Prince ED-Words
Some Observations
About Prince Edward County’s 250 Years of History
by William E. Thompson
(The Rev. Dr. William Thompson is
a resident of Farmville and is the retired Chaplain of Hampden-Sydney College
and former Pastor of College Church; he chairs the history committee of
Prince Edward County’s 250th Anniversary Commission, and will be writing
a weekly column for The Farmville Hearld during this anniversary
year, 2004.)
Who was Prince Edward, Our Namesake?
I guess
that a logical starting point would be to ask, “Who was this fellow, Prince
Edward, that we were named after anyway...and why?”
There had
been several Prince Edwards who became kings of England way back yonder
in the 1200-1500's. The most important one of those for our own heritage
was probably Edward the 6th (1537-53), who is his sickly and short-lived
existence at least saw to it that the Anglican Prayer Book was firmly fixed
and that Church of England’s official creed of 42 Articles (later revised
to 39) set forth the normative Protestant beliefs of England’s state church.
That particular Edward thus set in stone the official religious beliefs
and practices of the predominant group of colonial settlers who came to
the east coast of North American in the 17th and 18th centuries.
There wasn’t
another English King Edward until Eddie the 7th, who was Queen Victoria’s
long-waiting-offstage son, who finally ruled for just a little while (1901-1910),
giving modern news commentators an example of Prince Charles’s situation
today, with his aging body waiting while his mother keeps ruling on and
on. We mainly know that Edward for his fat picture on a box of stubby,
fat cigars. Then there was the royal lover-boy Edward the 8th, whose
plans to rul in the 1930's ran afoul because of his lusty conduct with
Baltimore’s commoner (very much so) Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson.
“Our” Prince
Edward lived for only 28 years (1739-67). He was fated to be the
second-born sibling of his older brother, George – he who would eventually
become the infamous King George III, form whom the 13 North American English
colonies rebelled in the mid-1700's. Gorgie and Eddie were less than
a year apart in age, and they were essentially brought up together.
There is some evidence, in fact, that the second-born Prince Edward may
have been his parents’ favorite over his older brother, George. Edward’s
kingly brother ruled Great Britain for 60 long years, from 1760-1820...and
lost much of his Atlantic empire in the process.
Meanwhile
“our” Prince Edward grew up fond of dancing and courtly liaisons.
His somewhat libertine nature was not well-received, especially after he
publicly proclaimed his great love for his tutor, a man named Bute, of
whom he said, “I should with an eye of pleasure look on retiring with him
to some uninhabited cavern.” Mr. Bute then allegedly said that the
prince would feel different once he was married. This debauched Prince
Edward died in Monaco form some unknown excesses that he had encoutered
during a continental tour in the summer of 1767. Horace Walpole,
an apt commentator on various Britons of that era, tersely wrote of “our”
Princ Edward, “Thus ended his silly, good-humored, troublesome career in
a piteous manner.”
It kinda
makes you wonder why on earth our own colonial forebears of 250 years ago
would even want to name this new county for such a fellow as that!
They did this, however, in 1754, when the prince was only 15 years old,
and his older brother, George was 16, and back then we were loyal British
subjects, in the main. This was the time of the French and Indian
War; our own George Washington was plotting with the British General Braddock,
against the French on the frontier. My best guess is that the first
citizens of our new county were covering all their bases, and seeking to
brown up the British bluebloods, bynaming this new colonial county for
one of their lords-awaiting. By the time the American Revolution
had broken out in force two decades later, Prince Edward was long dead
and forgotten. Maybe it’s just as well...except in this case our
county’s citizens really have overcome our questionable namesake.
(The Farmville Hearld, Wednesday,
January 7, 2004)
Courthouse or Court House -- Prince Edward Court House
For newcomers to Virginia, a courthouse can be a confusing term.
It takes people a while to understand that if it’s written as one word,
in lower case letters, it’s a building, e.g., our downtown Farmville courthouse,
but if it’s capitalized and written as two words, it’s a town, e.g., Charlotte
Court House and Cumberland Court House. Sometimes the village is
even abbreviated as CH. If one drives north out of Farmville on state
Route 45, there’s a sign indicating that it is 18 miles to “Cumberland
CH.” A quick-reading novice might mistake that as an indication of
how far it is to Cumberland (Presbyterian) Church, since “CH” on some signs
stands for “church.” And to absorb our Virginia quirkiness even more,
sometimes the Court House town – by its judicial functions – has obliterated
a perfectly good name of an already-existing village. For example,
Buckingham Court House “took over” Maysville, and in fact two churches
in the old Court House town still call themselves “Maysville” churches.
One of Robert E. Lee’s maps that he was using during his Retreat Week of
1865, indicated both a “Maysville” (a.k.a. Buckingham Court House) north
of his route, while not too far away to the southeast, there was also a
“Marysville” (a.k.a. Charlotte Court House).
Prince Edward courthouse functions started out in 1754 near the center
of our new county, but there was no Court House town to welcome them.
There was, however, a crossroads tavern located on the main road, near
the center of the newly-laid-out county, so the lawyers and the judge presumably
felt that this was as good a place as any to begin their business.
They even appropriated the taverner’s kitchen (a separate building back
then, of course) as their functioning jail ... which possibly meant that
jail-fare might not have been too bad back in the 1750's. But of
course any county worth its salt eventually needs a “courthouse” and a
Court House, so the entrepreneurial tavern owner, Charles Anderson, bargained
with the county officials to sell them some of his 3,000 acres of property.
Now the new county would not only have a new “courthouse,” but also all
those other things that made up a real “Court House” – not only the judicial
building, but also some public stocks where minor offenders might have
their ankles confined, and a pillory for confining the head and wrists
of more serious offenders (both of those were intended for embarrassment
and public scorn), but space was also needed for whipping post, and for
a gallows, for a debtor’s prison, and for a sure-enough barred jail, plus
an official Clerk’s Office, and some lawyer’s offices that were typically
laid out in a row around the perimeter of the courthouse and its “green.”
This space functioned as a social gathering place for women and children,
and as a bargaining place for men.
Gradually Prince Edward Court House took a very credible shape, thanks
to the tavern -owner Anderson’s wheeling and dealing, in which endeavors
he was assisted by a cohort named George Walker.
The result of all this, of course, was the original Prince Edward Court
House, with a couple of different courthouses. The village served
our country very well from 1754 until the Federal occupation army, the
carpetbaggers and the scalawags, and a few Farmville businessmen (who were
not in those other categories) convinced the county voters otherwise in
1871.
(The Farmville
Herald, Wednesday, January 14, 2004)
Fate of Prince Edward Court House -- a.k.a. Worsham
The “old” Prince
Edward Court House village was our county seat for 117 years, from its
founding in 1754 until its removal to Farmville in 1871; our “new” Prince
Edward Court House was never called that because the name “Farmville” was
already too well established as a tobacco processing and sales center,
and as a transportation center on the Appomattox River and the South Side
Rail Road. But if one takes as a working principle that the county
seat should be near as possible to the center of the county, one can easily
see that Farmville has been an inconvenient choice for these past 130 years!
Meanwhile,
the “old” Court House village was re-named, as a public testimony to the
integrity for the longtime Clerk of the Court, Branch J. Worsham.
This fine gentleman, unfortunately, had been forcibly removed from his
office by the carpetbagger controllers of the Prince Edward’s destiny in
the post-Civil War years, and he is buried at a site whose only “court”
these days are Farmville homes. Nor did his namesake village fare
much better. At the time of the 1871 removal of its judicial functions
into Farmville, what we now know as “Worsham, Virginia” had several private
schools, numerous stately homes, a blacksmith shop, a tannery, several
hotels and taverns, Dr. Mettauer’s medical school of considerable reputation,
and the academic “suburb” of Hampden-Sydney – all these in addition to
the half-dozen buildings and courthouse green that defined its primary
reason for existence. Its daily population was periodically swelled
by the nearby college students walking over there from Hampden-Sydney “to
see what was going on,” and to pick up their mail and, of course, lots
of rural people came to town on “court days,” or when the county militia
occasionally went through their maneuvers, which were sufficiently comedic
to be certain of an enjoyable crowd of on-lookers.
One of
the characters in the Bible is named “Ichabod,” a Hebrew phrase-term that
meant “Alas! The glory has departed!” – which is the feeling one
largely gets when passing through Worsham today. The few people who
live there, or who work there at the single service station/convenience
store, are all fine people, and the three highway historic signs testify
to an impressive history, but generally speaking what once was Prince Edward
Court House is now no more, save for the remaining debtor’s prison of colonial
times, and the Clerk Office, which a valiant group recently labored to
preserve and to have available for public meetings. Nearby, the 20th
century Worsham School building looks the worse for wear every passing
month.
If someone
drives east from the service station, that person will pass the left cutoff
road toward the Pickett’s lithia spring, which was also an 18th and 19th
century magnet for residents and travelers alike. And if you keep
on down “the main road” (route 665), you are traveling along the roadbed
of something that back in the Court House days was called “Gallows Road”
because that’s where folks gathered to see the ultimate form of justice
administered that had been earlier decided “back up the road” in the Court
House’s courthouse.
For certain,
that’s one form of the village’s departed glory that we can be glad we
no longer view as “entertainment.”
(The Farmville Herald, Friday,
January 23, 2004)
Two Invasions of Prince Edward Court House
The “old”
Prince Edward Court House village may be dead and gone, but it still holds
a distinctive place in our national history, in that it is one of the few
county seats in our land that has twice been invaded and occupied by a
“foreign” military force!
On Saturday,
July 14, 1781, when the Court House as a community was already 27 years
old, it was invaded by the British Redcoats ... only on this occasion it
was actually the British Greencoats, because Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s
treacherous and lecherous cavalrymen traditionally wore green. Tarleton
was reputed to be one of the truly “bad” characters in the British army
(he was “the bad guy” in a recent Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot,” which
dealt will alleged perfidies that Tarleton laid onto the South Carolina
back-country people), although a recent biographer of “Bad Ban” insists
that much of his reputation was built on gossip and myth, and not facts.
Be that as it may, on July 14, 1781, Colonel Tarleton and his legion swooped
down onto Prince Edward Court House (they actually interrupted a hanging
that was in progress on Gallows Road, to the east of the Court House),
in search of a collection of food and ammunition that was rumored to be
there or nearby. Some of this had been removed earlier, farther into
the Virginia wilderness, and what was left of the military larder was cleverly
hidden by Mrs. Nathaniel Venable at her Slate Hill plantation. What
she did was to have her sons and her slaves hide the stores inside several
tobacco hogsheads that were lying about. Tarleton and his gang trashed
up several plantation homes nearby and certainly they hassled Mrs. Venable,
but for some reason they did not break into the looming hogsheads.
(I’ve read this story in several forms, but I never have been able to figure
out why unruly soldiers would not have broken into a cache of good Virginia
tobacco.) The frustrated British cavalry then turned southeasterly
and spent the night at Moore’s Ordinary (a.k.a. Meherrin), before returning
to the main body of General Cornwallis’s army.
The other
time Prince Edward Court House was invaded was when the southern pincer
of the United States Army of the Potomac invaded and occupied the judicial
village on Friday, April 6, 1865, in its avowed intent of destroying the
Confederate States of America ... which it would largely do in about 48
more hours, at Appomattox Court House in the next county to the west.
This time the mounted “enemy” wore blue coats. The first of the invaders
numbered about 2,500, and were under the command of General Ranald Mackenzie;
they swooped into the Court House along the exact route that Cornwallis
had come 84 years earlier, having departed from Burke’s Tavern about dawn
and using Leigh’s Mountain as their guidepost to approach. This group
engaged in a somewhat unexpected skirmish of about a half-hour’s duration
(I’m writing a little booklet about the “Battle of Worsham”), before taking
possession fo the village. Thankfully, like the earlier British invaders,
however, they did not destroy the precious legal records at the courthouse.
After those invaders had departed to spend the night along the Buffalo
and Spring creeks, a second group of calvary (numbering about 6,000) came
into the Court House, led by Generals Sherman, Custer and Merritt.
These also departed, but not before the officers had begged supper from
the James Potts Smiths and had briefly taken Branch Worsham as prisoner
because he refused to tell them the direction that some Confederates had
gone, either on retreat or in desertion. Finally, at dusk, General
Charles Griffin’s 12,000 Union infantry and their wagons lumbered into
Prince Edward Court House to make a huge encampment that stretched from
Dr. Mettauer’s medical school to the Court House proper, and then to the
west all the way back to the Hampden-Sydney campus. They began departing
before dawn the next morning.
All-in-all,
that was about 20,000 Yankees who invaded and occupied the old Court House,
and so far as we know, there was no pilfering and trashing, thus providing
that although they may have been Yankees, they weren’t damned Yankees.!
(The Farmville Herald, Wednesday,
January 28, 2004)
From "Sails to Rails" to "Rails to Trails" -- The Fate of Commerical Transportation in Prince Edward County
It was the coming
of the South Side Rail Road in 1854, of course, that became the major world-changing
event in the history and development of Prince Edward County ... which
is certainly ironic now that exactly 150 years forward from that event,
this rail service is apparently now going to be removed from us.
Without the coming fo the railroad, Farmville might still be just “another
wide place in the road,” and instead what we know as “Worsham” might be
a thriving county seat metropolis, with Hampden-Sydney College at the center
of the town!
During
the county’s 250th Anniversary Commissions’s conversations last fall, I
said something flip about Farmville citizens “having bribed” the railroad
to come through its little riverside settlement instead of allowing it
to be built along its originally the county sear communities of Southside
Virginia. Local historian Bob Flippen challenged my ill-advised statement,
in that he believed the Farmville counter-offer represented an economic
opportunity of considerable risk and sacrificial giving as forward-thinking
citizens of Farmville dared to put forth gifts of $100,000 toward the purchase
of railroad stock, in order to guarantee a riverside route for their own
best interests.
The rerouting
of the projected South Side Rail Road of course resulted in the construction
of the magnificent High Bridge, which is now the major focus of a possible
“Rails to Trails” recreational project. As county historian Herbert
Bradshaw and High Bridge historian Jo Smith have both observed, the rerouted
railroad spelled the doom of Appomattox River shipping interests and river
ports like nearby Jamestown (I guess we could call that 19th century transition,
one of “Sails to Rails”).
Various
citizens groups from both Cumberland County and Prince Edward County are
now in a swivet over losing our rail service, with the attendant question
of what will this mean for the future of High Bridge and, quite understandably,
the adjacent property owners near the bridge have lots of questions on
their minds. And, of course, the increasing number of Civil War “fans”
and reenactors and scholars and students are all concerned about the continuing
history of one of the major structures associated with the closing days
of “The War.”
It’s too
bad that back in the mid-1850's, nobody was worried about what the new
route of the railroad was going to do to riverfront citizens of Planterstown
and Jamestown or, for that matter, what it might eventually portend for
the dozens of people who lived and worked at the historic judicial center
of the county, Prince Edward Court House (a.k.a. “Worsham”) who might be
eventually “done in” by the arrival of that same railroad. Also,
I expect that the grading for the new railroad, as well as the making of
the thousands of bricks and the cutting of those huge stone blocks for
the piers of High Bridge, were all assigned (without pay, of course) to
African-American slaves from the area.
As they
say, “Money talks,” and Farmville’s opportunistic promise of $100,000 in
the early 1850's ultimately silenced, or ignored, the well being of a lot
of good people in this area, just as the removing of “our” rail service
may be doing today.
(The Farmville Herald, Friday,
February 6, 2004)
The Influence of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Moving of the Courthouse Village
We should
make at least one other observation about how the 1854 routing of the South
Side Railroad through Farmville ultimately changed the location of our
county seat from “old” Prince Edward County Court House (a.k.a. “Worsham”)
to Farmville. Yes, the new railroad meant an economic boom to the
tobacco shipping concerns of Farmville villagers, and even when a strong
economy is based upon one particular subject, like tobacco, it has a way
of creating other supporting businesses as well as entirely different businesses
as well. And nine miles to the south, the only thing that Prince Edward
Court House had “going for it” was the judicial business within the courthouse,
and some feeding and housing opportunities on the special “court days.”
Another
often-overlooked reality that helped to build up the Farmville economy
is the period during the War Between the States, is that a Confederate
military hospital was constructed alongside the railroad and, of course,
as the war progressed, more and more little wooden barracks hospital wards
had to be constructed for the increasing number of incoming patients and
“government wartime contracts” have always been a boon to local communities.
Also, the recuperation period for these wounded men meant that many of
their kin traveled to Farmville on those same railroad tracks. Furthermore,
those kinfolk needed to have room and board while they were visiting and
this meant more money for t he local Farmville folks ... even if that Confederate
money was increasingly worthless.
Another
railroad -produced boon occurred in Farmville after the war in that for
about ten years this area was actually under military occupation by the
U.S. Army. That’s a period that lots of Virginians would just as
soon forget, although military occupation is typically the inevitable result
of one side’s triumph over the other. The presence of soldiers was
also deemed necessary in order to assure that there would be a peaceable
transition for African-Americans from slavery to freedom, as a result of
the U.S. military triumph and the Constitutional guarantees of the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments.
Certainly
a lot of die-hard Confederate sympathizers resented the presence of these
Reconstructionist enforcers ... but that didn’t mean that they weren’t
anxious also to make some money off of the people. These U.S. soldiers
needed support services from the local townsfolk and sometimes they had
family members who came on that same railroad for extended visits with
their husbands ... and they had money to spend as well. The occupational
soldiers probably should have been physically located at the official courthouse
village because, after all, Prince Edward Court House was the governmental
center of the place these soldiers were occupying ... but, once more, “money
talks,” and Farmville as a railroad depot town was where the money was.
Hence, the economic effect of the occupational army and its opportunistic
companions, who are known to history as “carpetbaggers” (the imports) and
“scalawags” (the local turn-coats), ALL spent money in Farmville and maintained
an influence there, and, in the process, they eventually, contributed to
deposing Branch Worsham from his longtime, distinguished career as Clerk
of the Court in the courthouse village that would eventually hear his name.
These same cohorts made Farmville citizens prosperous and powerful enough
to flex their voting muscles in 1871, to wrest the courthouse away from
the Court House, where it had been for 117 years, ever since its founding
in 1754 ... and the railroad that our county is now about to lose in the
21st century was enabling factor behind it all!
(The Farmville Herald, Friday,
February 20, 2004)
Prince Edward Court House -- the Village
One of the
objectives that some of us on our county’s 250th Anniversary Commission
had was to tell something of the story of our long ago county seat village
that is now just “a wide place in the road” that is simply known as “Worsham.”
Many newcomers to our area do not realize was once a place of considerable
interest and activity and influence when it was flourishing for 117 years
as our county’s governmental center.
Confederate
historian Chris Calkins has noted that in 1865 the old Court House village
still had the air of being an old-fashioned aristocratic community – complete
with several private schools, numerous stately houses, a blacksmith shop,
a tannery, several hotels and taverns, a nearby medical school of considerable
reputation (Dr. Mettauer’s teaching center that was academically governed
by Randolph-Macon College in Boydton), a wooden debtor’s prison dating
from the colonial era (still standing), a handsome two-story stone jail
that was less than ten years old (this was torn down within the memory
of lots of present-day folks), several lawyers’ offices, a Clerk of Court’s
office (still standing), and the old courthouse itself with an open green
space that such buildings typically had around them. The whole scene
was framed with great oak and elm trees that arched over top of the old
north-side roadway, which itself was (and still is, as U.S. Route 15) one
of the oldest highways in the country.
