Marshall erected his Richmond home, called "Shockoe Hill," in 1793 on a plot of ground which he had purchased four years earlier. Here, as his eulogist has said, was "the scene of his real triumphs." At an early date his wife became a nervous invalid, and his devotion to her brought out all the finest qualities of his sound and tender nature. "It is," says Mr. Beveridge, "the most marked characteristic of his entire private life and is the one thing which differentiates him sharply from the most eminent men of that heroic but socially free-and-easy period." From his association with his wife Marshall derived, moreover, an opinion of the sex "as the friends, the companions, and the equals of man" which may be said to have furnished one of his few points of sympathetic contact with American political radicalism in his later years. The satirist of woman, says Story, "found no sympathy in his bosom," and "he was still farther above the commonplace flatteries by which frivolity seeks to administer aliment to personal vanity, or vice to make its approaches for baser purposes. He spoke to the sex when present, as he spoke of them when absent, in language of just appeal to their understandings, their tastes, and their duties." Marshall's relations with his neighbors were the happiest possible. Every week, when his judicial duties permitted or the more "laborious relaxation" of directing his farm did not call him away, he attended the meetings of the Barbecue Club in a fine grove just outside the city, to indulge in his favorite diversion of quoits. The Club consisted of thirty of the most prominent men of Richmond, judges, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and merchants. To quoits was added the inducement of an excellent repast of which roast pig was the pièce de résistance. Then followed a dessert of fruit and melons, while throughout a generous stock of porter, toddy, and of punch "from which water was carefully excluded," was always available to relieve thirst. An entertaining account of a meeting of the Club at which Marshall and his friend Wickham were the caterers has been thus preserved for us: