Every July, Dawn Mitchell packs some clothes and supplies into her blue 2005 Honda Accord, leaves her husband and two children in their row house in Baltimore, and vanishes for a week. Working as a high school teacher, Dawn spends most of her summer overseeing the family business that never seems to get done during the school year: pool afternoons and dentist appointments, sports practices and band camp, home improvements and summer reading lists, car repairs and college visits — except for this one week, which is different. “They are my sweet babies and I have my maternal conscience to satisfy,” she says with a Dixie lilt (she is the daughter of a Baptist minister and grew up in rural North Carolina), “but I make it clear to them that this week is sacred. And I don’t want to be contacted unless the creek is risin’ and there ain’t no planks in the house to float out on.”

Much of her life seems like classic soccer-mom material, which makes her destination all the more astonishing: she is heading to Charles Town, West Virginia, to spend the week in an old country villa speaking no language other than Latin. A group called SALVI (Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum, the North American Institute for Living Latin Studies) rents a secluded space large enough for thirty-odd people to spend a week without any outside contact: no phones, no internet, no stores.

While participants can of course do what they want (cell phones do in fact work), every effort is made to ensure that no word of English (or any other language) breaks the Latin spell. They form a kind of Latin commune for the week, doing all their own cooking and cleaning. About six hours each day are taken up in Latin classes, but even presuming eight hours of sleep (which rarely happens), that leaves ten hours a day of conversing, cooking, eating, cleaning, playing, reading, singing, stargazing, strolling, dancing, philosophizing, and sitting on the verandah — all in Latin.

This unusual yearly ritual is known as Rusticatio, the Latin for “spending time in the country,” and it struck me as worth a visit after I had spoken with its founder, Dr. Nancy Llewellyn, who invited me to join Rusticatio after hearing about my efforts to write a Latin textbook which would be more effective for modern students. I had been teaching Latin in various fancy private schools with varying amounts of success. My Latin was good enough, and I was curious. It certainly seemed incongruous — could there really be a mini-colony of Latin speakers holed up in West Virginia? What were they doing there and what could they possibly be like?

Charles Town, the seat of Jefferson County, West Virginia, is just a few miles from Harper’s Ferry. Though not nearly as visited as its more famous neighbor, the town earned its place in the pages of history by witnessing the trial and execution of John Brown, who was hanged here on December 2nd, 1859. It took thirty-eight minutes of hanging before he was officially pronounced dead, due to what the New York Tribune called the man’s “extraordinary hold on life.” Brown had taken over a federal armory and had planned to use the weapons to start, like Spartacus, a slave uprising against a slaveholding Republic. The ends of both men were similar.

A brief walk from the courthouse brings you to the site of the gallows. It was erected outside the town in a large field, which was necessary in order to have room for the 1,500 soldiers who provided security for the event, with cannons pointed at the noose to do away with Brown once and for all in the event of an attempted rescue. The word “overkill” comes to mind. The field is now a quiet residential neighborhood and the spot is someone’s backyard.

The town is pleasant enough, like many old towns in the Potomac Valley, with old buildings and a mildly prosperous atmosphere but not a tremendous amount going on. It’s only sixty-five miles from here to the Capitol Building in D.C., and the area resembles Virginia or Maryland more than Appalachia. Large suburban tract developments are beginning to appear at the outskirts of town, and there’s a fancy restaurant on the main drag. But it’s still a quiet place and visitors stand out. I stop off at a little café and notice the girl at the counter eyeing me curiously. Thinking this might be the start of something interesting, I begin some small talk. After asking her about herself, I’m surprised she doesn’t ask what brought me to town; as I start to offer the information myself, she stops me.

“I know why you’re here,” she says. “You’re one of those Latin speakers.”

I ask her for more information, but none is forthcoming: “They come in every year about this time. They’re all very nice. It’s weird, sure, but it’s kind of cool, I think.” I’d have to go see for myself.

Rusticatio is held several miles outside town in a home called Claymont, one of the old plantation-houses on the old road. The seclusion is a key ingredient: it is useful, for language learning, to be able to create an immersion environment. An old Southern plantation house actually provides almost the perfect language acquisition scenario: a world unto itself, with space enough for forty people to sleep, eat, dance, talk, drink, play music or cards, and go for strolls in the woods and gardens without ever leaving the property.

