Virginia Vignettes

Not if they’re good story material. In 1880 a friend showed Thomas Nelson Page, a University of Virginia graduate working in Richmond, a letter supposedly found on a dead Confederate soldier. In the letter, the soldier’s sweetheart confessed her love for him but warned that if he returned home without a furlough, she wouldn’t marry [...]

The connection can be found in the friendship of Earl Hamner Jr. and Rod Serling. Hamner, the creator of “The Waltons” and a Nelson County native, first met Serling, who would go on to create “The Twilight Zone,” in the late 1940s. Hamner was working in radio at WLW in Cincinnati, and when he left [...]

Mary Elizabeth Bowser is a mysterious figure for historians. As the story goes, she was a slave belonging to Richmond’s wealthy Van Lew family. Freed through the efforts of the Van Lews’ abolitionist daughter, Elizabeth, she attended the Quaker Negro College in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew worked as a Union spy, [...]

Elizabeth Van Lew was a Richmond Unionist and abolitionist who spied for the United States government during the Civil War. Leading a network of a dozen or so white and African American women and men – possibly including Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a former Van Lew family slave who worked as a servant in the Confederate [...]