I was taking down that sign and preparing to retire for good, another long-time VMFA employee suggested that he and I were probably the last staff members who even knew who Osa Lee Yates was.

Mrs. Yates and hundreds of other needy Confederate women have long gone to their rewards. And if any ghosts inhabit the building on Sheppard Street these days, they are quiet, well-behaved, and shy.