The house is not visible from the road: you pull down an old carriageway, the modern asphalt cracking and swelling over the roots of old trees, and wind your way past barns and outbuildings until entering a circular driveway at the portico of the vast fifty-nine-room house, built of solid brick painted yellow with white trim, like Mount Vernon. The old carriage steps are still in place, and the entrance is flanked by two impressive marble columns. Inside is a spacious atrium with eighteen-foot-high ceilings, a fireplace, and an oak staircase. At the doorway the Rusticatio staff greet people as they arrive with their luggage for the week. Almost everyone is dressed in t-shirts and shorts and the atmosphere is entirely informal.

The Latin speaking doesn’t start until the second day, after everyone has settled in, so the first night is an opportunity to get to know people in English. Most are surprisingly normal — generally Latin teachers, some older, some middle-aged with families, but most in their twenties or thirties, still willing to try new things. The unusual people are unusual in unexpected ways — Jason Slanga, a Latin teacher from Baltimore, comes in a full-out Mohawk, straight out of the 1980s, giving those present the rare opportunity to use the Latin adjective Mohicanus, -a, -um. It’s not the kind of thing you expect in a person who speaks Latin fluently. Jason is not a mere passer-through either: he comes almost every year, serving as part of Rusticatio’s all-volunteer staff, running the kitchen.

Consider some of the other people who have served official roles at the Rusticatio, and you get an interesting picture of the world of Latin speaking: Robertus, a former Methodist minister from the hills of Alabama who is now a Druid; Cletus, an elderly Italian priest who worked for decades at the Vatican; Andreas, a cultured epicure from Australia, who now teaches Latin in Kentucky; Guenevera, a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley who works with Latin manuscripts and early print editions; and the aforementioned Dawn Mitchell, or Aurora, who teaches high school Latin in Baltimore and helps with all the practical challenges of running Rusticatio.

Each has a slightly different approach to Latin, and slightly different expertise — this is true of the participants as well, who are often just as Latin-fluent as the staff — and the hope is that by bringing these people together, the knowledge they labored to acquire individually may be diffused with less effort. Since most of the people present are teachers, this knowledge is not merely of Latin words, but also of teaching techniques and materials. So Iacoba, a Latin teacher from Santa Monica, brings a collection of popular songs (translated into Latin by her ex-husband) for a karaoke session (my favorite: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” = Ne Desperetis). Patricius, an Anglican pastor from Appleton, Wisconsin, keeps up his Latin by reading the breviary, a collection of daily Christian readings, which the teachers in Catholic and Christian schools start looking into.

I’m asked to make my nature walks a permanent part of Rusticatio, taking advantage of my interest in botanical Latin. Ginnia, a Latin teacher from Austin, Texas, brings buttons, t-shirts, and posters bearing Latin mottoes, while also leading Greek dancing sessions. Something of a polymath herself, she spends a fair amount of time sketching and examining the nature around her, with guides to the local flora and fauna (it turns out the Latin for ‘woodchuck,’ which have now overrun the estate’s old gardens, is marmota).

Nature is one of the two main elements of Claymont, the stage for this odd production. The other is faded grandeur. The house, built in 1840 by Bushrod Washington, the president’s great-nephew (yes, that was his name) has seen better days. Its ample plan — significantly larger than either Mount Vernon or Monticello, and featuring a paneled oak dining room, a library, a music room, a 70-foot-long two-storey verandah, a grand atrium, two substantial wings separated from the main house by small courtyards, and a large ballroom — is still impressive today, but has been the building’s tragic flaw. Construction ate up Washington’s capital, earning the home the moniker “Bushrod’s Folly.”

Henry Bedinger, one of Bushrod’s political rivals, said of him, “I deplore his weakness and folly in erecting Such an expensive building, because a house half or a quarter of the Cost would have Created as much if not greater real Comfort — but Pride & Ambition too often leads to great follies.” The mansion’s sixteen thousand square feet of antiquated interiors — not to mention the rest of the 300-acre estate — have remained a significant maintenance problem for any single owner, and the place passed from family to family before being bought in 1974 by the Claymont Society, a group dedicated to the teachings of the spiritual guru John Bennett.

As Bennett’s fame and followers have aged and thinned, so have funds for maintenance and refurbishment. Claymont is now rented out to groups, but the mansion’s unintelligible bedroom arrangement, dingy bathrooms, cracking plaster, crumbling verandah, weedy gardens and peeling-paint exterior do not offer ideal conditions for all guests. Worst of all is temperature control: the huge house is apparently unwarmable in winter and undoubtedly broils all summer. Air conditioners — helpless against the Potomac heat — are the closest thing the Claymont Society has come to a solution, pending the disbursement of a coming “Save America’s Treasures” grant, which the Claymont Society has worked hard to secure.