The village
had once been a military objective of the British cavalry during the Revolutionary
War, when it had been a storehouse of ammunition and food for the American
Continental army. A nearby resident, Mrs. Nathaniel Venable, had
dared to stand up to British Colonel Tarleton on that occasion, offering
her own life rather than divulging information about personnel and larder
(fortunately Tarleton didn’t take it). Years later, when the Union
army also made Prince Edward Court House its military objective, the aged
Branch Worsham had dared to stand up to General Sheridan, similarly refusing
to give out any information about the retreating Confederate army.
He was hassled and taken prisoner, but eventually released several miles
away.
The Court
House green had echoed to the political rhetoric of luminaries like Patrick
Henry and John Randolph; many old time localities have made spurious claims
for George Washington’s having slept in their locality ... but he actually
did do that once upon a time at Prince Edward Court House, and so had a
one-time U.S. Vice President, Aaron Burr; when he slept there he was under
arrest, having been charged with treason, and he was en route to his trial
in Richmond.
For years
the old Prince Edward Court House was an attractive curiosity and acquisition
site for nearby Hampden-Sydney College students ... who ambled over there
for their mail, and for occasional courtroom entertainment, and for backyard
moonshine, and for activities of various sorts. But all this changed in
1871, with the county’s vote to move its courthouse functions into Farmville.
The 18th
century English poet, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a famous poem that was entitled
“The Deserted Village.” It is an evocative, nostalgic picture of
a place he calls “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain...”
As such things go, Goldsmith’s creation is probably an exaggerated portrayal
of scenes that may never have been quite as grand as he depicts them.
But I still like it, and often when I pass along the Worsham way, I think
of Goldsmith’s words:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,Amen!
Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Our County's Historians -- Charles E. Burrell and Herbert Bradshaw
All of us make
history, as I hope these columns throughout this anniversary year will
make evident...but it is given to only a few people to write that history
in an educational, entertaining, and even inspiring, way. Aside from
an admirable succession of noteworthy Clerks of Court, who have recorded
the official judicial history of our county affairs (the legal affairs,
that is – not the personal ones!), Prince Edward County has had two very
special writers who have recorded its overall history over these past 250
years.
The first
of these was the Rev. Charles E. Burrell, pastor of the Farmville Baptist
Church (1919-1929). His History of Prince Edward County was
published in 1922, just three years into his decade-long local pastorate.
Pastor Burrell puts to rest the old adage that any local history must be
written by a native who is “one of us.” This Prince Edward historian
was born in London in 1870 and was educated in Canada. He was ordained
in his first Canadian church when he was only 16 years of age. He
came to pastor the Farmville church just after the conclusion of World
War I. The fact that in only three years he was able to amass sufficient
material to write the first history of our county leads some folks – especially
the preachers among us – to ask, “How on earth did this man have time to
tend to his pastoral and preaching responsibilities, and also to research
and write his history?” While there are certainly some limitations
in the scope of what he wrote (e.g., it is somewhat informal and anecdotal;
it largely ignores the African-American dimensions in the county’s history;
and one can truthfully say that he was probably overly impressed with our
Confederate heritage), still his history that was written over 80 years
ago was definitely ground-breaking.
Our county’s
other great history-writer was Herbert C. Bradshaw, about whom we can say,
he was “born and bred in the briar patch” of Prince Edward County.
Many of us know his story because you have lived at least parts of it with
him. He was a native of Rice, educated in our county schools, and
was graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in 1930, summa cum laude as the
valedictorian of his class. He served for a time as the principal
of the Darlington Heights School. He had also earned a Master’s degree
in Latin from University of Virginia, and he was granted an honorary degree
from Hampden-Sydney in 1967. If Mr. Bradshaw had a writing weakness,
it was that he seemingly wrote everything without ever making a judgment
to filter out a single word! His research methods were helped by
the fact that he was virtually kin to, or had married into, every family
in the county, or at least was connected to virtually every Caucasian family,
and certainly many will testify that he was also a friend to almost every
African-American family in the county. For a quarter of a century,
Mr. Bradshaw was a member of the staff of the Durham (N.C.) Morning Herald,
and his final position there before his 1974 retirement was as the head
of its editorial page. Meanwhile, he “never got above his raising”
– he wrote the Sesquicentennial History of Farmville (1948), and
the Bicentennial History of Prince Edward (1954), and one volume
of a projected three volume History of Hampden-Sydney College (published
in 1978, covering the college’s history only through 1856). Just
a few months after the publication of this last work, Herbert Bradshaw
was assassinated by a still-unknown serial killer, begin struck down while
he was washing the dishes at his Durham home. There was some speculation
at the time that his killing possibly represented some disgruntled person’s
response to his editorial policies, but that assumption was largely laid
to rest, in that he was the fourth victim in a series of what were random
drive-by shootings in Durham that autumn. He is buried in the Mt.
Pisgah church cemetery in Rice, as is Mrs. Bradshaw (who was a Cunningham
from our county, who died just several years ago). His Durham obituary
stated: “He was, fundamentally, a Southerner and a gentleman of the old
school who was courteous to all, but he never shunned new ideas and innovations.”
It is Mr.
Bradshaw’s 1954 county history that has been recently reissued, thanks
to our Board of Supervisors, and to the graciousness of the Bradshaw children.
This book (934 pages) is available from our county administrator’s office
for the unbelievable price of only $15, since the Bradshaw children asked
that no one make any profit from their father’s 1954 labor of love.
True, lots of people in this county have made a lot of history here since
1954 – not all of it sunny side up – and we probably need a supplementary
history that covers our county’s eventful last 50 years. But the
truth is that for Mr. Bradshaw’s coverage this bargain book will always
represent the very last work. It can also double as a good doorstop.
(The Farmville Herald, Wednesday,
March 3, 2004)
East and West Ruffner Hall -- Who Was the Namesake William H. Ruffner
March is the birthday
month of Longwood University, whose beginnings are traced to the March
5, 1839, chartering of the “Farmville Female Seminary” by a group of local
supporters. Through various name changes and governing changes we
now have Longwood University, a co-educational institution with more than
4,000 students. In that connection, it is such a thrill to behold
now the wondrous restoration that is in progress for the university’s Ruffner
Hall, with its magnificent Jeffersonian dome once again showing that characteristic
shape that has so long “anchored” that familiar part of our county landscape
along the lower part of Farmville’s High Street. When so many people
were wandering around in dismay after Ruffner’s devastating fire in April
of 2001, who would have dreamed that less than three years that grand old
dome would once again be the recognizable centerpiece atop a new East and
West Ruffner, with its signature Rotunda at the center of the two wings?
The reconstruction
of the “new Ruffner” as such a splendid replica of the “old Ruffner” begs
the question, “Who was this man, Ruffner, whose namesake symbol is once
more going to be the front-and-center- heartbeat of Prince Edward County?”
William Henry Ruffner was
born on February 11, 1824, in the Valley of Virginia where his father was
then serving as the president of Washington College in Lexington, (of course
that’s the predecessor institution of Washington and Lee University).
In addition to being an educator, the father was also a Presbyterian minister.
William H. Ruffner was educated at his father’s college, graduating there
in 1845, after which he attended both Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
(then located at Hampden-Sydney) and Princeton Theological Seminary in
New Jersey. Upon his ordination to the ministry, he served as Chaplain
of the University of Virginia (it is a mistaken notion to think that Thomas
Jefferson did not want any religious influence at the University which
he founded in Charlottesville; Jefferson simply did not want a mandated
sectarian influence; in fact, for many years the chaplaincy of the University
regularly rotated among several Protestant denomination, typically for
a couple of years at a time; Presbyterian Chaplain William H. Ruffner took
a turn at the spiritual post from 1850-1851; he then accepted a call to
become th pastor of the Seventh Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
but he shortly came back to Virginia to serve a rural church just east
of Lexington from 1854-1868.
When the
Commonwealth of Virginia finally established a public school system – after
months of rancorous debate – the Rev. Mr. Ruffner became Virginia’s first
Superintendent of Public Instruction, serving in that capacity for a dozen
years, from 1870-1882. At this same period Prince Edward Country’s
first (volunteer) Superintendent of Public Schools was the Rev. Dr. Benjamin
Mosby Smith, whose paying job was serving as the Hebrew and Greek professor
at te Presbyterian seminary at Hampden-Sydney. When Prince Edward
County initially established its public school system, there were 22 schools
– 11 for white students and 11 for black students. Most of there
one-and-two room schools operated for only 4-5 months...after the fall
harvest season and before the spring planting time. As fledgling public
schools continued to develop across the state, there was an increasing
clamor for some kind of systematic and standardized educational preparation
for the public school teacher. Forward-thinking Farmville citizens
agitated to have the first such state-sponsored teacher-training school
located in Prince Edward County and, in 1884, the Virginia General Assembly
passed a law establishing what was designated as “A Normal School” at Farmville
(“normal” meant “normalizing” some kind of basic educational standards
and expectations; such “normal schools” did not at this time offer college
degrees, and most students stayed for only a semester or two, but still
it represented progress). This new school was designated for the
“education of white female teacher” for the steadily increasing number
of (white) public schools across the state (obviously those two adjectives,
“white” and “female” indicated that the educators and the politicians and
the public at large still had a log way to grow). The law was passed
only on the condition that Farmville would convey to the state the property
that was then know as the “Farmville Female College.” The subsequent
transition to this new kind of school in our county turned out to be a
local bonanza as well, since the Farmville Female College was then in problematic
financial circumstances.
Dr. Smith,
our county school superintendent, was a long-time personal friend of Dr.
Ruffner, and Dr. Smith persuaded his friend to leave his successful administrative
position with the state, to come to Farmville as the Normal Schools first
president, a position he would fill from 1884-1887. In “retirement”
Dr. Ruffner then returned to the Lexington area, where he became a famous
geologist and a pioneer in scientific, farming methods. He also found
time to write the first history of Washington and Lee University!
William H. Ruffner died in 1908, at the age of 84.
That’s
the interesting full-dimensional person we Prince Edward citizens should
remember as we rejoice in the rising “his” new building from the ashes
of the old one. Ruffner was truly a giant among us, as is the fine
institution to which he gave a renewed life in 1884, even as the building
that bears his name gets a new life in 2004.
P.S.
Ironically, yet another one-time State Superintendent of Public Instruction
– Dr. J. D. Eggleston – would come as the president of Hampden-Sydney,
our county’s other college, in 1919!
(The Farmville Herald, Wednesday,
March 10, 2004)
Native-born Prince Edward County Men Become U.S. Senators?
Quick! Can
you name a United States Senator who was born in Prince Edward County?
There have,
of course, been a fair number of Prince Edward natives who have been elected
to the Confederate senate. But how about the United States Senate?
Hampden-Sydney College boasts of having had several U.S. Senators from
among its alumni, most recently the former (1983-1988) U.S. Senator, Paul
Trible, Jr. (HS ‘68), who is now the President of Christopher Newport University
here in Virginia.
But what
about a Prince Edward born U.S. Senator? Give up? There have
been tow of them...so far.
Abraham Bedford
Venable was the native son of a notable Prince Edward family. And,
while a citizen of this county, he was elected to four terms in the U.S.
House of Representatives (1791-1799) and, after a brief “retirement,” he
was elected in the late fall of 1803 to a standard six-year term in the
U.S. Senate. He died, however, in June of 1804, just six months into
his term. Prior to his national service, he had been a lawyer at
the county’s old Court House village (now “Worsham”), and he also served
as a trustee for Hampden-Sydney College.
Three-quarters
of a century later, this county had another native-born U.S. Senator, although
this one was not elected from Virginia. This second Senator was Blanche
Kelso Bruce, an African-American, who was born in Prince Edward County,
was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1875 as a Republican candidate for the
State of Mississippi. The Honorable Mr. Bruce served for just one
six-year term (1875-18881).
Although
we know very little about this political leader, Prince Edward historian
H. C. Bradshaw indicated that according to the oral tradition in these
parts – as reported to him by Dr. J. C. Eggleston of Hampden-Sydney – Mr.
Bruce had been born (1841) of slave parents who were then living on the
Linden plantation that was just over a mile south of the old Prince Edward
Court House, just across the old highway (present-day US 15) from Slate
Hill plantation.
Presumably
Blanche Bruce lived either there or nearby in servitude, until the end
of the War Between the States with its accompanying emancipation through
the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Again – according to
Bradshaw – the son of the white family who had owned the Bruces had taught
young Blanche to read. Bruce would have been 24 years old when he
was granted his freedom, whereupon he followed New York newspaper editor
Horace Greeley’s old dictum for success: “Go West, young man, go West!”
A fair number of newly emancipated young men followed that tried-and-true
advice in the immediate post-war period. Bruce’s “West,” however,
was not across the Mississippi to the Great Plains, but rather to the “Southwest”
– still east of the Mississippi. Why he went in that direction, we
don’t know. What we do know is that amidst the social upheavals of
this “Reconstruction Era,” it was an opportunistic time for truly bright
young black men to achieve an upward mobility that had never been possible
heretofore.
In the
case of both Venable in 1803 and Bruce in 1875, U.S. Senators were not
yet elected by popular vote. This would not happen generally in all
of the states until the 1913 passage of the 17th Amendment. Prior
to that time, Senatorial elections were the result of “a good ole boys”
caucus in various state capitals. Evidently what had happened for
both Abraham B. Venable and Blanche K. Bruce was that in their respective
governmental circles of Richmond and Jackson, these men had impressed their
respective colleagues and had ingratiated themselves sufficiently in their
company, that “their kind” essentially engineered their Senatorial elections.
This process does not mean they weren’t worthy men; it’s simply the way
things were done.
Come to
think of it, “back room politics’ among ‘the good ole boys’” is still the
way a lot of things get done...and it’s not necessarily just on the national
scene.
(The Farmville Herald, Wednesday,
March 17, 2004)
The effects of the Conferderate and Union invasions of Prince Edward County
The greatest series
of economic disasters that ever occurred within Prince Edward County happened
during the first full week of April in 1865, for that was when two separate
waves of humanity and their destructive carnage swept over the county from
east to west. This of course was the time of Lee’s Retreat, or Grant’s
Advance, (depending on one’s perspective), when both the Union and the
Confederate armies from the mid-Atlantic portion of that four-year war,
struggled and stumbled and destroyed their way through our county.
And by the time the blessed “silence at Appomattox” finally occurred on
Palm Sunday afternoon, April 9, virtually all the roads and bridges within
the county, and much of people’s private property lay in ruins...ruins
so terrible that it would take three-quarters of a century for the agricultural
area to get back to some kind of modest equilibrium.
In another
sense, though, there was very positive economic result of that otherwise
destructive week: African-American slavery that had existed within Virginia,
as well as within many other states for over two and a half centuries,
was demolished militarily with the Confederate surrender and legally with
the passing of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; henceforth,
formerly enslaved black persons were no longer counted as “property” in
some cases, and as 3/5 of a person (Constitution, Article I, Section 2).
As we all know, however, fully defining and accepting those African-American
citizens emotionally, educationally, and economically is a work that is
still in progress, from the standpoint of many persons and institutions.
But the
reality of Prince Edward County history is that when Lee’s army and Grant’s
army came through our area, this county’s immediate future was decimated.
When those home-county Caucasian soldiers came back from Appomattox, and
from Durham, North Carolina (many with mangled arms and legs) and faced
these fields and villages alongside their newly-emancipated African-American
neighbors, there was no effective money, nor borrowing power; there was
no working postal system; the rail system had been disrupted with the destruction
of several spans of nearby High Bridge; the roadways had been chewed up
by men and horses and wagons and cannon; the majority of the livestock
had been either killed or stolen; many hen-houses and smoke-houses had
been raided by the soldiers of both armies; and some barns and private
homes and even churches had been ransacked and partially destroyed.
The eastern
portion of the county had been thoroughly raked over in several battles
that took place along Sailor’s Creek on Thursday, April 6. That night,
as the barely-intact Confederate army struggled to get across the Appomattox
River and other streambeds named “Sandy” and “Bush” and “Briery” and “Buffalo,”
and through Farmville itself, and the high commanded of the Army of the
Potomac was planning its Friday, April 7, maneuvers. In the classic
tactics of an army moving toward its next objective, Generals Grant and
Meade and Sheridan decided to divide their invasion forces into a single
thrust, and two accompanying pincer movements. The main force would
be jammed forward as quickly as possible into Farmville itself, for the
commanders knew that Lee was desperately hoping to fee his famished soldiers
from several boxcars of food that awaited them there alongside the Appomattox
River. Another wing – largely infantry and artillery – would cross
to the north bank of the Appomattox River, just east of town an sweep up
toward the long low line of Cumberland County hills several miles north
of Farmville, and then perhaps pinch back across the river just west of
town. Meanwhile yet another portion of the Union army – mainly cavalry
– would ride swiftly that Friday toward Prince Edward County Court House,
to block Lee’s possible escape route southward toward the Richmond and
Danville Railroad at Keysville. These riders would be joined by another
cavalry command coming from the Burkeville railroad junction, cross-country
by Leigh’s Mountain, also bound for the Court House village. Many
of those cavalrymen of the south pincer movements had successfully blocked
Lee at Jetersville several days earlier.
As it turned
out, the southern movement of Sheridan’s and Mackenzie’s troops (and following
infantry forces of the Union V Corps) were not necessary. They made
for some interesting tidbits of history at the Court House village and
at nearby Hampden-Sydney, but the main events would occur in the town of
Farmville and along the high ground around the Cumberland Presbyterian
Church. The Union thrust directly into Farmville that Friday morning,
April 7, did indeed cut short the feeding of the Confederate soldiers,
but General Lee effectively “slipped out of the noose” by getting most
of his men and wagons across the river into Cumberland County. He
did it though by burning his bridges behind him this time the passenger
bridge and the rail bridge there at the river. Earlier that night
that portion of his army which had crossed the High Bridge rail corridor
had fired several of its sections. There would eventually be battles
along the Plank Road and around the Cumberland Church, but the dwindling
soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia would manage to exit Prince Edward
and Cumberland counties by the way of Curdsville and New Store roads...but
eventually every roadway of every kind dead-ended at Appomattox on the
second Sunday in April.
There was
a big mess left behind in Prince Edward County. Thankfully the Court
House village and Hampden-Sydney College and Union Theological Seminary
and the Farmville Seminary for women were not destroyed, as other courthouse
towns and colleges had been, and thankfully the majority of the buildings
in Farmville had been left intact and residents were unharmed, although
many people evacuated the immediate area. Thankfully those rail-side
hospital buildings and their vulnerable patients had also been spared.
Furthermore, although some white people had feared a destructive response
of the newly-emancipated blacks, there is no recorded evidence of such
activity anywhere in the county. The oft-reviled Yankee soldiers
also behaved themselves, in many cases, posting guards over private properties
within our county. Still, that war – its causes and its aftermaths
– were the costliest historical realities ever to hit this county and in
some ways we are still paying for those things.
(The Farmville Herald, Friday,
April 9, 2004)
Barbara Johns -- daring to challenge decades of unspoken “rules of order”
This week marks the 53rd anniversary of an
historic Prince Edward County event – the beginning of the student strike
at R. R. Moton High School. This startling event – or series of events
– would immediately challenge the continuing existence of “old Prince Edward
County,” and it would ultimately be a part of changing the educational
landscape of the entire United States, and with those changes, our entire
national culture.
This year’s Washington Post Magazine
copy of April 4, suggested that the actions of 16-year old Barbara Rose
Johns in Farmville on the unforgettable date of April 23, 1951, possibly
qualifies her to be honored as one of the bravest teenagers ever in the
history of our nation. After all, on that day she was thrusting herself
visually and verbally in front of “a situation that had either the overt
or tacit support of every white leader in the county.” One might
even go so far as to suggest that the Post’s last word in that sentence
could even be spelled “country.”
