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
signe