But the Romans didn’t have central air either, and a Piranesi aesthetic does not deter Latinists. “When I first saw this place I thought it was perfect,” said Nancy (Annula) Llewellyn, the founder of Rusticatio and SALVI. “It’s such a grand old house, it has such character — I mean really, who wants to learn Latin in a conference center? And there’s so much texture to the place.” Texture is one of the things that Nancy looks for: in fact, it’s one of the main principles of her method.

Llewellyn is a professor at Wyoming Catholic College, and belongs to that select group of professors who consider themselves first and foremost teachers. “I think we have plenty of people who have achieved a great deal of knowledge,” she says simply. “The question is, how to distribute that knowledge. As for languages, basically all the languages of the world are taught the same way: creating situations where learners have to speak, think, and write in the target language. That’s because that method has been confirmed by scientific evidence again and again. The only languages that aren’t taught that way are Latin and Greek. And not surprisingly, those are the languages that people come back twenty years later and say, ‘I took four years of Latin. I don’t remember a word.’”

Llewellyn founded Rusticatio originally in 1997, in California, before she discovered Claymont. One of her earliest collaborators was Dr. Robert (Robertus) Patrick, who now teaches high school Latin in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Patrick is seemingly endlessly complex: a muscular and fit yoga practitioner in his early 50s, he speaks with the soft drawl of his native Alabama Hills and went through Methodist and Catholic stages before becoming a Unitarian-Universalist. He has a Ph.D. in Classics as well as three children (one of whom is now also a Latin teacher and Rusticatio alumna), a wife from Long Island, and long flowing brown hair. He won the 2012 award for Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in the State of Georgia.

One of his refrains is “Latin is not different.” “One of the things you hear constantly is that we can’t really teach Latin using modern-language methods,” he tells me. “‘Latin is different,’ they say. ‘We can’t talk about modern things using Latin.’ All the evidence we have suggests this is not true. Latin doesn’t go into the math section of your brain, while all other languages go in the language section of the brain. Latin goes in the language section just like every other language. All our data on language acquisition suggests this. This means that eventually we have to start teaching to what works. We need to treat Latin as no different from any other language. Ultimately, if we don’t do that, no one will know Latin, neither to read it nor anything else.”

So why has Latin been taught with the grammar-analysis method, when other languages rely on speaking, hearing, reading, and writing? Part of it appears to be that the linguistic methods of Classicists actually belong to a period when the students already knew Latin, but had to be taught the grammar of the language they unthinkingly spoke. Many of the questions Latin teachers ask their students — “What case is this noun in?” — are the same questions grammar teachers asked their Latin students two millennia ago. The difference was that their students already knew Latin by hearing and speaking it. Modern students do not have this luxury.

Dr. Patrick adds another element: “Latin teachers are typically what are known as ‘four-percenters.’ They’re the kids who think case inflections are cool and look at verb synopses as a kind of artform. They’re the kids who if you put them in a corner, hand them a book, and give them minimal instruction, will excel at Latin (or any other language). They can’t understand why we need different methods — the old methods worked fine for them. But I think what we’re finding is that Latin does not have the kind of cultural cachet that would allow it to throw away 96 percent of its students anymore.”

This is one of the main things that draws Dawn Mitchell. “I teach in a Baltimore public school. I love my students — I love them to death. And I’ve seen a lot of students just not make it with the old ways. I want to be able to teach every single student at my school this language that I love. And the more I see these methods working, the more I see that I really can do that. Latin doesn’t have to be a stratifying pursuit. ‘Latin is not different’ means that Latin is not for the academic elite. The language can be taught with any method that makes any second language more accessible.”

Llewellyn sees Rusticatio as a place where Latinists of all sorts, but Latin teachers in particular, grow more comfortable using Latin as a language, for the sake of their own understanding and for their students as well. Her primary linguistic method of choice is called Total Physical Response, or TPR. Its basic premise is that language cues should be tied as much as possible to physical actions: from giving basic directions — telling students to stand, jump, throw, give, sit, etc. — to complicated sequential tasks.