Maybe Barbara and the handful of student co-conspirators
who joined her that morning on the Moton High School auditorium stage,
only had a short-range goal of better educational facilities in mind, and
not the burgeoning case that would eventually be joined with several others
in producing the May 17, 1954, unanimous Supreme Court decision striking
down the longtime “separate-but-equal” Jim Crow laws. Nonetheless,
those actions of public protest from teenagers – a public walk-out complete
with placards and slogans – were unprecedented actions for the “safe” years
of post-war America. Now, over a half century later, we are all accustomed
– perhaps even too much so – to protest marches, strikes, slogans, but
for goodness sakes! this was back in “the silent ‘50's” when virtually
all young people – black and white – did pretty much what our parents told
us to do and not to do (except maybe when we went to those drive-in movies).
And here was a 16-year old (and a girl at that!!) who was behaving in a
decidedly unexpected way! What on earth would her parents, or the
parents of those other teenagers, think? What could those “rocking-the-boat”
youngsters possibly expect to happen when a report about their conduct
went home ahead of them? What thoughts were going through the minds
of those in the student body there that morning when Barbara banged her
shoe on the lectern and yelled, “I want you all out of here now!”
The present-day word of some people there then is that her persona was
so electrifying then and there, that they were actually scared not to follow
her bidding! Their parents might quaver and quibble, but they would
not!
One might even recall of that scene, the scriptural
suggestion that in the coming age of the kingdom of God. “The wolf
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and fatling together, and a little child shall
lead them.” And April 23, 1951, was truly a defining Kingdom Moment
for our county and for our nation’s collective conscience, when a little
child stepped forth.
Her critics, both then and now, would insist
that Barbara Johns was being used as a tool of “outside agitators” – people
like the Rev. L. Francis Griffin of Farmville’s First Baptist Church, or
Barbara’s own uncle, the Rev. Vernon Johns of the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama (himself a largely unacknowledged Prince
Edward County native), or the NAACP. But objective investigations
and personal testimonies agree that Barbara Johns’ actions in our county
on that day were essentially her own doing, with the strong support of
a half-dozen other students initially, and then virtually the entire Moton
student body of about 450 teenagers. It is no accident that a marker
on the ground of the old school now reads “Dedicated to the Children of
1951 Student Walk-Out at R. R. Moton High School,” and there is an accompanying
picture of a massed group of the student body itself. That marker
was placed on the property on the 50th anniversary of that date, on April
23, 2001.
Her mother, who was working that day in the
U.S. Navy Yard in Washington, did not know what Barbara was planning until
after the seminal even had occurred; neither was her father, who was working
back at this Darlington Heights store that morning, aware of the plans
of his “uppity” daughter, whom he assumed was being her usual, pliant self
at school that day. Unbeknownst to any other member of the family
– including Barbara’s own siblings – she and a few other friends had been
planning “to do a new (and unheard of) thing” that day. Some folks
today, including people within the family itself, talk about a peculiar
“streak” that those Johns family members seemed to have in common.
They termed it, “the Johns temper,” in the words of the Post, “an
eruption of passion, heeding nothing and no one, scary even.” Still
further, the newspaper said, “The Johnses could be hard-nosed, not always
in the right direction. They were stubborn, strong-minded, strong-will
people. Sometimes it didn’t set right with people outside the family,
but that’s just the way they were.”
A single person against The Establishment:
it’s the stuff of great history – David against Goliath, Horatio at the
bridge, Martin Luther hammering up his 95 arguing points in defiance of
a 1500-year old Church, the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, and
a 16-year old Prince Edward County girl daring to challenge decades of
unspoken “rules of order” and the acknowledged way that blacks should “quietly
fit in.”
This was years before the better-known civil
rights protests began across the South. No one – at least of all
Barbara Johns – could have imagined that History would eventually declare
that her actions would be on the “right side.” It’s a truism that
once a bandwagon starts rolling and acquires support, lots of people will
jump on (and some will falsely claim that they were there all along, even
when they were not there at those generative moments). Over a half-century
later lots of Caucasians and African-Americans alike claim that Barbara
Johns’s actions were truly ground-breaking and historic. But back
then, on April 23, 1951, nobody was gifted with such foresight, and nobody
knew how many supporters of her actions would eventually join her and her
on stage compatriots ... including those nine white judges on the U.S.
Supreme Court. Barbara Rose Johns deserves to be acclaimed as one
to the most singular personalities ever to live in Prince Edward County.
We are all indebted to her legacy.
(The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, April 21, 2004)
Vernon Johns -- Civil Rights Leader, Prince Edward Native
What Prince
Edward native once had a movie made about his interesting life?
Give up?
It was the Rev. Vernon Johns, a Darlington Heights native. Back in
the early 1990's there was a made-for-TV movie simply entitled The Vernon
Johns Story, and it starred in the title role, James Earl Jones – the
star of many better-known movies, and the one whose deep, resonant voice
so many of us have heard in that unmistakable identification notice: This
is CNN!”
Quite honestly
the televison bio- movie did not make much of a splash that year ... although
the person/parson being depicted there absolutely made many splashes, while
rocking and upsetting so many boats during his relatively brief lifetime
of 73 years. Both the Longwood University Library and the Hampden-Sydney
Library have VHS tapes of that movie, and all of us could learn some more
dimensions to our own county’s history by reviewing that movie. I
showed it to a Hampden-Sydney freshmen class that I was teaching several
years ago and, true to my expectations, several of the classes members
reacted by confessing that they “couldn’t believe things like that really
happened back then.” “Back then” was only in the 1940's and early
1950's!
In this
anniversary season of so many hallmark events from the beginnings of the
mid-twentieth century civil rights story in our county and in our nation,
the life of this Prince Edward native bears a second look. You can
still find older citizens of our community who remember him when he was
growing up and initially farming in the Darlington Heights area, and they
certainly have “their take” on this controversial personality; you can
still find people in our area who even insist that back in 1951 he was
the absentee manipulator of his teenage niece, Barbara Johns, the Moton
School strike leader. Or, you can drive to the intersection of our
County Routes 666 (Douglas Church Road) and 665 (Darlington Heights Road),
and pull over and read the black-and-silver historical marker that describes
some of the basic facts of his life.
But you
really ought to see the movie to get a feel for the times and the man.
Most of that movie depicts only one part of his life – the four years when
he was the blunt-spoken pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery,
Alabama. That’s the church where Martin Luther King, Jr. succeeded
Vernon Johns as pastor in 1952; and that’s the congregation whose building
was blown up on a Sunday morning in the early 1960's, killing several of
the Sunday school children in attendance there that day. That church,
its pastors, and its members are truly major building blocks of social
change motivated by the Christian gospel.
Vernon
Johns himself is a testimony to the value of education. Back in the
spring of 1892, when he was born there in our own county’s Darlington Heights,
most people assumed that being a Negro male, he would eventually be one
more day-laborer in the red-clay fields of our county. But the Johns
family always had a way of defying community expectations and instilling
larger visions in the hearts and souls of their children. Vernon
Johns did indeed work in the fields of our county as a youngster, but he
eventually went to Oberlin College in Ohio, an institution long identified
with progressive ideas (it was the first coeducational college in our country,
for instance – a really “dangerous new thing” for the early nineteenth
century).
Vernon
Johns became an impassioned preacher (in the movie, James Earl Jones is
especially believable in that role). He was, in fact, the first African-American
minister to have a sermon included in an annual publication entitiled Best
Sermons of the Year, and his was included there in 1926, when he was the
pastor of the Court Street Baptist Church of Lynchburg. Johns served
there from 1920 to 1926, and again from 1941 to 1943. While he was
living and working in Lynchburg, Vernon Johns also served (1929-1934) as
President of the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, one of the
historic southern preparatory centers for black church pastors.
The Rev.
Johns preached his expected sermons on Sunday but he also preached his
unexpected ones during the week. The movie vividly records a true
incident that occurred when he sat down at a segregated diner to dringk
a cup of coffee. As the black preacher finished each cup, the glowering
counterman deliberately broke that cup rather than washing it and using
again for other customers. So the contest of wills went, cup-after-smashed-cup,
until the counterman finally had to take into consideration his mounting
costs. The proprietor gave in, but just barely before the preacher’s
own capacity to contain had been reached.
Our county
has numerous honored references to a Johns family of one branch or another.
We have the Johns Memorial Episcopal Church (organized 1879, present building
consecrated 1882), named for a famous nineteenth century Virginia bishop
of the church. On the campus of Hampden-Sydney we have Johns Auditorium,
built in 1951 and named for the longtime (1938-1958) chairman fo the college’s
board of trustees, Dr. Frank S. Johns, a Richmond physician. “Johns”
is a distinguished family name all over Southside Virginia, but surnames
are not race-specific, and we should never forget this African-American
preacher who was also named Johns, a civil rights pioneer before that kind
of person became a twentieth century folk hero. He was one of our
own ... even though he had to go elsewhere before he was widely acclaimed,
reminding us of Christ’s observation that “a prophet is not without honor,
save in his own country ...” Often i is the fate of pioneers to push
themselves outside thieri restrictive borders, all for the good of those
who come after them. I challenge you to walk on up the field-trail
from his highway marker, and turn left to his gravesite, where there’s
a bench for personal reflection. The poet Thomas Gray wrote of some
such people and their gravesites: “full many a flower is oborn to blush
unseen, and waste its sweetness of the desert air.” May that not
be so for this man! We are all the richer for the contributions of
this Prince Edward native, who most definitely did not “blush unseen” nor
waste his life’s work “on the desert air.”
The Farmville Herald, Friday, April 30, 2004
Governor Philip Watkins McKinney -- Prince Edward citizen
May 1st
was the birthday anniversary of one of Farmville and Prince Edward County’s
most notable nineteenth century citizens ... even though he was a birth
native of our next-door neighbor, Buckingham County. When Philip
Watkins McKinney first saw the light of day on May 1, 1832, in his parents’
farmhouse at New Store, his relatives perhaps thought he might eventually
become a good additional farm hand, but they probably never dreamed that
this good old country boy would grow up to become Governor of Virginia.
He entered
Hampden-Sydney College at the age of 17 and was graduated the in the class
of 1851, where he had already established himself as an earnest student,
an attractive and sociable young man, and a splendid public speaker.
He had, in fact, received a gold medal from the college’s Philanthropic
Literary Society, in recognition of his declamation skills (he would later
be a college trustee from 1885-1899). Immediately after his graduation
he studied law a Judge Brockenborough’s well-known private school that
in Lexington, and he was admitted to the bar in 1858. In that same
year he was elected as Buckingham County’s representative to the House
of Delegates in the Virginia General Assembly. McKinney subsequently
served as a captain in a Confederate cavalry unit until his severe wounding
in the 1863 battle of Brandy Station, near Culpeper. After a lengthy
recovery he served in minor guard duties for the remainder of the war.
Philip
McKinney came to Farmville in the summer of 1865 to resume his law career,
albeit in a new setting. Prior to the war he had been a Whig in his
politics, but in the general upheaval of postwar politics, he became a
firm Democrat and for the remaining 35 years o his life, Mr. McKinney would
be one of this county’s most outstanding citizens ever. He served
several different terms as the county’s Commonwealth Attorney, ran unsuccessfully
for Congress in 1872, twice was a Presidential elector, and was a delegate
of the national Democratic Conventions of both 1884 and 1888. Having
run unsuccessfully for Attorney General of Virginia in 1881, he was nevertheless
nominated as the Democratic candidate for Governor in 1889. In that
election he was pitted against William Mahone, the state’s best-known Republican
and one of its principal “heroes” of the last portion of the War Between
the States. Despite predictions of an underdog candidacy, Philip
McKinney won by almost 45,000 votes. His 1890-1894 term was especially
noted for the Commonwealth’s strong economic recovery. In his Farmville
history, Herbert Bradshaw observed of McKinney’s gubernatorial term; “His
administration was efficient and popular” (p.115)
When McKinney’s
term was over, the Farmville Guard was in Richmond for the inaugural parade
of his successor and the group stayed overnight to accompany the ex-Governor
on his train ride home to Farmville, where an elaborate public reception
had been planned or the town-and-county’s “favorite son.” A huge
crowd was on hand as McKinney and uniformed Guard detrained (at the former
depot that was then located just west of where the rail-trails now cross
Main Street). All of the town’s businesses were closed for the occasion;
classes had been canceled for the young women of the Normal School; the
Farmville Silver Band was playing “Home Sweet Home.” A quickly-forming
parade surrounded McKinney’s buggy, and the celebrants bore him along to
the town’s Opera House (just south of the courthouse lawn), where a selected
group of the county’s black and white citizens greeted him. Confederate
veteran, Major A. A. Venable, Jr. then read a public resolution that had
been adopted in appreciation for this “adopted” Prince Edward son, and
Mayor W. H. H. Thackston gave a brief address, welcoming him home.
The ex-Governor
returned to his longtime private residence on the northeast corner of Beech
and Garden streets (it’s still one on the community’s most prominent homes),
and he resumed a quiet law practice of public service that was not nearly
as stormy as many of his professional cases of the 1870's and 1880's had
been, when he first became prominent throughout Southside Virginia as Prince
Edward County’s Prosecuting Attorney. He continued to attend the
Presbyterian Church just down the hill from his house, he made frequent
trips to Hampden-Sydney, and he often held Confederate reunion meetings
in his home. He died in 1899 at the age of 67 and was buried in Westview
Cemetery. He was married twice, first to Nannie Christian of New
Kent County, and later (1884) to Annie Lyle, who continued to live in Farmville
until her death in 1936.
The 1890's
were not noted as a particular “grand” era in the overall history of Virginia
and certainly Prince Edward County and its surrounding jurisdictions were
still having many postwar economic struggles and both races were still
adjusting to their new social realities. That does not mean, however,
that there was not good and descent people, who were brightening the corner
where they were ... and Philip McKinney was certainly one of them!
He deserves to be remembered during this birthday month.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, May 7, 2004
Union Theological Seminary -- Prince Edward County Years, part one
One hundred
and ten years ago, in early May of 1894, one of Prince Edward County’s
major disruptions began to occur when Dr. Walter W. Moore, chairman fo
the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (then located adjacent
to the campus of Hampden-Sydney College), proposed to the seminary’s board
of trustees that this growing group consider the possibility of moving
the seminary to some urban location in either Virginia or North Carolina,
because the theological graduate school probably did not have much of a
future if it continued to be located in Southside Virginia.
Mind you,
the seminary had flourished rather well in this “isolated” place ver since
1822, when it was separated from Hampden-Sydney College itself. Actually,
the academic training of Presbyterian ministers had been under way at the
college almost from its very inception, back in 1775, and under the direction
of the college’s fourth president (1807-1820), Moses Hoge, probably entirely
too much of its baccalaureate curriculum was directed toward pre-ministerial
classes, and certainly too m much of Dr. Hoge’s time and energies were
spent in that direction. Upon Hoge’s unexpected death in 1820, the
next president, John Cushing, was selected, and the fact that he was a
layman, not a preacher and an Episcopalian, not a Presbyterian, threw the
expectations of clergy-preparations into turmoil. It was not until
two years later that a Bedford native (and a former Hampden-Sydney tutor),
John Holt rice, was called from a Richmond pastorate to assume the direction
of an entirely new post-graduate seminary that would be located on land
adjacent to the college. And for the next 72 years that seminary
had seemed to move along very respectfully with an ever-increasing national
acclaim. It was first called “The Virginia Presbyterian Theological
Seminary,” but in 1826 Dr. Rice succeeded in getting the Presbyterians
in the neighboring state of North Carolina to assume the joint sponsorship
of the school, at which point the name changed to “Union Theological Seminary
in Virginia,” with the “union” being a reference to the co-state, or synod,
sponsorship. Dr. Rice himself was remarkable in his fund-raising
activities and a fine cluster of brick buildings eventually graced the
tree-lined road that came to be called “Via Sacra” (“the Holy Way”).
This three-year post-graduate school typically had about 30 people in its
student body each year, about half of whom were graduates of Hampden-Sydney,
another fourth from the University of Virginia and Washington College (later
Washington & Lee), and a final fourth from North Carolina colleges,
with a smattering from other states.
Transportation
to either the college or the seminary had always been a problem, but this
was alleviated some with the opening of the South Side Rail Road (with
its Farmville depot) in 1854, but still one had to get to the seminary
from Farmville and that could be as long as a two-hour buggy ride.
And the increasing number of North Carolina matriculates following the
Civil War had considerable train changes before they could even get as
close as Farmville. But there were other factors as well. The
southside Virginia economy and infrastructure was decimated by the war,
and it took many years to get back to a basic form fo economic equilibrium.
Thanks to textile and furniture manufacturing, North Carolina was recovering
faster than Virginia and numerous North Carolina pre-ministerial students
were beginning to feel that going to school in rural Virginia was a step
backward for them, despite the seminary’s fine accommodations and faculty
and the village’s genteel atmosphere.
Another
factor was the influence of the educational philosophy of John Dewey which
believed that there needed to be a very practical component in one’s professional
education, and not simply the theoretical, no matter how well thought-out
the theoretical (and in this case, the biblical) precepts might be.
Law schools and medical schools and other seminaries were now emphasizing
training centers such as prisons, jails, orphanages, “old folks homes,”
and even something called “factory evangelism” where laborers’ half-hour
lunch breaks were regarded as fair time for them to be exposed to fledgling
preachers. Plainly speaking, the one-room churches of Prince Edward,
Charlotte, Buckingham, and Cumberland counties (the normal “horseback riding
range” for a seminary student on Sundays) did not offer much in the way
of “practical” educational opportunities.
Those were
the main reasons that Dr. Walter W. Moore had in mind when he brought up
the possibility of a move to some urban center. They were very legitimate
reasons...although, of course, there were other reasons as well.
And, as is so often the case, those other reasons may have been the real
reasons, after all was said and done. Hampden-Sydney College and
its faculty and The Farmville Herald immediately became the spokesmen for
the opposition. It would be four more years until the seminary actually
did mover to the Ginter Park area, then just outside of Richmond.
Some of
this was not a very pretty story...but real history is like that, you know.
In the end it’s probably best that everybody knows “the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.” And we shall consider in another
column what the truths and falsehoods of the 1894-1898 struggle really
were.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, May 14, 2004
Union Theological Seminary -- The Rest of the Story
This week’s column
is “the rest of the story” that I began last week, relative to Prince Edward
County’s two-year battle (1894-1898) to keep the Presbyterian’s three-year
post-graduate seminary at Hampden-Sydney (where it had been since 1822).
In May of 1894, the seminary’s leading faculty member, Walter Moore, proposed
to the seminary trustees that the entire church would be much better served
by moving the school from its “backwater” location here in southside Virginia
to some urban center of transportation and commerce were there would be
more opportunities for practical experiences in filed education.
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 had recently trumpeted the virtues and
glory of The City – any city – as if such were like unto “the new Jerusalem,
coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband....” Dr. Moore’s argument was that the one-room crossroads
churches of ours and the surrounding counties simply did not offer adequate
training opportunities and mission challenges to “modern-day” seminarians.
There was
an immediate hue and cry from seasoned Presbyterian ministers in North
Carolina and Virginia because, of course, they felt that they had been
more than adequately trained at the Hampden-Sydney seminary (in fact many
of them also had personal ties to this county because their seminary evenings
had not been spent entirely on urgent scriptural matters, but rather on
ardent relational matters of courtship, engagement, and marriage with the
available Prince Edward belles). Dr. Moore had spent nearly all of
his spare time over the last several years trying to raise money for the
seminary and he reported that he kept hearing the recurring complaint “from
our main supporters” that Union Theological Seminary had no future in this
out-of-the-way place. Furthermore, he insisted that prospective students
frequently complained about their difficulty in getting to the seminary
by train.
