Solitude, located in Blacksburg, Virginia, served as the home of the Preston family in the 1800s. Granville Smith, uncle of Virginia Governor James Patton Preston (1774-1843), named it Solitude around 1808. Sections of the home were built as early as ca. 1802, with an expansion made ca. 1834. The home was again expanded in the 1850s by General Robert Taylor Preston (1809-1880), who had inherited the property from his father, Governor James Patton Preston. In 1872, the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech) Board of Visitors purchased the home and surrounding 250 acres, adding them to the central campus. Robert and his wife Mary lived in Solitude until their deaths in 1880 and 1881, respectively. The building has served in a variety of capacities since then.

Upwards of 250 African and African American people, including the McNorton, Saunders, and Fraction families, were enslaved at Smithfield, an earlier home of the Preston family, and many of them were later enslaved at Solitude. In 2019, Virginia Tech renamed the surviving outbuilding The Fraction Family House at Solitude in honor of the most numerous of the families and in honor of the contributions made by all the enslaved people forced to work on these plantations. The building is believed to have been a dwelling for enslaved people built around 1843.

The writer of the letter in this collection may have been James Patton Preston (1838-1901), the only young, single man listed by the 1860 federal census in the home of Robert T. Preston of Montgomery County, Virginia