Virginia Vignettes

Louisa county native John Mercer Langston, the son of an enslaved African-American and American Indian mother and White planter father, became one of the earliest African-American elected officials on his way to a career of dazzling range and accomplishment. Born in 1829, he was orphaned at age 5 and went to Oberlin, Ohio to live [...]

Virginia holds two claims to a day of thanksgiving predating the widely popularized “first Thanksgiving” at Plymouth in 1621. Upon arrival of much-needed supplies from England in the spring 1610, following the Jamestown settlement’s “starving time” – the winter famine in 1609-the settlers greeted Lord De la Warr on the James River with a service [...]

Heavily indebted after Thomas Jefferson’s death, the Jefferson family was forced to sell Monticello in 1828. Charlottesville druggist James Barclay purchased the property in hopes of creating a silkworm farm, which failed; in 1836, he sold the estate to Commodore Uriah Levy, a War of 1812 veteran and a pioneering Jewish officer in the Navy, [...]

In a mere half-dozen years, Winchester’s Patsy Cline not only achieved enormous country-music success but redefined the genre with a strongly blues-tinged pop sensibility. Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932 in Gore, near the West Virginia line, she moved often with her family before they settled in Winchester. She sang prolifically on local radio and [...]