Dr. Moore’s arguments definitely
had considerable merit and they were carried forward by his charming, charismatic
presence. He was learned and well-spoken, in his young 30's, 6 feet
3 inches tall, and – in the news report of that day – he was frequently
likened to “a Greek god” (which should have been a bit much for the Commandment-believing
Presbyterians). He was sought after far and wide as a visiting preacher,
and Princeton, McCormick (in Chicago), and Louisville Presbyterian seminaries
were all clamoring for his permanent presences on their respective faculties.
The Farmville
newspaper’s initial editorial response to Moore’s proposal was to sniff
a bit haughtily: “Oh, no, brother! It were as possible to remove
Willis Mountain from Buckingham as Union Seminary from old Prince Edward”
(one wonders what that writer’s celestial perspective might be now of that
dwindling mountain?). The next week, the Herald’s editor had broadened
his imagery: “...What? Move the Seminary? One might as well
speak of moving the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Atlantic Ocean!”
By the early summer of 1894, our local paper was suggesting that “sissy”
city-trained ministers would never choose to serve country churches, and
that the gas lights of the city were “bad” for the eyes and not as good
as kerosene lamps for studying, and that the availability of frequent baths
by means of a city’s plumbing system “was not really all that healthy for
young men.” A stalwart county leader, Colonel Henry Stokes of Green
Bay, took the more practical angle of creating angle of creating a petition
to put the issue of public bonds on the November ballot, with view to using
those bonds to build a railroad between Farmville and Keysville (something
that had often been suggested previously), or at least to extend a trolley
car line to Hampden-Sydney. That proposal needed a 3/5 majority,
and although it passed comfortably (718-545) on November 17, it fell short
of the necessary margin of victory. Meanwhile, some meddling soul
from Louisville, KY, wrote to the Herald in early August that he had it
on good authority, that if the seminary left there were Presbyterians who
intended to sell the property “to the State for the purpose of a lunatic
asylum for the Negroes.” This was an absolutely unkind, totally unnecessary,
racist rumor, but in the final analysis racism was most definitely a contributing
issue to the eventual move. The seminary trustee minutes of he previous
two decades reveal an increasing concern about he presence of the black
Mercy Seat community immediately contiguous to the seminary property –
a late nineteenth century of NIMBY” (“Not in My Back Yard”). Meanwhile
the Hampden-Sydney President Richard McIlwaine was fighting a losing public
relations battle since all of the argument by his friend Walter Moore for
moving could also be seen as arguments against the college’s staying in
such an “isolated backwoods” area.
Real estate
cronyism was also a factor. The new chairman of the seminary’s board
of trustees was George W. Watts of Durham, NC. He was an evangelical,
mission-minded, Christian layman who was the business manager of the Duke
Brothers Tobacco Company. Dr. Moore also had his hand in Mr. Watts’
pocket as well as his hind in the pocket of the Baltimore philanthropist,
W. W. Spence (Hampden-Sydney’s current historian, John L. Brinkley has
delightful – but sardonically – observed that Dr. Moore “knew how to smell
money,” which Dr. McIlwaine did not.) Mr. Watts was secretary-treasurer
of the American Tobacco Company “conglomerate” and Major Lewis Ginter from
Richmond was then the president of the same. Major Ginter also had
a planned suburban village on his real estate drawing boards, but he was
having a hard time selling lots there, even though he had installed gas,
electricity, telephone, and street car connections to nearby Richmond.
And George W. Watts, the chairman of the seminary’s trustees, was Lewis
Ginter’s silent business partner in this planned real estate development.
Major Ginter
made a free real estate offer of 11 acres to help anchor the (alleged)
moral climate of his new village; Mr. Watts mad a $50,000 contribution,
and Mr. Spence, a $25,000 contribution, provided that the seminary move
only to Richmond. Thus the seminary was “delivered” from its nearby
Prince Edward neighbors, and in the construction period of 189701898 the
first two buildings at the new Ginter Park location were named Watts Hall
and Spence Hall.
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Hampden-Sydney Boys Who Gave It All for the Cause
Here we
are this week, exactly half-way between the traditional annual and recurring
Memorial Day that honors our military veterans – and the 60th anniversary
of D-Day (June 6, 1944), the Day That Saved Modern Civilization.
It’s a good time for us to pause in our present-day history and to give
thanks for all those people from the past, whose personal sacrifice of
even life itself, has made it possible for us to even have a history to
honor...and personal histories yet to make.
I was visiting
my farmer-grandparents that June week of 1944, anticipating helping my
grandfather and my uncle with the oats harvesting and then later the wheat
harvesting, which typically brought so many neighboring friends by to help...and
so very much food piled up for us all to eat. My relatives awakened
this nine year-old boy early that June morning, to come downstairs and
to listen to the radio reports from the commentators back on ships, behind
the breakers along the Normandy coastline. We listened with pride
and hope and fear to the great words and rhythmic cadences of Winston Churchill
and Franklin Roosevelt. My grandparents were also listening with
their hearts, because they felt sure that my dad’s younger brother was
aborad one of those landing crafts. My grandfather took me by the
shoulders and told me that he wanted me to remember this day as long as
I lived because it was probably going to be “one of the most important
days in all human history.” Nobody came by the farm that day to help
in the oat fields because everyone wanted to stay by the radio to listen,
to feel, to pray, and to sense themselves as close as possible to their
loved ones who were continuing to make their way toward the beaches by
sea and air. I walked out under the family grape arbor and tried
to write a poem about the intensity and importance of that day, D-Day,
the Day. My “poem” began: “When our boys landed on the invasion
beaches, The way they have to go – very far it reaches / But they won’t
stop until everything is over, And Adolph Hitler is buried ‘neath clover.”
It all made me feel that I was also doing my part, back home on a North
Carolina farm.
Veterans
Day...Memorial Day...the Dedication of the World War II Memorial on the
National Mall...the 60th anniversary of D-Day – within the march of these
holidays (holy days, really), there are also the shuffling steps and the
thinning ranks of that Greatest Generation who made all our subsequent
generations possible.
It’s an appropriate time for
us local citizens to walk up to the monument on the left side of the county
courthouse lawn, and to think – and to thank – our way through those 50
names inscribed there, in memory of those Prince Edward County “who made
the supreme sacrifice in World War II, 1941-1945.”
But the
reality of course is that our present history and freedom were equally
bequeathed to us by the sacrificial deaths of other great generations as
well. If you want to go to an especially meaningful local military
memorial, you might drive out to the campus of Hampden-Sydney College,
and park there on the corner by College Presbyterian Church and walk across
the road to the Memorial Gate. It was originally built and marked
to honor the 14 college alumni who died in World War I, “the war to end
all wars”...which, regrettably, turned out not to be the case at all.
Most of those 14 wee not actual battlefield deaths, but rather soldiers
who died in military uniform during the great Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918
(but they were still military heroes, nonetheless). The last name
on the World War I plaque is that of Lee Campbell Tait. He was from
Cotton Hill, West Virginia, and in the Hampden-Sydney Class of 1915.
At the time he entered military service he had completed one-year at Union
Theological Seminary in Richmond. Mr. Tait was mortally wounded approximately
15 minutes before the Armistice went into effect at 11 o’clock on November
11, 1918, and he died the next day...the first day of peace for everyone
else. How does one even attempt to express appreciation to the memory
of someone who was the last person to die in a war that ultimately saved
your own way of life?
The Hampden-Sydney
Memorial Gate was broadened in concept about a dozen years ago. Now
it contains the names of two alumni from the American Revolution, 83 from
the Civil War (with several more to be added through further research),
from the Spanish American War, the 14 from World War I, 44 from World War
II, two from the Korean War, and two from the Vietnam War. Every
single one of those names on that honored wall gave his life in exchange
for someone else’s freedom.
History
is not a dead thing; it is often a sacrificial force that gives you and
me our lives, our loves, and our hopes. Yes, to be sure, history
also has its embarrassing moments, and certainly it has plenty of mistakes,
even here in our own county. But those name on those plaques that
I have mentioned are not among them.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, June 4, 2004
George Washington Really Slept in Prince Edward Court House Villlage
When World War
II was over and we were finally finished with gasoline rationing and lower
speed limits, my parents and I were ready to hit the highways on some long
tourist trips...which for my dad and me meant our going to big league baseball
games in Washington (Senators), Philadelphia (Athletics and Phillies),
New York (Yankees, Giants, Dodgers). This was my first “road trip
adventure” since I had achieved some modicum of elementary school lessons
in American history. Our East Coast route to those baseball cities
was the only logical one available to us at the time – U. S. Route 1.
As we traveled from North Carolina northward through Virginia and D. C.
and Maryland and Delaware (and of course back then that highway took us
straight through down town of every community), my parents had me keep
a sharp look-out for the many “touristy/historical” signs that were out
in front of various downtown buildings, proudly proclaiming “George Washington
slept here.” We wondered, of course, how factual such a claim might
really be, and how much these signs might just be evidence of a community’s
entrepreneurial self-promotion.
Well, for
certain George Washington really did spend the night once upon a time in
Prince Edward County. It was June 7, 1791, and he spent it somewhere
in Worsham, Virginia, then known as Prince Edward Court House. Unfortunately
we don’t know whether he slept in a room of one of the several taverns
then located in the village, or whether he stayed in one of the two dozen
private homes there in its “downtown,” or whether he possibly slept at
one of the outlying plantation homes. At any rate, every possible
candidate for that housing honor is now gone...because, for sure, he didn’t
sleep in either the Clerk’s Office or the old Debtor’s Prison, which are
the two remaining buildings that are still there at their old sites in
more or less their same forms. Nor do we know exactly how many companions
might have been in the Presidential entourage. This was long before
there had to be close by Secret Service shield-men, but surely there were
some family members with him, or some political friends, or even some former
military friends from Virginia as the President passed through the Old
Dominion.
Washington
was mid-way through his first term in office when he embarked on this “Southern
Tour,” but unlike later Presidents who consciously pursued a “Southern
Strategy” with a view to their political future, Washington was simply
wanting to pay paternalistic tribute to many southerners who had helped
him win the Revolution and then launch this new government which had redefined
that uncertain period when the aborning nation had been governed under
the ambiguities of the Articles of Confederation. Washington had
presided over the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and although he had not
been a principal framer of, and arguer for, the Federal Constitution during
its year-long ratification process, he was certainly its beneficiary by
his election to the initial presidential office. In many ways, Washington’s
“Southern Tour” of the summer of 1791 was a delayed way for the public
to thank him for being “the Father of his country,” for his many costly
labors against so many great odds. In that regard we might even liken
the response to his 1794 tour to the cross-country adoration we have recently
observed in response to the funeral ceremonies for President Reagan.
It would
be interesting to speculate whether or not Patrick henry – our area’s most
famous-ever political figure – might have conversed with the President
that evening in long ago Worsham/ Prince Edward Court House. They
were not of the same political party; Henry had, in fact, consistently
argued against adopting the Constitution and the anti-Federalist had done
so in that very community; nevertheless when the Constitution was a done-deal,
and Patrick Henry was a presidential elector, he had cast this vote for
Washington.
All of
which just goes to show that you can strongly disagree with an president
and his particular policies, but you can still honor the office itself
and appreciate the character and leadership of the particular person.
At least that’s what some Prince Edwardians were doing in Worsham in June
of 1791...and that’s what some present -day patriotic citizens were also
doing in June of 2004.
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, June 23, 2004
The Mettauers' Medical School -- Between Prince Edward Court House and Kingsville
Perhaps
a couple of days (or nights) a week med-evac helicopters come and go from
Southside Community Hospital landing pad behind our house, and we often
try to determine whether they are heading toward the medical school hospital
either in Charlottesville or in Richmond. That brings to mind that
in the mid-nineteenth century we had a medical school located right here
in Prince Edward County...and we also had another medical school that was
governed from here in the county.
A hundred
and fifty-or-so years ago medical school education was in its infancy and
the standard “course” of a medical education might not be more than a year
or two, and that was typically one of observation and apprenticeship.
Some basic surgeries and even some immunizations were practiced and taught,
even though an understanding of germ theory (Louis Pasteur, 1864 in England)
and antiseptic surgical procedures (Joseph Lister, 1865, England) still
awaited their hypotheses and provings. These alter affirmations would
eventually propel medical training in their more sophisticated, “modern”
ways.
In 1837
Drs. John Peter Mettauer and Francis Joseph Mettauer opened a medical training
school between Prince Edward Court House and Kingsville. According
to Mr. Bradshaw’s history of our county, “Instruction was given by lectures,
demonstrations, daily examinations, and dissections.” An agreement
existed between these doctors and those at the Washington University in
Baltimore that these professors’ certification that a student had satisfactorily
completed one year at the Prince Edward Medical Institute would automatically
admit such students to a second year at the Baltimore medical school.
Eventually our local medical school – probably for reasons of gaining legal
certification and chartering – came under the governance of Randolph-Macon
College (then located in Boydton, Virginia). That shift occurred
in 1847. The medical training at this school achieved a laudable
reputation, especially in the filed of obstetrics and gynecology, and it
existed thereafter as the Randolph-Macon Medical Department for almost
two decades. However, it was pretty much “done in” by the realities
of the War Between the States. On Friday, April 7, 1865, General
Romeyn Ayers’ 2nd division of the V Infantry Corps of the U.S. Army made
its evening camp all around the Mettauer/Randolph-Macon medical school
and the army’s reports indicate that the old school – like the Confederacy
itself – was now in extremis.
In recent
years the late Dr. Ray A. Moore, Jr., of our community, bought the old
property, largely for sentiment’s sake since so many of the Moore family
had been medical doctors, and because this property was only two miles
from Ray’s home. There is a Virginia Historical Marker sign there,
on the right side of U.S. Route 15, a quarter mile south of the signal
light at the turnoff for Hampden-Sydney. The old school’s legal association
with Randolph-Macon College at Boydton certainly begs the question, Why
did it not establish itself through the charter of Hampden-Sydney College
instead, especially since one of the Mettauers – Francis Joseph – was also
a faculty member of that nearby college?
That’s
because at the time (1847) Randolph-Macon “adopted” the Mettauers’ medical
school that was in our county, Hampden-Sydney already had its own medical
school, or at least its own Medical Department, which was located in a
former hotel in downtown Richmond. Ths arrangement continued from
1837 to 1854, during which time all of the medical diplomas in Richmond
were marked with the seal of Prince Edward County’s Hampden-Sydney College.
The college catalogues of that same period have two printed sections: “The
Literary Department” (i.e., the instructions here at the college that we
know) and “The Medical Department” there in Richmond. In fact our
county’s medical school there in Richmond prospered so much that the Hampden-Sydney
trustees added a second building in 1853. This is the so-called “Egyptian
Building” that is one of Richmond’s architectural treasures; it is located
at the heart of the present-day MCV&VCU School of Medicine. The
administrative relationship eventually ended in a rancorous internal squabble
(thankfully concluded by the Virginia General Assembly’s legislative actions
of June 13, 1854, that put the medical school under formal state sponsorship).
The imbroglio about who would be in charge of medial school faculty appointments
(H-S trustees or the medical school faculty itself) brought neither institution
any particular acclaim. College historian John L. Brinkley adroitly
and appropriately entitles that chapter in his history, “Neither Profit
Nor Honor.” Subsequently, however, MCV presented a plaque to the
college (it is located on an inside wall of Graham Hall), where the daughter
institution “salutes the mother institution with filial affection, appreciation
and respect.” That’s certainly more than the departing theological
seminary ever did...although that Richmond religious institution at least
helped the college and its museum to finance the 1991 historical sign about
the seminary’s longtime (1822-1898) presence in the village.
I always
feel sad and concerned when those helicopters take off from our local hospital
because I realize that he necessity of their transport means that some
patient is in especially serious circumstances. But in my lighter-minded
moments I think it’s more than ironic that some of those being transported
are Hampden-Sydney students who are going 65 miles away to what is–in essence
– “their” institution, and all because they have typically received some
injuries at, or near, “their” institution as well.
Sometimes
history has a strange way of circling back upon itself...which is one of
the reasons why it can be so fascinating.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, June 25, 2004
George Walton, Signer of the Declaration of Independence
With the
upcoming Fourth of July weekend upon us, it’s appropriate that we pay our
respects to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who may
have been born in Prince Edward County (although the Cumberland County
folks stoutly dispute that assumption), but for certain George Walton lived
for a short while in Prince Edward County. His signature is in the
first grouping of three there at the left lower side of the Declaration;
those three constitute the Georgia delegation in the famous Second Continental
Congress...and not a single one of them was a native of the Georgia colony.
The National
Park Service official biography of the signers indicates (p. 141) that
George Walton was “born sometime in the 1740's near Farmville, Virginia,”
which is appropriately vague as to his birth’s time and place. Mr.
Bradshaw in his history of our county straddles the fence (p. 631): “George
Walton was born either in Prince Edward or Cumberland County.” A
part of the problem is that concerning George Walton’s early childhood,
we only know for certain that he was orphaned as a youngster and that his
uncle then took the lad into his home. That uncle most definitely
lived in the southern part of Prince Edward County, where he was quite
active in the Briery presbyterian Church. In fact the uncle, who
was also named George Walton, applied to the Prince Edward Court in September
of 1759, that the non-conforming (i.e., non-Episcopalian – and hence perhaps
not entirely loyal English subjects) Scotch-Irish people in his neighborhood
who were “performing divine service at the head of Bryery River in the
Presbyterian way” be licensed to exist with legal protections. Since
the younger George Walton had no living parents and no property, hence
no future security, his uncle apprenticed him to a carpenter in the neighborhood,
but the boy seems to have also pursued some formal schooling – probably
with his uncle’s financial support.
By 1769
(still before the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence),
this Southside Virginian – then in his 20's – migrated to Savannah, Georgia,
where he read law under a local attorney and he was eventually admitted
to the colonial bar of Georgia in 1774. In that capacity George Walton
became a well-known “fire-eater” in the Low Country area around Savannah.
The Georgia colony at this time, however, was at best only lukewarm toward
the idea of independence from Great Britain, and the provincial congress
there was of a split mind about sending delegates to the First Continental
Congress the convened in Philadelphia, but by the time of the Second Continental
Congress’s convening there was an outright civil war within the thirteen
colonies. And, by now, the majority of Georgians were in favor of
the way that this Second Continental Congress was probably going to proceed.
Walton was elected as a Georgia delegate and he served in that capacity
throughout the Revolution that concluded in Yorktown in 1781, although
the Treaty of Paris was not signed until two more years in an act that
officially confirmed the colonists’ Declaration and their military victory.
Once during
the course of the Revolutionary War(in 1778-79) George Walton took leave
of his congressional role in order to rush by stagecoach to the defense
of his adopted colony. As a colonel in the Georgia militia, he was
wounded and captured during the siege of Savannah in the late 1778.
He was imprisoned for over nine months, until he was exchanged for a British
naval captain in September of 1779. He then returned to his seat
in the Second Continental Congress, now more zealous than ever to vote
sufficient military funds for George Washington’s army, and especially
for General Greene’s Continental forces in the southern colonies, where
eventually the war would be decided.
“Our” native-born
Southsider continued in impressive roles of public service after the Revolution,
always on behalf of his adopted Georgia. He served in several capacities
in the Georgia court system and was elected the U.S. Constitutional Convention
in 1787 (but for some reason he did not serve in it). Later Walton
served as Governor of Georgia (1789-1790), and still later he filled out
an unexpected term as a U.S. Senator from Georgia (1795-96). His
final year as a Senator witnessed the presidential election of John Adams,
one of George Walton’s fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Walton
was also an advocate for higher education, and he served as a founding
trustee of the school that eventually became the University of Georgia,
in Athens. During this term as Governor, the capital of the young
state was located in Augusta, so Walton and his wife and two sons moved
across the state from Savannah on the eastern seacoast to the Savannah
river city of augusta on the western border of Georgia. He eventually
owned two houses there in Augusta, “College Hill” and “Meadow Garden.”
