Virginia Vignettes

In 1951, Barbara Rose Johns, then 16 years old, organized a student walkout at the all-black Moton High School in Farmville to protest the conditions of their education. At Moton, the facilities included tar paper shacks but no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no science laboratories, and no athletic field. The buildings had no plumbing and were [...]

The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition was held in Norfolk from April 26 to November 30, 1907, and celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony by settlers from England. It was one in a series of large fairs and expositions held across the United States that began with the 1893 World’s Columbian [...]

Quite often. The most notable escape from Richmond’s infamous Civil War prison occurred in February 1864, when 109 inmates tunneled their way to freedom. After three failed attempts, a small group of Union officers, working in three five-man shifts,  labored for several weeks to dig the fifty- to sixty-foot-long passageway out from the prison’s cellar. [...]

The Libby Chronicle was a newsletter published by inmates at Richmond’s Libby Prison during the Civil War. Libby began as a hospital and general prison in 1861 and was converted into an officers-only facility in 1862. The Union prisoners who stayed at Libby were crowded inside a three-story, poorly ventilated former tobacco factory; they suffered [...]