Virginia Vignettes

The Wreck of the Old 97 occurred on September 27, 1903, when the Southern Railway freight train called the Fast Mail (or “Old 97″) left the tracks and crashed at the Stillhouse Trestle outside Danville, Virginia. Eleven people were killed, including the locomotive crew and a number of clerks assigned to oversee the mail the [...]

Colonial Williamsburg was the brainchild of the Reverend W. A. R. Goodwin. Once rector of the historic Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Goodwin had been responsible for raising the funds for its restoration in 1907. In 1924, he approached the philanthropist and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr. with the idea of restoring other parts [...]

The tennis great Arthur Ashe, who died February 6, 1993, was the first person so honored since the death of Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Although nearly 6,000 people attended his funeral, the legacy of this Richmond native, who in 1975 beat Jimmy Connors to become the first African American male to win Wimbledon, [...]

Arthur Ashe, the first black men’s tennis champion at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, grew up in a house located smack in the middle of a playground. And the playground had tennis courts. This was in 1940s Richmond, and Ashe’s father had taken a job as a special police officer assigned to Brook Field, an [...]