The latter house is maintained today by the Daughters of the American Revolution
as a memorial to this Signer, George Walton died in Augusta in 1804 when
he was in his 60's and he is buried there under a public monument to all
three of Georgia’s signers.
His was
the classic “rags to riches” American success story, or more accurately
his self-made life was that of a journey from humble beginnings of little
promise to an accomplished life of a self-educated man, a revolutionary
patriot, an imprisoned soldier, an ardent educator, and, finally, a southern
statesman. Not bad for a fellow who started out here on the banks
of the Appomattox River! Think about our one-time “neighbor” George
Walton and his daring signature there on the Declaration of Independence
as you eat your hot dogs and drink your beer and set off your firecrackers
this coming Sunday...after you’ve gone to church, of course!
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Hampden-Sydney Boys in the Civil War
One hundred
and fifty-three years ago this week, on what was then Sunday, July 7, 1861,
the first college-boy military company on either side – North or South
– in the American Civil War, came under fire. It was at a river crossing
about half-way between Buckhannon and Beverly, (now West) Virginia.
The place was called Middle Fork Bridge, and the wooden structure itself
was a classic covered bridge. It had been built by Lemuel Chenoweth
(an ancestor of present-day Prince Edward County citizen, George Wilson).
The advancing soldiers in blue were from Ohio and Indiana, and the defending
soldiers in gray were “The Hampden-Sydney Boys,” who were officially designated
as Company G of the 20th Virginia Infantry Regiment. These were 101
young men from Hampden-Sydney College and Union Theological Seminary with
a smattering of farm boys from families living near the college and seminary.
In all probability, their flag-bearer and company cook was Davy Ross, an
African-American employee (or perhaps a slave?) of the college. At
least earlier that spring he had volunteered to accompany “the Boys” in
these dual capacities. The group was captained by the 44-year old
president of Hampden-Sydney, the Rev. J. M. P. Atkinson. He was most
definitely not a military man. He had only been at the college for
several years, having come there from a pastorate in Georgetown, D.C.
Earlier he had been the founding pastor of the First Presbyterian Church
of Houston, Texas. Atkinson was a native Virginian though, and on
that Sunday afternoon he had led a scouting party out from Camp Garnett
at the foot of Rich Mountain until the group clashed at the river with
a similar Federal scouting party that was feeling its way toward them.
No one was seriously injured in the brief little melee, although one of
the college boys had a finger shot off. Predictably, his fellow student-soldiers
razzed him about his finding too small a tree from which to fire at the
enemy! “War” was still an adventure and these were indeed “boys”
playing at it.
Three days
later, however, on Wednesday afternoon, July 10, the stakes were ominously
higher as General George McClellan’s huge Union Army command of about 7,000
soldiers inched forward to the banks of Roaring Creek and stared across
to the other side where colonel John Pegram (of a fine old Richmond family)
and his 1300 raw rookie soldiers were manning some imposing ramparts they
had thrown out across a narrow defile in the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike.
That evening, General McClellan’s bedding-down soldiers began singing hymns,
and the Rev. Atkinson’s men joined them from across the creek. Captain
Atkinson and his Hampden-Sydney boys into the vulnerable skirmish posts
and rifle pits out ahead of the camp barricade. Everyone recognized
that on the morrow there would be a major fixed battle at that sport and
this little Prince Edward company was expected to absorb McClellan’s initial
attack. However, the naive Colonel Pegram, was seriously underestimating
the size of his opposing forces, and he was actually considering having
the Hampden-Sydney Boys lead off with an offensive – whatever – there were
more than hymns being lifted up that night; it was prayer meeting time
for Captain Atkinson and his “Boys.”
Later that
evening, though, alternative plans were developing in the Union camp.
McClellan’s subordinate commander, General William Rosecrans, had found
an 18-year old mountain boy, David hart, who was a Union sympathizer, and
Hart had volunteered to lead a major part of McClellan’s army over a flanking
mountain path that climbed around the Confederate forces, on a circuit
that would come out at his parents’ farms atop Rich Mountain, absolutely
in the rear of Colonel Pegram’s command at Camp Garnett. David Hart,
incidentally, was a direct descendant of “Honest John Hart,” a New Jersey
signer of the Declaration of Independence and, believe or not, he and his
parents were also direct ancestors of present-day Prince Edwardians, George
(and Martha) Wilson and their children and grandchildren (the family genes
of our genial gentleman had a way of getting around in those mountains).
Throughout
the rainy morning of Thursday, July 11, 1861, while the Hampden-Sydney
Boys awaited either an order to advance, or watched for movements toward
them from across the creek, General Rosecrans and his drenched command
followed David Hart and eventually encircled the Confederate forces, although
Pegram had put a small group of several hundred men with one cannon at
the top of the mountain, “just in case.” And it was there at the
Hart farm that the battle of Rich Mountain occurred; it was an overwhelming
Union victory. Meanwhile, general McClellan and his huge force was
supposed to attack the Hampden-Sydney Boys and the others there at the
foot of the mountain as soon as he heard Rosecrans’ firing from the mountaintop
just two miles away, but for some reason he never made that attack.
In fact, even after McClellan knew that the mountaintop had been secured,
and that the Confederates immediately in front of him had been cut off,
he still did not advance to receive their certain surrender. Instead,
it was left to General Rosecrans to come down the mountain and receive
that the next morning. He found many of the Hampden-Sydney Boys bedded
down in camp, sick with the measles. Meanwhile most of those who
had been positioned on the front lines had managed to escape after midnight,
in another direction, but two days later these famished folks sent a courier
into Beverly volunteering to surrender and begging for some food and dry
clothing.
Thus ended
the saga of the Hampden-Sydney Boys. They had joyfully entrained
on May 28, bound for a Richmond camp, from which they had been ordered
to northwestern Virginia on June 11. They had taken a train from
Richmond to Staunton and then had marched for over a week, for a 100 miles,
over seven ranges of the Allegheny Mountains...all for a few rifle shots
on Sunday, July 7, and an anxious day of waiting on Thursday, July 11,
soon recognizing that they were surrounded. Then followed their desperate
flight over a pathless mountain terrain for two day with no food.
They had meekly surrendered without even the hint of a struggle.
This was not how they had imagined “war” would be. Still, in the
parlance of that era, they “had seen the elephant” and they had not flinched,
and they returned here with “honor.” Allegedly.
The Farmville Herald, July 2, 2004
"Separate but Equal" public education -- the "wart" on Prince Edward County History
A function
of good history is that it forces all of us to look at the whole story,
and not just at those things that apply to us, or appeal to us. I
often think about the remark of that dour Englishman, Oliver Cormwell,
the (mercifully brief) ruler and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, who
is alleged to have directed his portrait-painter to duplicate Cromwell’s
true appearance “warts and all.”
Prince
Edward County’s 250 years of history has many warts...and considerably
worse than that of course.
It’s been
interesting to me that in these recent springtime months when we have “celebrated”
again the student-led strike at the old R.R. Moton High School in April
of 1951, the Caucasians among us have had to re-examine how “their kin”
– and in many cases, “their kin” – were reacting back then. Their
kind/kin were wanting to label it as “misbehavior” and certainly they didn’t
want to give it any recognition of publicity, because if you didn’t officially
mention it, maybe it would go away, or maybe it wasn’t really happening
(in my ministry, I used to observe how a family never started coming to
grips with grief, until the obituary got out into the public domain of
the newspaper or radio; otherwise, maybe they could keep it all unto themselves,
and pretend that it wasn’t really happening, but once it got out into the
media, it was out of their private control, and they had to deal with it...like
it, or not). Well, maybe we’ve all grown up a little since 1951,
and now many of us can look at the total story for what it was...and in
some cases, still is.
The same
with the nations recent 50th anniversary celebration of the Brown v. Board
of Education Supreme Court decision, to which landmark case Prince Edward
County was a partner, and in which all of our society has been partnered
ever since...whether everyone has necessarily wanted to look at the process,
or the result, or the future for that matter. It’s been an embarrassment
for some of us to look at The Herald’s 50-year front page feature week-by-week
about what was happening in this community and commonwealth’s reactions
to the Brown decision in the spring and summer of 1954, juxtaposed with
the community and Commonwealth’s 2004 front page stories of today.
Our county’s Caucasian power structure was posturing and postponing all
over the place back in 1954 and, by today’s (perhaps more mature?) standards,
those reminders feel so embarrassing to whites, while at the same time
they feel so justifiably anger-producing to blacks. Most of the county’s
Caucasians back then didn’t want to admit that the ‘separate-but-equal”
realities that the Court was addressing had anything legitimate to do with
either “justice” or “justifiable anger.” For them it was simply a
“warty” challenge that shouldn’t be there on the face of things.
Then later
in May we had the 40th anniversary fo the Supreme Court decision that followed
Brown a full decade later and most directly spotlighted Prince Edward County.
This was the May 25, 1964, Supreme Court decision known as Griffin v. County
School Board of Prince Edward, a decision that essentially put to an end
the last vestiges of Virginia’s Massive Resistance to the Brown decision
a decade earlier (interestingly, the Griffin case had been argued before
the Court by the Solicitor General of our nation, Archibald Cox, who is
also remembered as the principled first victim of Richard Nixon’s “Saturday
Night Massacre” in 1973; Mr. Cox died earlier this summer). The majority
opinion of the Court in Griffin (also interestingly!) was written by Associate
Justice Hugo Black of Alabama, a one-time KuKluxKlans-man, whose choice
is was to tell Prince Edward County that the time for all “deliberate speed”
had now run out and that the public schools must now be reopened for everyone.
There really are some strange ironies in the twists and turns of history,
and in the interesting people who come back again on front pages...sometimes
in different forms!
This past
week we’ve had another historic celebration – the 40th anniversary of the
great Civil Rights Act of 1964...which in many ways completed what should
have been accomplished by the 13th and 14th Constitutional Amendments of
1865 and 1868 and their century-long results. And next year we will
celebrate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whose work should have been completed
in the ratification of the 15th Constitutional Amendment of 1870.
History
forces us all to look at the gaps where a series of things didn’t necessarily
work out in the way people had envisioned. Prince Edward County (and
many other places, to be sure!) has had some “warts” and some “gaps” which
certainly translated into injustices, into angers, into embarrassments,
and into “sides-taking.” But, instead of always hearkening back to
commemorate “those times,” we also really do need to celebrate “these times.”
We are fortunate to live under a form of government that is open-ended
and which allows old histories to be re-examined, and adjusted when and
where necessary...even locally. It is also fortunate that our society
(and hour human nature itself!) can be “grown larger” in later generations.
In order
to do that, all of us have to be willing to examine everyone’s histories,
without preconceived and simplistic judgments. Caucasians have to
look at the Civil Rights Movement, even right here in our own county, and
African-Americans have to look at the Civil War, even right here in out
own county. Because these are shared histories that belong to all
of us and they have shaped all of us and continues to do so...and it behooves
all of us to build upon these past histories for our better histories to
come. YES, “stony the road we trod , bitter the chastening rod...”
We have all truly come over “a way that with tears has been watered; we
have come, treading our path through the feet of the slaughtered.”
But an ongoing history has to be made right here in Prince Edward County...and
celebrated! So I say, “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark
past has taught us [and] sing a song full of hope that the present has
brought us!” But is can’t be done unless we all study – and feel
– everyone’s own history for what it truly is...and that also includes
the unjust and often unwise ways that some of us have intruded into those
other histories. That also includes the unthinking ways that some
of us have tried to ignore those other histories.
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, July 14, 2004
The Rev. Dr. Richard McIlwaine -- member of Viginia's Fourth Constituional Convention, 1901-1902
In this
area of Virginia we have tended to think that the most troublesome actions
affecting modern-day race relations were the educational policies associated
with the governmental edits of Senator Byrd’s political network – actions
and reactions that are most commonly known as Virginia’s “Massive Resistance”
of the late 1950's and early 1960's. That, however, overlooks a much earlier
series of maneuvers by Caucasian politicians, which focuses not on education
but on our citizens’ basic freedom of the ballot itself.
I am speaking
about Virginia’s fourth Constitutional Convention that met from June of
1901 until June of 1902. This group was essentially called together
in order to re-write the Underwood Constitution of 1869, which was a Reconstruction-era
state constitution that sought to guarantee to make it possible for Virginia’s
citizens of every race to claim their right that had been (allegedly) granted
to them by the passage of the 1th and 15th Amendments to the Federal Constitution
(as we know, all through our history there had been continuous struggles
both in legislative chambers and on the battlefield in issues of “national
right” vs. “states rights” – and there still are of course, e.g., the issue
of gay marriages to be guaranteed in certain states but maybe to be determined
by a national Constitutional Amendment). Virginia’s Underwood Constitution
had made it possible for black Virginia men to be elected to some – not
many, but some – state and national positions. But by the end of
the 19th century many Caucasian Virginia politicians felt sufficiently
strong “to un-do” what Carter Glass, editor of a Lynchburg newspaper, called
“33 years of Virginia’s sullied honor.” Ostensibly, some of those
calling for a new state constitution said that its purpose was “to remove
the power of railroads in politics,” most everyone knew what the real reason
was, and indeed Bradshaw’s history of our county states that the passage
of the new constitution’s voting restrictions, “...Reconstruction came
to an end in Virginia.”
There was
one representative from each county to this constitutional convention that
met in Richmond, Prince Edward’s man was the Rev. Dr. Richard McIlwaine
– certainly by every measure possible, one of our most learned and respected
citizens. He was a native of Petersburg, with a Bachelor’s degree
from Hampden-Sydney College (1853), a Master’s degree from the University
of Virginia (1855), an 1857 divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary
(then located in this county), and an honorary degree from Davidson College
in North Carolina. He had also done post-graduate work at the University
of Edinburgh in Scotland. McIlwaine was a Confederate veteran, and
a former church pastor in Amelia and Farmville and Lynchburg, and he had
been president of Hampden-Sydney College since 1883. At the time
of his election to the constitutional convention he was 77 years old.
Hampden-Sydney was so honored by Dr. McIlwaine’s election that the college
trustees and faculty gave him a year’s leave of absence, with senior professor
James R. Thornton serving as acting president.
Although
Dr. McIlwaine certainly knew the real reasons behind the calling of this
state-wide assembly, he was apparently beholden to no special interest
group, although he – as well as everyone else in the assembly – was a white
man and a staunch Democrat, and by his age and acculturation he was clearly
a product of “the old order,” i.e., the slave-holding South. He later
wrote, however, that he thought that “depraved and vicious whites” were
more of a “menace to society” than were “the ignorant and corrupt Negroes.”
He probably meant that to sound even-handed, but of course it feels like
a racist statement by today’s standards and sensitivities. Dr. McIlwaine
also was on record for wanting “to deliver the State from the burden of
illiteracy and poverty and crime.” It is possible that this also
was an implied racist statement, although he did not define any group as
being this “burden” he had in mind. On the other hand, to his everlasting
credit, Dr. McIlwaine served on the Convention’s subcommittee on educational
reform (it should be remembered that public education throughout the state
had also been a goal of Reconstruction policies) and amidst all attempts
to un-do the two separate-but-equal (?) public school systems then in existence
throughout the Commonwealth, Dr. McIlwaine held the line that a free system
of education had to be offered to children of both races.
The newspapers
of that day repeatedly referred to Dr. McIlwaine and Mr. Glass as being
“the only non-lawyers to assume leading roles in the year-long debates.”
Still the end result of that constitutional convention is most embarrassing
to the modern-day student. For one thing, the new constitution was
voted into law by its own members; it was not submitted to a popular plebiscite.
This constitution clearly instituted racist-inspired restrictions at the
ballot box: (1) a literacy test was imposed, with the judgment of acceptable
literacy being left up to each local white administrator at the polls;
(2) an understanding of both the Virginia and the Federal Constitution
was hereafter made a voting requirement, again with the particular questions
about such being left up to the local white administrator (who in many
cases probably could not have satisfactorily answered the questions he
had been told to present); (3) a poll tax was imposed, which had to be
at least one dollar, but which could be set locally at any level up to
$150 (Virginia’s poll tax requirement was not removed until the 1960's).
Once the
new constitution went into effect in 1904, every person initially coming
to the balloting place had to fill out a written application there on the
spot, in order to vote...and guess which persons were given ready assistance
in filling out the form, and which ones were not? Oh yes, there was
one other interesting provision in that new state constitution of 1904;
there was a “grandfather clause” that automatically gave the vote to “all
Confederate veterans or sons of Confederate veterans.”
Predictably
the black voter participation throughout Virginia fell by 90% during the
next decade...and it would be nearly 60 years before these legal restrictions
were un-done. No, Prince Edward County did not create this deplorable
situation, but it certainly contributed to such through its representative
– decent and broadly educated and Christian though he was.
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Poplar Hill --Victoiran-Era Home of the Tobacconist Family the Dunningtons
It is ironic
and poetically just that the latest (and presumably the absolutely final)
“starting date” for the Poplar Hill Development is in August this year,
because August 1st in 1922 was the death of Walter Grey Dunnington, whose
ownership name on that property is still the identifiable one for many
people in this area...even though the property has passed through several
owners in the 82 years since Walt Dunnington’s death.
Many newcomers
to our county are not even aware of the existence of this grand old plantation
house, which is barely – and quickly (and dangerously!) – visible to vehicular
traffic proceeding southward along Route 15. It’s off to the left
before one gets to those new storage sheds that are along the Farmville
Lake Road. Many folks still call it “the old Dunnington place,” although
more recent residents of our county may refer to it as “the Bolt place.”
A certain generation still calls it “the old stump farm,” which was its
name about a half century ago, after there had been a major cutting of
its old growth timber, with dozens of massive stumps being left to rot
out there on the rolling hillsides.
My former
neighbor, Mrs. Virginia Dowler Dickoff, has pleasant memories fo growing
up on the old Dunnington place, when her father had come to Prince Edward
County from Canada, to help tend and develop the field crops; presumably
her brother Tommy, who still lives near there, has memories of the same.
My late church member, Roy Fore, also had delightful memories of his father’s
association as a Dunnington employee who tended the large gardens on t
he farm; Roy also attributed his own love (and great skills!) for growing
vegetable to what he had observed and absorbed from his father’s labors
there in the Dunningtons’ family gardens.
The Dunnington
Tobacco Company was organized in Farmville in 1870 by Walt Dunnington’s
father, James W. Dunnington. This business concentrated at first
just on dark-fired tobacco, but it gradually expanded to bright lead as
well, as this latter variety of tobacco “took off” with the enormous expansion
of the Virginia and North Carolina cigarette manufacturing business at
the end of the 19th century. Walt Dunnington joined his father’s
business in 1872 and eventually established an international reputation
for this family firm, connecting this Prince Edward business with tobacconists
in Italy and Austria and, especially, in Norway. According to Herbert
Bradshaw’s history of our county, there was one famous day in 1902 when
a train of thirty cars loaded with tobacco left from Farmville, all consigned
to Norway, via the shipping docks at the end of the Norfolk and Western
Railway tracks in Newport News. W. G. Dunnington was also involved
in Farmville’s First National Bank and was a co-owner with Walter H. Robertson
in the manufacturing of fertilizer under the firm name of the Virginia
State Fertilizer Company. Beginning in 1897, he also served our county’s
wider community for many years as a member of the Hampden-Sydney College
Board of Trustees.