“Basically Rusticatio, besides being a hell of a lot of fun, is one giant TPR classroom,” she says. “We need to do all our own cooking and cleaning here. People say, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have your classes someplace where all that stuff is taken care of? Quite the contrary — we couldn’t do it without those things. First of all, the physical work releases some of the stress of being in an alien linguistic environment, but more than that, when you need to communicate with a group of people about what type of meal we are going to prepare and how to do that, you have to be attentive to linguistic structures because that’s where you’re getting your meaning.”

There are other activities, mostly participant-driven, besides the necessary cooking and cleaning — participants find ways to play badminton (pila pennata) or ultimate frisbee (discus ultimus), hold choir practice and play Scrabble, all in Latin. The terms for things like “ultimate frisbee” are made up, but the directions given during the game — “throw it” or “catch” or “run!” — would have been understood by a young Julius Caesar. One of the highlights of the week for me was listening to (the now late) David Morgan — a professor of French language and literature at Furman University and a South Carolina native — drawling out Latin instructions during a square-dancing class held in the mansion’s old ballroom: “Dextrorsum… sinistrorsum” (“to the right… to the left”).

In a previous year one group of rusticators put on a fireworks display for the Fourth of July — displosiones patrioticae, much celebrated now in Rusticatio lore. Unfortunately SALVI’s legal advisors got wind of this particular activity and asked that it never, ever be repeated. The modern world does reign, even at the Rusticatio. “That’s not part of our insurance, but even more than that, ethically, at a beautiful old historic house like that, even if it was way out in the field far from the mansion… no, you can’t have fireworks at Rusticatio I’m sorry,” says one of SALVI’s board members.

The schedulers have avoided the Fourth of July ever since, but it was very successful pedagogically. After learning the difference between displodere, which means about the equivalent of the English “explode,” and explodere, which actually means to boo off a stage (the verb is the related antonym of the word for “applaud”), the group organized the effects and timing, linked the fuses, and fired, all in Latin. Or almost — Robertus confesses to having gone over the final instructions once in English — “Honestly, I was afraid someone was gonna get killed. Doing all the sequencing and connecting everything, and doing it all in Latin was pretty hard. I mean, we had more fireworks there than Macy’s.”

Sometimes, of course, things do get lost in translation. One year a miscommunication in the kitchen resulted in two eggplants (melongenae) being put in the oven without being perforatae. The whole house was shaken by two successive “displosions” which prompted terror at first — what was the Latin word for “gas leak”? — but mirth soon after, as people realized that no damage was done beyond a lost meal and an almost uncleanably disgusting oven.

Little misunderstandings occur in conversation fairly frequently. I was talking to a group of people about my carpal tunnel problems, when Martella, a Latin teacher in Massachusetts, related that she knew someone who had cut his wrists (secavit carpos) as a result of the pain — and she made a slashing gesture on her wrist — and she recommended it for me too. Everyone found this unfathomably rude and I quickly changed topic. Having sensed that she was not understood, Martella came up to me later and told me more about how much this had helped her friend, and I realized that she meant surgery, not suicide.

The misunderstandings are indicative, in their own way, of what Llewellyn considers the main problem: that even Latin teachers are not that comfortable in the language. Classicists in departments around the country will confess, some with despair, that standards have been declining for half a century or more. “When I look at copies of old exams,” says rusticator Dr. Matthew McGowan, a professor of Classics at Fordham University, “I’m astounded at what teachers used to be able to ask of their students. Some of the professors today couldn’t pass these exams. Our standards are falling…And it’s not clear that our teaching methods — inherited from hundreds of years ago — can actually work with the students we have.”

The combination of declining university standards and the near-complete elimination of Latin from the Catholic Church, which Nancy Llewellyn calls “the greatest cultural catastrophe since the sack of Rome in 1527,” has created a situation where the number of truly excellent Latin speakers is at its lowest number in many, many centuries — maybe ever. People tend to think of Latin as something that has lived only on the page for at least 1500 years, but in fact Latin was one of the world’s spoken languages until about two generations ago. Being able to debate and write in Latin was a university norm until the late 19th century: we have academic papers in Latin written by Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard. No less a figure than Rousseau complains that though he “succeeded in reading Latin authors fluently enough,” he never achieved mastery “in speaking or writing the language, which has put [him] into difficulties when [he has] found [him]self, for some reason or other, numbered among the men of letters” — where speaking Latin was considered de rigueur.