Walter
and India Knight Dunnington moved into their Poplar Hill plantation home
in 1897. For decades prior to his, there had already been an 18th
century house there that was known as “the Wood Plantation home;” in fact,
the Dunningtons built their enormous Victorian house around the central
core of the Woods’ family house. One of the prior residents of that
original house was the Prince Edward native Susan Wood, who as a young
woman had met her eventual fiancée, Moses Drury Hoge, while the
latter was attending Hampden-Sydney and Union Theological Seminary; Mrs.
Susan Wood Hoge eventually became one of the major female religious figures
of Civil War Richmond and for the remainder of the 19th century.
Much of
Prince Edward County’s (white) business and social life during the late
19th and early 20th century centered around this Dunnington home (now the
Poplar Hill Land Development property) a truly grand old manor – equal
to the most sumptuous fare one might have imagined in Virginia’s antebellum
ear...only now it happened with electricity and running water! Our
present-day investors and developers of this property envision something
on the same scale. It reminds me of the radio announcer’s voice at
the beginning of each episode of the old “Lone Ranger” broadcasts, when
he excitedly set the stage: “Return with us now to those thrilling days
of yesterday! From out of the past come the thundering hoof-beats
of the great horse, Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”
We shall
see. At their best this new development of this great old property
will become a major positive force for all.
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, August 4, 2004
The Long Hot Summers of Prince Edward History
Some years ago
there was a movie entitled The Long Hot Summer, starring a young
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. As I recall, it was loosely built
upon a story by William Faulkner. I like that phrase, “the long hot
summer.” Prince Edward County has had several very “hot” ones that
must have seemed extra “long” as well.
One of
our early ones was the summer of 1781, when the Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton
swooped down upon Prince Edward Court House (now Worsham, of course) with
over a hundred of his ill-famed British cavalrymen. A recent historian
has commented on the temperament of this particular period of the colonies’
Revolutionary War this way: “in 1780-1781, the gentlemen’s war was over
in America.” And absolutely nobody had become more “un-gentlemenly”
in that long war than Banastre Tarleton, who gloried in his renown for
leaving fiery destruction and rapacious behavior in his wake. Yet,
our 27-year old frontier court house community of a half-dozen buildings
and some scattered farm residences and some official record ledgers – and
even the lives of some ardent patriots – all surprisingly escaped Tarleton’s
direct vengeance, suffering only some threats and minor hassles on that
Saturday, July 14, 1781. It was all the more surprising that the
fiery colonel would have left completely untouched, a nearby college named
for two anti-royalist British patriots!
A half-century
later there was much fear and foreboding in our county (among both races)
at the end of “the long hot summer” of 1831, when reports and rumors and
predictions (typically exaggerated) began to surge westward from Southampton
County, in the wake of the Nat Turner Insurrection, which began on Sunday,
August 21, and continued in a reign of terror for both races until Sunday,
October 30. But the immediacy of that blood-tide ebbed, without spilling
its direst terrors to our own county.
The next
summertime occasion when our county’s well-being was seriously threatened
occurred 33 years later, in late June of “the long hot summer” of 1864,
when the U.S. Army commander, General Grant, unleashed the Wilson-Kautz
Cavalry Raid of some 3,300 armed men (with additional artillery support)
toward Prince Edward, with one focus on the South Side Rail Road that entered
our county at High Bridge, and another directed toward the Richmond and
Danville Road that skirted the south end of the county at Meherrin.
On Thursday, June 23, Kautz’s raiders destroyed many miles of tracks and
numerous buildings around the Burkeville junction of those two railroads.
Meanwhile a home guard force of old men and boys were called out in this
emergency to contest a predicted assault against High Bridge, but then
Kautz’s command surprised them by dashing on down the Richmond and Danville
tracks, to link up with Wilson’s forces at the Staunton River Bridge near
Roanoke Station. En route on Friday, June 24, 1864, they destroyed
a number of building at the Meherrin and Keysville stations, pushing onward
for their unsuccessful attack against the Staunton River Bridge on Saturday,
June 25...in what has to rank as one of the “miracles” (at least in a Confederate
viewpoint) of that war. By late Saturday the frustrated Federals
were bing so closely contested that they could not exercise any options
about swinging northward either toward Prince Edward Court House or High
Bridge. Once more our county’s judicial center had escaped a summertime
threat, and our citizens’ lives continued along more or less normally.
We should
remember, however, that “the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor the
destruction that wasteth at noonday” (Psalm 91:6) is not limited to wars
and rumors of war. The forces that can effectively destroy a community
are not always those that wear uniforms...although they do typically carry
their flags and propound their patriotic rhetoric.
How about
the torrid temperatures and temperaments of this county’s “long hot summer”
of 1959 – the somber summer of virtually everyone’s discontent? One
group of our citizens was feverishly scurrying around during that summer
to provide an alternative private Caucasian school system that would subvert
the Federal directive to integrate all public education throughout the
nation. These people were determined that black and white school-age
children should continue to be educated separately, as had been the case
ever since Virginia’s public school system had been created in the 1870's.
It should also be noted that certain Caucasian leaders were begin advised
– and in some cases directed – by strong political forces and leadership
from beyond the bounds of this county. At the same time many black
families, who were dismayed by the June 2nd decision of the Board of Supervisors
not to appropriate further money for public education that next fall, also
had to scurry around feverishly to move themselves – or at least their
children – to other localities – typically to the homes of grandparents
and aunts and uncles. Depending on the geography of their relocation,
some of those uprooted black students would eventually attend integrated
schools, but the majority of them would attend all-black schools...bu the
point is that those would still be public schools, not he private ones
being envisioned for Prince Edward.
Yet another
local educational alterative was also being suggested for Negro students
by certain Prince Edward citizens who portrayed themselves as being sympathetic
and helpful to the educationally-threatened Negro students. This
group floated the idea of creating a local separate private school for
Negroes, using private school tuition grants that the Virginia General
Assembly had recently created. Would a sufficient number of non-white
students and their families be interested? They would not!
A key factor here was that those suggesting this proposed charter school
for blacks were themselves white, and they had not involved the mainline
local leadership in creating this proposal. It was also clear the
off-stage NAACP leadership was opposed to this plan as being incompatible
with its goals. Just as many Caucasians were being directed and influenced
by the “outsider” Byrd political machinery and goals, so were African-Americans
being directed by non-Prince Edward “outsiders.”
There were
indeed some local Caucasian advocates for public school education for all
of the Prince Edward County school children, who did not have a mixed agenda
– men like Gordon Moss and Calvin Bass – but most of their voices were
scattered and muted. Meanwhile all during that long hot summer of
1959 there was destructiveness to the communal fabric of the entire county
despite everyone’s impassioned rhetoric to the contrary. First it
had been the British, and then the slaves, and the Yankees...but in the
long hot summer of 1959 we ourselves – virtually all of us, in one form
or another – were the ones who were most actively threatening us...mainly
by talking about one another instead of talking with one another.
Our lives today still show some of those unsightly and uncomfortable scars
of our history, but happily this summer has not been as hot and threatening
as those other ones!
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, August 11, 2004
The Reconstruction Era in Prince Edward County
Certainly one
of the most disruptive periods for everyone in Prince Edward County’s long
history was the time immediately after the War Between the States.
The title of this period is “The Reconstruction,” and many of us tend to
want to skip over an examination of this era because it was a period when
we were under mandatory Federal control. We had nothing like self-determined
elections; our economy was in shambles; our infrastructure was virtually
non-existent; the old Confederacy was an occupied country, which is always
the plight of those who lose a war, and there were certainly some pressure
for “insurgents” to take matters into their own hands, even though they
had already been defeated on their battle fronts. Two and a half
centuries of our “official” understanding of how race relations “should”
exist had been radically changed. And in the immediate post-war summer
of 1865, nobody seemed to know how long the unsettled circumstances would
continue. The assassination of President Lincoln at the end of the
war had left governmental policies clouded in Washington, while internal
administrative and congressional forces tugged at one another for control
of the defeated South, and it was clear that some politicians were determined
to keep on fighting against the old Confederate enemy – this time not with
bullets and cannon balls, but with their peacetime politics.
It was
also clear that the United States had no way of immediately addressing
the day-to-day conditions of the African-Americans who were living in this
conquered territory. O.K., so the slaves had been rhetorically freed
by the late President’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, but
those were simply wartime words. It would take peacetime laws to
make that happen, and then (as now!) passing laws took a lot of time.
The Constitution’s 13th Amendment to make the slave-freeing official had
been proposed in the winter of 1865, while the war was still going on;
it would not be ratified by a sufficient number of the victorious states
until December of 1865, seven months after the Confederate surrender. But
who would enforce this new law, even when it became official...and how?
The second level of legislative enactment – the 14th Amendment, which made
those ex-slaves into declared U.S. citizens, would not even be proposed
until June of 1866 (over a year after the war was over), and this still
far-reaching amendment would not be ratified until July of 1868...again
by a ballot just within the victorious states. A final enabling act
of social and political change would be the 15th Amendment that would empower
the ex-slaves with the open and free right to vote. That Amendment
would not be proposed until February of 1869, and it would not be ratified
until a sufficient number of states had approved, and that would take until
March of 1870.
That meant
five full years of legislative process for changes that everybody knew
was coming...but again simply to know it does not mean that something is
accepted; therefore, how are the two races supposed to act toward one another,
and with another in the meantime? That of course was part of the
reason for the Federal military occupation of the our area...but even those
people did not have a clearly spelled out “manual of procedures and objective.”
Instead, they had uniforms and guns...and entirely too much swagger and
attitude to be acceptable to former Confederates.
The last pre-war (1860) census
had revealed Prince Edward County’s population to the 62% black slaves
(11,844 people) and 3.9% free blacks, (465 people) and 34.1% Caucasians
(4,038 people). Presumably, the free blacks had had pre-war livelihoods,
and these might continue now, but praytell, how were the newly-freed blacks
now to make a living...and on what land? For that matter, how were
most of the white farmers now going to make a living (without those slaves)?
The most
immediate problem, however, was not a vocational one, but a matter of food.
As victorious armies will often do, the Union forces that had swept through
this county in early April of 1865, had raided hen houses, smoke houses,
pasture lands and stables (although some families had managed to hide some
of their livestock “off the beaten track” way back in some isolated woodlands,
as soon as they had heard the sounds of the battles in Amelia County and
had begun to observes the gray tides of retreating soldiers swarming along
the Prince Edward roadways). In the wake of these events, people
of both races now typically had to line up and beg for food, back at the
Federal military headquarters in Burkeville. For many people this
meant a foot-trek all the way to that railroad depot, and this was understandably
a demeaning journey.
As soon
as feasible the Federal army took over several of the wards of the Confederate
hospital in Farmville and used these as a new distribution point for food,
along with some clothing and even some tools. That same site would
eventually become our county’s Freedmen’s Bureau, where U.S. officials
tried to help the ex-slaves with material goods and with other forms of
assistance...while the white families and individuals were simply left
to help one another as best they could. The crucial issue of a place
for the ex-slaves to live and work was typically handled informally by
their continuing to live on in their old quarters, and now to be paid by
their ex-masters. But then there was the overwhelming problem of
a worthless currency in this county and state. In truth, both races
were co-dependent; they had to survive as best they could by working the
fields together and eating in common the produce thereof. This enormous
crisis of sustenance was helped by the fact that the growing season and
harvest-time of 1865 turned out to be one of the most abundant within anyone’s
memory...or did just any productive substance seem good to everyone that
year?
It was
a miracle that the two colleges in the county valiantly and optimistically
managed to get their respective student bodies and faculties together for
the next fall. The student bodies were noticeably reduced, although
the Presbyterian post-graduate seminary student body at Hampden-Sydney
was much larger than expected – the result of some “foxhole conversions”
and prisoner-of-war dedications. Tuition payments for these institutions
were sometimes made that year by “in-kind” payments of food, and even furniture.
Another
depressing reality was that some vandals and scoundrels and even “gangs”
seeped their slimy way into some of the Southside Virginia counties during
that spring and summer. The white citizenry was largely impotent
in dealing with them, while the Federal military occupiers were so overwhelmed
with their own small numbers and our civilian needs, that they seldom mounted
serious search parties to ferret out these opportunistic crooks.
Small wonder, then, that some of our county’s Caucasians wanted to migrate
somewhere else...out West, or even to Central and South America, or that
the ex-slaves among us had little sense of direction for focus. Nobody
of any race or any “side” in the late war was really prepared for the post-war
realities of late 1865, or the next half-decade. This Reconstruction
Era was a far more pervasive “Depression” for Prince Edward County than
would be the one that would occur 70 years later in the 1930's.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, September 3, 2004
The Appomattox River - Staunton River Canal link
Before the interstate
highways were initiated by the Eisenhower administration almost a half-century
ago, there were occasional “super highways” with dual lanes and divided
grass strips; before these were typically some four-lane (non-divided)
“by-passes” around medium-size towns; before that there were two-lane “paved
roads” of asphalt or cement (these only came along, however, in the early
1900's). Before these highways there were the railroads that moved
freight and passengers, and before the railroads there was river boat traffic
– but that mainly went “down” a river, except for the steamboats plowing
against the currents of the really large rivers.
Between
the times of the rivers and the railroads, however, there were the canals.
And canal dreamers and planners even once fixed their eyes upon a grandiose
– and expensive – canal system right here in Prince Edward County!
The railroads began development
in parts of our county as early as the 1830's (the South Side Rail Road
became operable through Prince Edward in 1854), but even in the earliest
years of our nations independent existence, George Washington was pushing
the notion of an extensive network of river-and-canal operations.
In 1784 he proposed to the Virginia General Assembly that a canal be constructed
“from Tidewater up the James as far as practicable,” in order to bring
the mountain and valley produce and ore to the Atlantic seaboard for shipment
to other parts of our country and to other parts of the world. Thus,
the James River and Kanawha Canal Company was formed, and construction
began in 1786. Washington himself was given 100 shares of stock in
the company, which he had not really needed, so he announced that he would
give it to “the cause of education.” The Hampden-Sydney College Board
immediately applied for that gift...but the Father of our Country gave
it, instead, to the struggling Liberty Hall Academy in the Valley of Virginia...which
institution thereupon gratefully changed its name to “Washington College”...to
wait another 85 years to tack on there the name of “Lee” as well.
One can only speculate what might have happened if Washington’s largess
had come to the struggling college named “Hampden-Sydney.”
Meanwhile,
the James River and Kanawha Canal that was supposed to go to the Kanawha
and Ohio Rivers was barely going anywhere. By 1840, it had covered
156 miles, from Richmond to Lynchburg, and its construction finally limped
through the Blue Ridge Mountains into Buchanan in 1851...well after railroads
were crisscrossing the Commonwealth. Elsewhere in the nation, however,
the famed Erie Canal and Lackawanna Canal and the Delaware Canal and a
half-dozen others were earning enormous profits for their investors.
Even in Tidewater Virginia, a canal through the Great Dismal Swamp had
profitably connected commercial interests in northeastern North Carolina
with Norfolk.
At the
height of the young nation’s “canal fevers,” a group met in Charlottesville
on July 14-17, 1828, to consider commercial improvements within Virginia.
The group included ex-Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, Supreme
Chief Justice John Marshall, and Prince Edward County’s Richard N. Venable.
Delegate William H. McFarland, of Petersburg and a Hampden-Sydney alumnus
(1819), proposed that either a canal or a turnpike be constructed between
the upper waters of the Appomattox and the Staunton/Roanoke Rivers.
He saw this commercial connection as being absolutely vital to the economic
development of Southside Virginia. His motion, however, was defeated,
primarily because so much money and time and labor had already been expended
on the much-tardy James River and Kanawha Canal enterprise.
Some Prince
Edward and Charlotte County investors continued to look at the maps of
our
region, however, and to discuss among themselves how tantalizingly “close”
the Appomattox River seemed to be to the Staunton, with streams from both
counties feeding into those rivers. Back then, for much of the year, the
Appomattox River was navigable by bateau as far inland as Farmville and
there were no appreciable hillsides/mountains to be negotiated between
those two rivers, so no costly and complicated lock system would have to
be constructed to take care of contour differentials. The only thing
that would really have to be done would be to dredge out some creeks and
small rivers, like the Buffalo and the Cub, and maybe dig a canal ditch
or two, here and there....
Nothing
of this sort ever materialized of course. Canals were a way of the
past. Dr. William Porterfield, of the Hampden-Sydney faculty, recently
addressed that institution’s summer alumni college, pointing out that on
July 4, 1828, President John Quincy Adams had two invitations to participate
in significant commercial ceremonies of inaugural; he could either turn
the first shovel of dirt in Baltimore for the construction of the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad, or he could turn the first shovel of dirt in Georgetown
for the construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Adams chose
the latter, perhaps for convenience sake since that site was only a mile
from the White House. “Bad choice!” Professor Porterfield wryly
remarked. If a mid-nineteenth century canal-and-creek linkage through
Prince Edward County were not an economically feasible project, perhaps
the dreamers should at least have fixed their thoughts on a good macadam
roadway. In that same period of the 1830's, Virginia’s great Valley
Turnpike (Route 11) was laid out and macadamized with a thick base of broken
stones, and that trade-way opened up tremendous commercial enrichments
for the numerous families and towns in that region. Meanwhile, the
bateaux of timber and tobacco that were floated and poled down river from
Farmville and Jamestown could take up to several weeks to make their deliveries
to the Petersburg docks, and when the railroad came to our county those
same deliveries could be made in several hours. It didn’t take an
inspired prophet to realized that canals were truly the stuff of backwater
dreams.
The Farmville Herald, Friday September 17, 2004
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Prince Edward County seal --
wheat sheaf vs tobacco hand
Strange to say,
Prince Edward County never had an official seal until plans were under
way for this 250th anniversary year. This is a round notarial signet
that will henceforth be embossed on, or printed on, all official county
documents and stationery. It is a “shorthand” symbol of our entire
history, with a representation of the original Prince Edward Augustus himself,
along with the old Clerk of Court’s office at the first courthouse village
(now known as “Worsham”), the Watkins Bell Tower at Hampden-Sydney College,
the signature Rotunda of Longwood University’s Ruffner Hall, and the Cupola
atop the present County Courthouse in downtown Farmville. Then there
is one more feature – in fact, the most prominent item on the new seal.
It is a somewhat stylized sheaf of wheat stalks. This agricultural
symbol at the heart of our county seal was most appropriately “borrowed”
from a similar representation that has long been on the historic seal of
neighboring Amelia County; it is a way of reminding us that we were formed
directly from that older county in 1754.
Some people
have strenuously objected to that wheat sheaf, claiming of course that
a far more appropriate symbol at the heart of our county seal might have
been a hand of tobacco leaves, since that has been a major “cash crop”
for so much of our county’s long and rich history. They make a good
case, especially if you just focus on the history of the last two or three
generations. We know that if King Cotton once characterized the Deep
South, then certainly King Tobacco ruled for years in the Tidewater regions
of Virginia and in the Coastal Plains of North Carolina, beginning in the
earliest colonial period. But tobacco did not come to be the major
crop in our area until about 150 years ago. The grain crops of wheat,
oats, barley, corn have been much more important to our area over a much
longer period of time than has tobacco.
On the
eve of the War Between the States there were dozens of little cottage industries
having to do with tobacco – in Richmond, Lynchburg, Danville, for instance,
and these were primarily focused on pipe tobacco (with pipes themselves
being made in great quantities in nearby Pamplin), and chewing tobacco,
and snuff, and cigar-rolling. The great popularity of growing and
processing flue-cured bright leaf tobacco in the central counties of Southside
Virginia and the North Carolina Piedmont, for eventual use in cigarettes
did not occur until after the American Civil War.
There are
various stories about how this regional product became well-known, and
many of them have been chronicled by Dr. Joseph C. Robert, a historian
who wrote History of Tobacco in America, back in 1949, just prior
to his becoming the President of Coker College in South Carolina, and then
the President of Hampden-Sydney College (1955-1960). Dr. Robert died
just this past year. Some people tell about how the Union soldiers,
who were waiting around in central North Carolina in 1865 for generals
Johnston and Sherman to work out their surrender terms, raided some of
the tobacco storehouses of a farmer named Washington Duke who lived near
Durham Station, and when they took these “spoils of war” back home with
them, they and their neighborhood friends love the aroma and taste of Duke’s
tobacco so much that they wrote back to obtain some more...presumably paying
for it this time. Others have observed that at least some of the
popularity for “our kind” of tobacco can possibly be traced to the enormous
traffic jam of Union soldiers whose converging routs came together at Prospect,
Virginia, on Saturday morning, April 8, 1865. While the cavalry displayed
the fact that they were indeed crooks by breaking into the Prospect Depot
that was filled to its rafters with cured tobacco and hundreds of them
“appropriated” some of our finest leaves and also took those home with
them. Just like the men who acted similarly in North Carolina a couple
of weeks later, they wrote back after the war, wanting more of the same.
The main
tobacco emphasis in the United States in the years immediately after the
Civil War was just on plugs of chewing tobacco. For years cigarette
smoking was considered to be a passing fad and a bit of an effete one at
that. Many Americans had never even seen, or heard of, cigarettes
until New World observers of the Crimean War (1854-18560 saw these “newfangled
things” being smoked by Russian soldiers. Some cigarettes were produced
in scattered factories of the southern states in the ensuing years, but
their production was quite labor-intensive; cigarettes were all hand-rolled,
and it was thought that the small fingers of children and women were more
adapted for such work, and that kind of labor force was never going to
be a strong factor in our U.S. economy. Moreover, in a generally
prejudicial way, the presence of “cigarette girls” outside the tradition
domain of home was considered “racy,” as illustrated by the lustiness of
George Bizet’s central character in the 1875 French opera, Carmen.
This famous, hot-bloodied heroine was – by official occupation, at least
– a roller of cigarettes in a factory in downtown Seville, Spain.
Cigarette-production and smoking and marketing took on a new character
entirely, however, in the 1880's, when a Lynchburg teenager named John
Bonsack developed the prototype of a cigarette-rolling machine (the little
village of Bonsack, Virginia, alongside U.S. 460, between Bedford and Roanoke,
commemorates his family name and eventual fortune). R. J. Reynolds
in Winston, North Carolina, did not immediately embrace the notion that
a machine was better than the hand-labor of women and children, but all
three of Washington Duke’s sons – Brodie, Ben, and Buck (James Buchanan)
gave their unqualified support for what were soon simply called “the Bonsacks,”
and the Duke Brothers’ cigarette production took off so sharply by the
mid-1800's that by the end of the decade all of the South’s cigarette production
was machine-made. A giant cigarette marketing campaign was led by
a master-promoter, Lewis Ginter of Richmond, and all of this meant that
thereafter for the next hundred years, flue-cured bright leaf tobacco would
literally be a “hot” commodity...and central Virginia and North Carolina
farmers had found their Grand Tobacco Era.
Nevertheless,
all along, grain growing and milling had been the major agricultural concern
of Prince Edward County. We may not live by bread alone, but it’s
certainly more basic to life than tobacco; yes, the wheat sheaf belongs
on our seal!
The Farmville Herald, Friday, September 24, 2004
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William Henry Harrison, Walter
Reed, Robert Russa Moton – educated in Prince Edward County
When so much has been written
about the period when Prince Edward County chose not to educate a significant
number of its young citizens, perhaps we should at least acknowledge a
few of the most significant personalities who were educated within our
county, albeit not with public funds but through private educational ventures.
Let’s cite three examples of folks whom our county claims through here
for a brief part of their interesting lives.
Foremost among these would
be William Henry Harrison, the ninth President of the United States, who
would be famously and popularly acclaimed as “Old Tippecanoe,” a testimony
to his eventual military efforts against the native Americans in the old
Northwest Territory. His father had signed the Declaration of Independence
as a Virginia representative to the Second Continental Congress and his
son was born in the family’s noteworthy “Berkeley” plantation home in Charles
City County. For reasons that have never been exactly clear, his
family sent the teenage Harrison to Hampden-Sydney College for his basic
baccalaureate education, which was heavily focused in the classics of Greece
and Rome, Harrison was a member of the college class of 1891; he may have
stayed there for at least three years, but he did not graduate; some say
that he withdrew because his family objected to a religious revival that
was then going on at the college, but other point out that apparently his
father thought that his son perhaps should move elsewhere and concentrate
on medical studies. One thing is certain, however, and that is that
thereafter in this colorful man’s life he often spoke approvingly of his
studies about the classical soldiers and statesman of the ancient world...which
then emulated in his own life. One of Virginia’s Historical Markers
is located on Hampden-Sydney’s campus and indicated that Harrison briefly
studied there.
Another person who was not
born in our county, but who received a significant part of his education
here was Dr. Walter Reed, the famed conqueror of the dreaded “Yellow Jack,”
or yellow fever. Young Reed was born in 1851, near White march in
Gloucester County, to a Methodist minister and his wife. Walter Reed
was six years old when his father was assigned to the Prince Edward Circuit
of the Methodist Church. The Reeds lived on High Street. Young
Walter began his formal education at the Southside Institute, which was
then a well-known private school that was located on Farmville’s South
Main Street in the vicinity of its Fourth Street intersection. Mrs.
Booker was his teacher there prior to his minister-father’s transfer to
another Methodist circuit, just on the eve of the Civil War. Eventually,
Walter studied at the University of Virginia and at the Bellevue Hospital
Medical College in New York City. He then entered the U.S. Army and
became a major in its medical corps. In 1900, he chaired a special
military commission to study infectious disease in Cuba, in response to
the devastating number of yellow fever cases among our soldiers who had
been located there during the Spanish-American War. Prior to that,
however, there has also been major summertime yellow fever epidemics at
various times among the civilian populations of Philadelphia, New Orleans,
Galveston, and other port cities. Dr. Reed discovered that this disease
was carried by infected female Stegomyia mosquitoes and he participated
in developing an inoculation against this heretofore “killer disease.”
His own untimely death came in Washington, D.C., in 1902, when he was just
51 years of age. The magnificent medical contributions of this one-time
Prince Edward County schoolboy are honored, of course, in the naming of
the great Walter Reed Army Hospital in northwest Washington, D.C.
There’s a Virginia Historical Marker on U.S. 17 highway at White Marsh,
indicating Reed’s birthplace nearby.
On that same highway, just
a short distance away from the Reed marker, there is also one that notes
the Holly Knoll death-site of Robert Russa Moton, African-American educator
and co-founder of the famed Urban League. As many of us know, young
Moton was born in nearby Amelia County two years after the close of the
Civil War, and although his parents were now freed slaves and were therefore
not necessarily under the old legal and social strictures against having
Caucasians openly teaching African-Americans, still this was not yet a
generally acceptable practice. Moton’s parents eventually came to
live and work on the farm of Samuel Vaughan and Lucy Lockett Vaughan, which
was along the border of Amelia and Prince Edward counties. In secret
Mrs. Vaughan began to teach the inquisitive young Robert to make his letters
and words and sentences and to decipher his numbers, and one day she was
discovered at this task by her husband. In an age when the man’s
word was the governing word, she was uncertain of her husband’s response,
but he eventually replied, “God bless you, Lucy Lockett!” Subsequently
the Locketts’ youngest daughter also assisted in his instruction.
Thankfully, a sharecropper’s life was not to be Moton’s fate. From
that humble beginning on the Vaughan farm of our county, Robert went on
to enroll at Hampton Institute, where he graduated with honors, and served
on its administration staff for the next 25 years, until he was elected
as president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. During the era of
segregated public schools, Prince Edward County built a black high school
in Farmville in 1939, and named it for this “almost-native-born” son.
The initial construction of this high school was accomplished with major
supplemental help from the Public Works Administration and with a loan
from the State Literary Fund. This was not only an era when Caucasian
decision-makers were reluctant to fully fund the educational needs of non-white
students, but the 1930's were also the Depression era when both public
and private monies were sparse. The size of the school was inadequate
even from the time of its opening. In our present-day zeal to emphasize
that school building’s place in our local and national history let’s not
forget also to emphasize its namesake’s place in history. The high-achieving
Robert R. Moton wrote his own autobiography, Finding a Way Out,
prior to his death in 1940, and as Lucy Lockett Vaughan’s great-grandson,
Lt. General Samuel Vaughan Wilson, a noted resident of present-day Prince
Edward County, has written: “His autobiography on his personal struggle
to overcome racial prejudice in education became an inspiration to all
thoughtful Americans.”
Not a single one of these
three was born here, but we should celebrate that some of our local citizens
did something right (!) by helping to start them on their way
The Farmville Herald, Friday, October 8, 2004
Longwood House – home of the Johnstons, Venables, Wrights, and several Longwood University presidents
One of the
grand old houses of Prince Edward County is the Longwood House, which has
been the home of the presidents of Longwood College/University for the
past several decades. It has a long and interesting history – much
of it related to other properties and people of Prince Edward County.
The original
plantation and house were associated with the Johnston family – Peter,
Sr. and Peter, Jr. That house is not the present one. Peter
Johnston, Sr. was a prosperous Scottish immigrant, albeit an Anglican and
not a native-born Presbyterian. He owned other property in the area
and in 1775, he gave a hundred acres “at the head of Hudson’s Branch” for
the establishment of Hampden-Sydney College. This little creek is
in the area just below the present-day football filed, in the general area
of the Kirby Field house. Contrary to the traditional reputation
of Scottish thriftiness, or even stinginess, his was an outright free gift.
He might not have been so generous if he had known that the young college
that would be raised up on his gift-land would be such a hotbed of revolutionary
spirit against the British Crown, because Mr. Johnston of Longwood Plantation
was an avowed Tory who gave open support to the Redcoat cause. His
rebellious son, Peter, Jr., ran off from home and Hampden-Sydney to join
“Light Horse Harry” Lee in his calvary operations against the British in
the southern colonies.
After the
war, Peter, Jr. returned to this county to take up farming and a wife,
and, from their union, two noted sons were born there at the Longwood House:
Charles Clement Johnston, who would serve from Virginia in the U.S. House
of Representatives (unfortunately while he was in Congress, he accidentally
drowned at the docks in Alexandria), and Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who
was educated at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point before becoming
a famous military figure in both the Mexican War and the War Between the
States. In the latter, he commanded first the eastern Confederate
forces prior to his serious wounding (near the present-day Richmond airport)
and then later he commanded the principal western Confederate army twice,
before surrendering that army to Sherman just outside of Durham, North
Carolina, several weeks after Lee had surrendered to Grant and Meade at
Appomattox. General Johnston later served from a Virginia congressional
district in the U.S. House of Representatives and, still later, he was
President Grover Cleveland’s Commissioner of Railroads. In one of
the grand, ironic stories of that late war, he also served as the pallbearer
at General Sherman’s funeral, just a few weeks before his own death.
The Johnston
family sold Longwood to Nathaniel E. Venable (he’s Nathaniel Venable, II,
not he earlier Nathaniel Venable, who had lived at Slate Hill plantation
an in whose office Hampden-Sydney was founded in the winter of 1775).
The second Nathaniel Venable was also a prosperous farmer and it was he
who built the present Longwood House. One of his sons was Charles
Scott Venable, who would attend Hampden-Sydney (beginning at the age of
12 in 1839, mind you, and graduating with top honors in 1842!). He
remained at Hampden-Sydney for another year of self-directed studies in
science while also taking some classes at the Presbyterian seminary in
the same village (there’s now an endowed Venable Professorship in Chemistry
at Hampden-Sydney, honoring his memory). He later taught math at
the college for several years before studying abroad in Germany.
When Charles Venable returned to the United States, he taught astronomy
and math for several years at the University of Georgia and then at the
University of South Carolina. Beginning in 1861 he became a part
of various commands of the Confederate Army, before he was eventually summoned
as the principal staff member to General Robert E. Lee. After the
war Charles Venable became a faculty member at the University of Virginia,
teaching chemistry there for 35 years prior to his death in 1900.
During that same period, he also founded the well-known Miller School nearby
as a preparatory school for boys.
Charles
Venable had a professor-son, Francis Preston Venable, who was also born
in “our” Longwood House. That son studied at the University of Virginia
and also in Germany, before he became a much-beloved professor of chemistry
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And, still later,
he served as president of the University of North Carolina (1900-1914).
The Venables
sold Longwood House to Wright Barber, who was a part of an interesting
group of English immigrants who settled in Prince Edward County in the
late 1800's (the now-removed St. Anne’s Episcopal Church served as a worship
site on the Five Forks Road for many of these people who lived in the Spring
Creek area).
Thanks
to the persistent efforts and enthusiasm of Mr. J. L. Jarman, wife of the
longtime (1902-1946) State Teachers College president, the Farmville college
bought the property for the Wright heirs in 1924, to be used initially
as a college club house and recreation center. By then, this landmark
house and property was such a beloved and handsome feature of the county’s
rich history that the college itself took this as its new name in 1949.
So...when
you pass along that way, either on Johnston Street or on Milnwood Road,
or when you play golf on its expansive hills and valleys, think about some
of these names and their histories. This fall’s event of naming several
new buildings at Longwood University for some of the more recent inhabitants
of that lovely home also serves to remind all of us that history is still
being made at Longwood House today!
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Gubernatorial candidate Fitzhugh Lee visits Worsham, 1885
This election
year calls to mind one of the most famous campaign visits that was ever
made to this county, back in the fall of 1885, when Republican John S.
Wise and Democrat Fitzhugh Lee were candidates for Governor of the Commonwealth
of Virginia. General Lee was a favorite of many people around the
county because he as an ex-Confederate Major General of calvary forces,
but his period in Prince Edward County was still in the aftermath of the
Reconstruction, when so many laws, customs, and assumptions had been either
challenged or overturned. Lee would will the gubernatorial election
handily, but Wise would carry Prince Edward County by a margin of 1,614
to 1,108.
On Friday,
October 23, 1885, candidate Lee made an official campaign stop and speech
at a barbecue in Prince Edward County...but his visit was focused at the
old county seat village of Worsham, rather than at the new county seat
of Farmville, because even though by then the county seat had been in Farmville
for over a dozen years, old line Democrats were still smarting at having
had it “stolen out from under them” by the Deconstructionists of the early
1870's. So Lee’s political handlers arranged for this stop to be
in Worsham, to call “the good old days” to the electorate’s mind.
Fitz Lee, indeed, had a distinguished and impeccable genetic heritage which
hearkened bac to such an era. He was the great-grandson of George
Mason of Gunston Hall (a colonial leader who had authored the Virginia
Declaration of Rights in 1776, an who had opposed the adoption of the U.S.
Constitution primarily because, in its original form, it had lacked an
inclusion of a similar statement of individual rights); he was the grandson
of “Light Horse Harry” Lee, who had consistently bested the British in
the southern colonies’ fight for independence; and, of more immediate import
to the old Confederate electorate, he was the nephew of Robert E. Lee,
and he had commanded the Confederate cavalry in its grand time under J.
E. B. Stuart and Wade Hampton, a mere twenty years earlier.
Fitz Lee
was met at the train depot in Farmville that October morning, and then
he and his supporters rode horseback to Worsham. A student writer
for the Hampden Sidney Magazine, was obviously carried away as he described
th scene he had recently witnessed just down the road from the college:
“General Lee’s reception at Worsham...was indeed a brilliant affair, and
exceeded the most sanguine expectations of his friends. Rarely has
such an occasion been experienced in our county, and we err not greatly,
if we assert that at no time since the turmoil of war subsided, has Prince
Edward ever turned out in such force. We must allow to surrounding
counties, however, that they contributed quite extensively to the making
up of the assemblage. Gen. Lee was met at Farmville, and escorted
to Worsham, by a mounted procession of 1,396 men, and as the old commander
arrived at their head, riding beneath the Stars and Stripes, the times
of re-union seemed indeed to hover over us, and we more than ever before
realized the fact the animosities of sectional strife had been buried deep
and forever...” There was much emotional speechifying, as well as
the meeting of old comrades of past days, and there was, of course, the
traditional southern barbecue that has long been associated with such political
events.
It was
too bad that the county’s “Grand Old Man,” Branch Jones Worsham, did not
live to see and to enjoy this grand headline day for his village – and
to be acclaimed by an appreciative audience of his Democrat cohorts.
For years, Branch Worsham had been “Mr. Prince Edward County,” while he
was serving as the county’s distinguished Clerk of Court for 57 years (1802-1869),
before he was quite ungraciously dismissed by the Deconstructionists and
their military advisors...who then added insult to injury by removing the
county seat of government itself.
Our own
recent transition in the Clerk of Court’s office calls to mind how very
fortunate Prince Edward County has been in having such a grand succession
of splendid Clerks and how doubly fortunate we are in never having had
our county records destroyed by invading armies (although they twice had
the chance, in July of 1781 and in April of 1865), or ruined by fire and
flood (as has happened in several other Virginia counties). Furthermore,
we’ve never had the first breath of scandal associated with our fine Clerks
of Court.
Reading
any of those decades of county records that were written in ink, in Mr.
Worsham’s fine, flowing scrip, is such an easy and pleasurable act!
When you visit the present Clerk of Court’s office, your attention is called
to his portrait, which is the first one on the left wall, just behind the
counter. He was the son of Captain William Worsham, a Prince Edward
hero of the American Revolution who had been captured by the British cavalry
raider, Banastre Tarleton, in July of 1781. Years later, Branch himself
became a folk hero locally by refusing to give Union General Phil Sheridan
any information about the routes that the Army of Northern Virginia had
taken through this area. In response to Mr. Worsham’s integrity,
Sheridan had briefly arrested this defiant Clerk of Court and had taken
him along when they departed the old courthouse village about dusk on Friday,
April 7, 1865. By then, having hassled this 75-year-old man sufficiently
for his own satisfaction, General Sheridan released Mr. Worsham along the
banks of Buffalo Creek several miles away, whereupon the old Clerk of Court
walked back home to the welcoming cheers of his family and neighbors.
Groups
and individuals can still arrange to use the old Clerk of Court’s office
there in present-day Worsham. And, if and when they do, they should
feel a sense of grand history and great people associated with that place.
The Hampden-Sydney/Sidney writer was wrong in his hyperbolic acclaim that
here had never been such a day as the one in October of 1885, when portly
old Fitz Lee came campaigning for governor to that site. There have
been many such days, and several such people...at least for the appreciative
people whom Holy Writ describes as “those with eyes to see and ears to
hear.”
The Farmville Herald, Friday, November 19, 2004
What’s in some of our county place-names?
Shakespeare
once famously asked, “What’s in a name?” (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene
2). We might likewise ask, What’s in some of our county place-names?
Why did some crossroads communities get the names they have, and why did
some of them once have another name prior to the present one, and why did
they change?
There is
debate about the naming of the county’s principal community. Do we
have “Farmville” because Rutledge’s Landing on the Appomattox River was
located on some of the rich “farmlands” of the old Randolph plantation?
Or, is it “Farmville” because even when it was incorporated in 1798 it
was already apparent that this would be the ville (the French word for
“town”) for the entire agricultural region?