The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, with its public debates, committee-produced documents, and back-room dealings, was conducted entirely in Latin, and this was just in the 1960s. This is why Latin terms for Mohicans and badminton do exist — the clergy have been using Latin continually and have updated the language with new words as needed. But this continuous tradition stretching back to antiquity is now endangered (witness the fact that the current Pope, Francis, has issued the first-ever encyclical without a Latin title). Many of the most comfortable Latin speakers are old men now, and a few of them have been worried for some time about the extinction of a tradition they love. Nancy Llewellyn herself was a student of one of these men, Fr. Reginald Foster, who for many years worked in the Latin office at the Vatican, where Latin is the official language of the documents, but with the exception of a “habemus Papam” every decade or so, is spoken very little.

This situation has attracted the attention of Evan Gardner, a specialist in dying languages. Gardner first came to Rusticatio to get a sense of how Latin is doing after a decade of working with the Chinook, who when he first became involved had only ten fluent speakers left, all of them old. After “lots of ups and downs,” as he reports — “I got kicked out, and invited back in, and kicked out again, and invited back in again” — he designed a whole series of language-learning techniques designed to greatly increase the speed of language acquisition.

One of his key tools are hand signals, which allow a poor speaker to communicate with a fluent speaker without reverting to another linguistic structure. “That’s become a major problem with Native American communities,” he said. “They all speak English. When you have a dominant language like that, what ends up happening is you start thinking English, with just a few Chinook words tossed in. It’s absolutely imperative to work completely in your target language. You have to stay out of English or you’ll never become a truly proficient speaker.” I find myself a bit skeptical at first — now you have to learn Latin and sign language too? — but there’s no doubt that his techniques work.

Gardner came to Rusticatio with only a week of preparatory Latin and no books at all. By the time he left — now after two weeks of Latin — he was able to have a forty-minute conversation with me, all in Latin, in the car ride to the airport. I was astounded. “Language is a game,” he says. “All you really need to play the game is someone who already knows the rules, someone who wants to learn the rules, and situations that are really obvious, so you learn what is being said from the situation itself. When someone says ‘da mihi carotam,’ and points to a carrot, you know to give them the carrot — obviously. Then you know what a carota is. Good language teachers create situations like that all the time. And that’s what Rusticatio is.”

Gardner was leaving directly from Rusticatio for Northern California, where he would be working with the Yurok Indians. “They now have only three truly proficient speakers left. But they said they have young people there who want to learn,” he said. “So we’ll see what we can do.” He had some success with Chinook: “I was not the only person helping there,” he makes clear. “But there are fifty speakers now, and that’s a lot better than ten.”

How is Latin’s situation relevant to Native American languages, I ask? “It’s a fascinating case. I now use Latin as one of my examples all the time. There’s a whole school of thought that says that the answer to the problem of dying languages — and actually, numerically, the majority of the world’s languages are dying — is just to write the languages down. I tell people, Latin has a long and glorious history of written material — but that hasn’t saved it. There is one advantage Latin has — there are people out there who want to understand Cicero, who want to fully understand Cicero. That’s valuable as a source of motivation. But you can’t do that by laboriously translating it into your own language. Classicists who don’t speak the language find it very difficult to access the material from their hearts. They’re not having the same experience of that language the way Cicero had when he wrote it. There’s an immediacy to spoken language, and to thinking in the language, which illuminates all written language. I think you can’t have a proficient understanding of a written language without the experience of speaking it. And so I tell all the people who think that they’ll let their languages die, they’ll just write it down: that’s not an answer. Forget the books. It has to be people talking to people. Once you lose that, it will never be the same.”

People talking to people. Latin is not different. Most nights at Rusticatio a crowd gathers on the mansion’s massive old verandah, with beer and wine and mint juleps flowing, talking into the West Virginia night. It’s an odd chapter in Latin’s history, and it is of course possible that it may be one of the last. Thomas Jefferson said that if his father had made him choose between inheriting the plantation or receiving a classical education, in the end he would have chosen the classical education: it was more valuable in the long term. But on the verandah that last evening, as I stared at the laughing faces of the Latin speakers of West Virginia, I felt that for a week at least I had managed to get my hands on the pleasures of both.

John Byron Kuhner taught Latin for ten years before moving to an off-grid cabin in the Catskill Mountains in 2008. Since then he has spent his time reading, thinking, writing, observing nature and growing plants. More of his writing can be found at www.johnbyronkuhner.com