We know
that when the Reconstructionists government displaced the longtime Clerk
of Court, Branch Worsham, for its own toady and also deigned to move the
county seat of government from Prince Edward Court House to Farmville,
the governing authorities tossed a bone to the jilted people at the old
courthouse village by suggesting that the abandoned site be named “Worsham”
for the gentleman who had served the county for so long. One wonders
why these literal “movers and shakers” did not then take away the name
of “Farmville” and replace it with the continuing name for those judicial
and administrative functions: “Prince Edward Court House.” After
all, in the neighboring counties of Buckingham, Charlotte, and Appomattox,
longtime place names were undone when those respective counties settled
on such places as being appropriately for their judicial business and then
named them “Buckingham Court House” and “Charlotte Court House” and “Appomattox
Court House.” Maybe Farmville should have been “Prince Edward Court
House II?”
Where id
the place name “Rice” come from? The location of the South Side Rail
Road tracks and a depot on that high ground in the northeastern part of
the county certainly brought that place into relative prominence and made
a nearby river-front village named “Jamestown” obsolete. Perhaps
that’s just as well, since Prince Edwardians and others have always had
to explain that “our” Jamestown is different from the 1607 Jamestown of
Captain John Smith. Still now in Presbyterian circles that same confusion
has to be explained about the Jamestown Presbyterian Church that is located
near Rice. For that matter, how did “Jamestown” get its name?
Some insist that it was because a Mr. James Towne operated a ferry at that
point on the river, and that it became informally known as “James Towne’s
Ferry.” Others, however, say that this is a linguistic “joke,” and
the Mr. Towne’s first name really was John.
Moore’s Ordinary used to be
a well-known stage coach stopover in the southeastern part of our county,
but after the Richmond and Danville Railroad came through there, the old
name evidently was judged to be too “ordinary” and the new name of “Meherrin”
appears. Some folks say that this is related to the Meherrin River
that flows through a part of Southside Virginia, but take a look at the
map – only a very remote tributary of the Meherrin River is anywhere near
that part of our county!
Where and
why did “Green Bay” gets its name? The Green Bay that everybody knows
is hundreds of miles away, in Wisconsin, and its “mayors” have included
Bart Starr and Bret Favre, two good ole Southern boys, albeit its one time
“emperor” was Vince Lombardi, a Yankee through-and-through. I’ll
wager that none of the above fellows have ever been in good old Green Bay,
Prince Edward County, Virginia!
Hampden-Sydney
used to get its mail at the first Prince Edward Court House, and the collegians
continued to do so when it became “Worsham.” College yearbook articles
are filled with joking articles about the daily walking trek to “Woo-shum.”
Now, of course, Hampden-Sydney has its own zip code status symbol: 23943.
But how many people can tell you anything about those 17th century British
anti-royalists, John Hampden, a Parliamentarian who was mortally wounded
on Chalgrove Field near Oxford on June of 1643, or Algenon Sydney, a political
theorist whose rhetoric was dear to Thomas Jefferson a century and a quarter
later. Still, it seems a bit quaint and far-fetched to some of wonder
around “our” present-day Hampden-Sydney and to try to relate that place
to 17th century patriots and places in faraway England.
Speaking
of England, “Darlington Heights” seems to have been given its name by a
group of 19th century English immigrants who settled in those highlands
of western Prince Edward County after the American Civil War. Before
that, the general area was referred to as “Spring Creek.” For the
most part, the 19th century English settlers eventually dispersed, leaving
behind them only a roadside marker to their St. Anne’s Episcopal Church
that used to stand alongside the Five Forks Road (the church itself was
relocated later to Appomattox). Also, why the nearby “Abilene,” which
sound like Texas. There was a place by this name in long ago classical
antiquity...but that’s also a long way from Prince Edward County!
And, did you know that “Madisonville” (just across the county line), used
to be called “Chickentown” because of all the illegal cockfights that used
to held there?
“Tuggle”
came into existence when the South Side Rail Road came through in 1854.
You had to have a water tank alongside the railroad, about every 20 miles
for those tiny little steam engines that rapidly depleted their energy-dispersing
water. There was a tank at Rice and then there was also the “Tuggle
Tank Stop,” that was named for a nearby family, whose property lay alongside
the tracks.
“Prospect”
is another real enigma. One might guess that there had been some
mining operations in the area, or that entrepreneurial dreamers had plans
for some major economic development there and gave the place such a name
as “a draw” for settlement. The name was firmly fixed when the U.S.
Army came there on April 8, 1865, as an acerbic cavalryman wrote home,
“...we found neither station nor prospect!” Not even Prospect historian
and story-teller Robert Taylor has a satisfactory explanation for the name.
Do any of you have any clues?
The Farmville Herald, Friday, December 10, 2004
Mail delivery in last century in Prince Edward County
With the
development of electronic mail, package delivery companies, and the commercial
services of the Internet itself, perhaps the U.S. Postal Service does not
carry as large a volume of December mail as it once did...although I’m
sure you would get a quick argument on that from many of the postal employees
who seem as burdened as ever with their bulging tote-bags. But certainly,
people do not send as many Christmas cards during December as they once
did. I can remember when my parents sent a Christmas card to every
household in my father’s church, and they worried about how much money
that cost them. Back then, in the 1940's, in-town correspondence
carried a brown two-cent stamp, and cards to their out-of-town friends
took a dark blue three-cent stamp. My job was to lick all those stamps...something
else that has now gone out of style. In the North Carolina town where
we then were living, we had both a morning and an afternoon delivery to
our homes. The real adventure of the arrival of the mail, however,
was at m y paternal grandparents’ house out in the country, because they
lived on a rural route, at the end of a dirt driveway that was a hundred
yards long. Both of my grandparents were busy for most of the day
– he in the fields and in the barn, and she in the kitchen at the back
of the house. They did not exactly hang around watching for the rural
mail carrier’s car. So if they had not seen him actually stop, the
big mystery was whether or not they had any mail...and of course that thrifty
and busy couple did not want to waste any time on a walk of five minutes
down the driveway out to the highway and back on what might have been a
futile trek. So my grandfather had an old-fashioned expanding one-lens
telescope that he kept in the front hallway, so someone could pick it up,
walk out onto the front porch, draw out the length of the telescope, put
it up to one eye, and train it on the far mailbox...to see if perhaps the
red flag was up that would make it worthwhile to trudge the way the their
rural mail box.
Here in
Prince Edward County, the mail deliveries were originally made to crossroads
post offices, some of which existed just in a corner window of some other
business establishment. Mail was brought to each little post office
by a carrier who had come from the nearest railroad station where the mail
had been dropped off (more on that in moment). Clarence Bradshaw’s
1954 history of Prince Edward County indicates that at the opening of the
20th century, there were county post offices at places called Beck (Moran),
Nile, Overly, Travis, Leigh Mountain, Rice, Green Bay, Meherrin, Sanco,
Felden (at times this one went by two alternate names: Cypress and Redd’s
Shop), Millbank, Worsham, Farmville, Tuggle (alternate named Acteon), Gardenia,
Five Forks, Adelle, Tredways, Venna, Putney’s, Prospect, Darlington Heights.
How many of those places can you identify now, over a century later?
The earlier railroad mail exchanges at depots were a marvel in themselves.
Nearly every passenger train typically had its separate mail car, and mail
was delivered for that mail car by a postal clerk who tossed leather bag
onto the station platform from an opening in the side of the mail car itself,
and some of you probably remember that that same car was equipped with
a metal arm that was let down as the train was approaching the station,
and the postal pick-up was literally a “snatch-up,” as that extension arm
automatically snagged the local leather bag filled with mail that had been
literally “posted,” or hung, on a stationary metal pole that had a suspended
sling that held the mailbag. The mail car arm engaged this bag as
the train passed by. I used to stand at train stations and watch
in amazement at this marvelous, rudimentary – but unfailing – technology.
I had an uncle who worked those depot exchanges from such a mail car and
he sorted the contents into mail car pigeon-holes between stations.
His work was so important, in fact, that it provides him with an automatic
military draft deferment during World War II. President Roosevelt
personally decreed that mail deliveries were so important to the war effort
and to both civilian and military morale that already-employed postal clerks
did not have to go to war.
Bradshaw’s
history indicates that the second phase of such postal deliveries – all
those little neighborhood post offices – was brief. On December 1,
1904 – exactly a hundred years ago this month – rural postal delivery was
introduced throughout our county. Such an innovation necessitated
“a run” on purchasing those now familiar rural postal boxes and, of course,
numerous farm boys had to cut cedar posts for those boxes and to dig holes
for the posts. Except for walking routes within Farmville, postal
clerks delivered their rural routes on horseback, from Rice, Farmville,
Prospect on the one railroad through our count, and from Meherrin and Keysville
on the other railroad. (Yes, Keysville is technically in Charlotte
County, but many of its deliveries were in the southern part of Prince
Edward County, just as some of the western part of our county now has its
mail service from the Pamplin post office in Appomattox County).
There was no separate post office for the college girls at the Normal School
on High Street; there was one drop-off at Ruffner, and then there was a
quite proper “mail-call” outside the dining room, just before meal time.
A postscript
to the developing mail service throughout the county, however, was when
Hampden-Sydney got its own post office, separate from the one at Worsham
(earlier, Prince Edward Court House). Until that time, a daily break
in the college boys’s schedules had been their mile-and-a-half trek to
the old nearby village to see if they had received any mail that day.
Many times that was indeed a futile trip, although sometimes trekking friends
would make inquiries for the more studious fellows back in their candle-lit
rooms. The coming of a college post office to a spot just several
hundred feet away from a dormitory obviously began the spoiling and weakening
of those collegians.
Meanwhile,
during this very busy month of mail deliveries, thank those clerks in your
own post offices, and those people on their now-motorized routes.
Just over a hundred years ago it involved a lot more labor and laborers
and time to get those Christmas cars.
Of course
it was a lot cheaper back then too!
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Dr. R. R. Moton’s challenge to complete “unfinished business”
The Lincoln
Memorial is probably Washington D.C.’s most revered monument, and ti is
remembered by many as a focal point of lots of public demonstrations –
none more famous than the August 1963 “March on Washington,” with Martin
Luther King’s uplifting “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Memorial.
This replica
of a Greek temple is found on the back of every copper penny and on the
back of every $5 bill. Lincoln’s familiar face of course is on the
obverse side of both. The Memorial has 36 columns, representing the
36 states of the union that existed at the time of Lincoln’s untimely post-war
murder. The seated figure of the 16th President is definitely one
of our nation’s most recognizable icons. The sculptor, Daniel Chester
French, spent 13 years carving this massive marble figure.
Site preparation
had been underway for years, since the location was originally a swamp.
In fact, the capital city’s nearby neighborhood that is called “Foggy Bottom”
owes its name to the miasmic mists that used to rise from that adjacent
swamp. Many thousands of man-hours were spent just in creating an
artificial foundation for this Memorial. It was finally dedicated
on Memorial Day of 1922.
So...why
on earth should someone be writing about the Lincoln Memorial in a column
on the history of Prince Edward County? Because “one of our own”
was one of the two featured speakers at the dedication ceremony: Robert
Russa Moton. To be truthful, of course, Moton was not a native-born
Prince Edwardian, as he had just lived within our bounds while he was a
youngster, when his parents were working for the Vaughans of the Rice/Jamestown
community. He was born in Amelia County on August 26, 1867.
He attended Sunday school classes at he Jamestown Presbyterian Church in
our county and, with encouragement and assistance from some of those church
members, Moton went to college at Virginia’s Hampton Institute (now Hampton
University), and served as an administrator there fro 1890 to 1915, at
which time he succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama. It was while he was there that he was invited to be one
of the featured speakers at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.
President Warren Harding had a minor role at the celebratory event.
The main speakers were Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft
(himself a former U.S. President) and President R. R. Moton.
All was
not absolutely rosy that day, however, for this was still the Jim Crow
era of restrictive racial customs in everyday practice. While distinguished
guests, Robert Todd Lincoln (the former President’s son), and President
Harding and Chief Justice Taft were all seated in splendid honor on the
podium, Dr. Moton was ushered away from that platform to an all-Negro section
across the road from the rest of the audience. It was an ugly reflection
of the temper of the times, an indication of the long and unreconstructed
road yet ahead toward a still unrealized Emaciation that Lincoln had declared
and fought for over a half-century earlier. American blacks were
understandably indignant at Dr. Moton’s side-tracked seating. He
achieved some decree of symbolic honor, however, by taking his reverent
time in crossing the street when his time on the program was at hand.
Clad in striped trousers and a cutaway morning coat, Dr. Moton stepped
up to the platform before a national audience...and his very presence perhaps
“spoke” as great a volume and as thrilling a cadence – and as symbolic
significance on the nation’s conscience – as Marion Anderson’s contralto
voice would contribute before 75,000 people at that same place at her famous
concert on Easter Sunday afternoon 17 years later.
Mrs. Lucy
Lockett Vaughan’s former student, now 55 years old, had indeed come a long
way from the fields and cabins of Prince Edward County by that 1922 occasion
in Washington, but it was clearly apparent from his speech that our nation
itself still had a long way to go. Among the words that Robert Russa
Moton said at the Lincoln Memorial’s dedication were these: “Lincoln died
not for the Negro alone, but to vindicate the honor of a nation pledged
to the sacred cause of human freedom. Upon the field of Gettysburg
he dedicated the nation to the great unfinished work of making sure that
‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, should not
perish from the earth.’ And this means all the people. So long
as any group within our nation is denied the full protection of the law,
that task is still unfinished.... With malice toward none, with charity
for all we dedicate ourselves and our posterity, with you and yours, to
finish the work which he so nobly began, to make America the symbol for
equal justice and equal opportunity for all.”
Parts of Dr. Moton’s dedicatory
speech were recently recited at a special presentation (In Our Own Backyard)
of Prince Edward history that was given by students and faculty of the
Fuqua School’s theater and art department. The occasion was in the
Hull building on the Longwood University campus just after the December
5 Christmas parade. This was community service project by two Fuqua
School teachers, Dora Bounds and Jeremy Bryant, highlighted by numerous
tableaux featuring 16 students, supplemented by filmed oral history interviews
that were moderated by Richard Swayne: other film sequences, edited by
Spanish teacher Shane Newcombe, formed the backdrop for the tableaux of
student actors. Mrs. Bounds also coordinated this assembling and
presenting as her semester project for a 45-hour course on Prince Edward
County history that she and others have been taking this fall at the Southside
Virginia Community College.
Certainly
Dr. Moton’s Lincoln Memorial dedication speech should be remembered – and
more importantly, embodied – by all of us as we continue to work for the
whole of our community, and as we mark the fact that our county’s first
R. R. Moton High School building is now a museum and study center, anchoring
a new regional tourist attraction that is known as the Civil Rights Trail
in Education. Let’s also hope that our present-day county citizens
will continue to respond to Dr. Moton’s stirring challenge about “unfinished
business” that was spoken there at the Lincoln Memorial over 80 years ago.
The Farmville Herald, Friday, December 31, 2004
Afterthoughts on Prince ED–Words
This will
be my final column in a year-long effort to highlight various aspects of
Prince Edward County’s two and a half centuries of history. The Prince
Edward County Court convened for the first time on January 8, 1754, and
we formally began our 250th birthday celebration at the courthouse a year
ago, on January 8, 2004. Your columnist has been a member of the
county’s 250th Anniversary Commission that was chaired by Supervisor Lacy
Ward. We began our work about a year and a half ago, and officially
closed it with the burial of a time capsule on the courthouse lawn on the
afternoon of December 5, 2004.
I promised
the Commission the I would write a weekly column about various aspects
of our county’s history, and I want to thank publisher Steve Wall, editor
Ken Woodley, and newspaper writer Rob Chapman (who was the Herald’s official
representative on the Commission) for their assistance and encouragement.
Various ones of you have helpfully corrected some of my mistakes, and others
of you have “filled out” for me additional interesting information about
some of my column topics. Lots of you have reported that you have
been saving those columns for others in your family who formerly lived
here. The newspaper’s management team recently indicated at a seasonal
meeting that it planned to draw all these columns together in a book that
will eventually be available to the public sometime in this new year.
I’ve also taught a 45-hour course on our county history during this past
fall for the Southside Virginia Community College. Since I’m not
a county native, I’ve had to work at this whole endeavor, and I have learned
a lot.
Some people
understandably recoil from – and even avoid – parts of our county’s rich
and varied history. Others undoubtedly celebrate too much some one
aspect, or time period, of our history. One of the intentional things
I have tried to do in these weekly columns has been “to jump all around”
in that history, just to be certain that I didn’t “slow down the story”
too much at any one period.
History
is never simply dates and facts alone. It is also memory, and for
all of us, memory is always selective, sometimes for known reasons and
at other times because we are indeed finite and can’t remember “everything.”
Sometimes that is admittedly intentional, but most of the time it is not;
for, as I say, the human mind has only so many gray matter cells (my wife
constantly says that I fill up my allotted amount with content that does
not make any difference, and which few people would ever want to know),
and we cannot possibly remember everything...although some would venture
to suggest that Herbert Clarence Bradshaw almost did. His extremely
detailed county history is a genuine treasure, not so much as a story as
it is as a reference work, to be consulted just here and there. His
footnotes and index are extremely valuable. History is also personal,
reflecting our individual, or group, interests. What is boring to
one person will invariably be interesting to someone else. And history
is also interpretive, like newspaper editorials. And the reader,
or the student absorbing that history, may sometimes want to filter out
that interpretation. But the interpretation also belongs in the past
and the present history...and it will also belong in the future history.
Interpretation has to do with the meaning of the history for our own growth.
That’s where history becomes more than simple dates; it becomes destiny
itself destiny for us to latch onto, and to learn from, and to build upon.
If we were
naming our county now, we would probably never call it “Prince Edward.”
We perhaps named ourselves that back in 1754, wanting to curry the king’s
favor. Back then the heir apparent of Great Britain’s throne was
a man who in six more years (1750) would begin a 50-year reign as King
George III, a reign whose length would be exceeded only by his great-granddaughter
Victoria’s 64-year rule (Victoria’s great-granddaughter Elizabeth II has
now ruled for 52 years...and counting). Colonial Virginians perhaps
felt sorry for “poor little Prince Edward,” George’s younger brother, who
didn’t have a reigning future, so our founders “immortalized” him with
our new county’s name when the king’s younger brother was just 14 years
old. Frankly, as matters developed, Edward didn’t deserve our honor
and we didn’t deserve his name. He turned out to be a wastrel of
considerable immorality and idleness, who died young from his many excesses.
Furthermore, by the time of the American Revolution two decades after our
county’s founding, in writing the great Declaration of Independence, our
fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson would call Prince Edward’s “older brother
George, no less than” and absolute Despot” and “an absolute Tyrant,” and
“a Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define
a Tyrant,” and one who most decidedly “is unfit to be the ruler of a free
people.”
But we,
who bear the name and heritage of those essentially “good-for-nothing”
Hanoverian prince, are neither controlled nor damned by that name.
There are certainly some things in every family’s heritage, and in every
community’s heritage, that we might wish had not turned out in the manner
that they did, just like Prince Edward himself was hardly exemplary in
all his doings.
But we
don’t have to be chained by an single part of our 250-year history and
certainly, we are not dependent on it. The best history of Prince
Edward County has yet to be written. As the poet Robert Browning
famously said, “Come, grow old with me, the best is yet to be,” Speaking
now as a preacher, I would counsel, “YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE IT!”
The Farmville Herald, Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Farmville
- Prince Edward Historical Society
Prince
Edward County, Virginia, 250th Anniversary Celebration
Website
created and maintained by
Farmville - Prince Edward
Historical Society
Edwina Covington, webmaster
created March, 2003
last modified January, 2005
hosted by NTelos