Virginia Vignettes

John Stewart Battle served as governor of Virginia from 1950 to 1954. A loyal Democrat in line with the Byrd Organization, the state machine run by U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr., Battle overcame a spirited challenge by three fellow Democrats to win the 1949 gubernatorial primary. His greatest achievement as governor was a massive [...]

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 [...]

Anne Spencer was a Lynchburg poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Noted for verse preoccupied with [...]

Few United States Supreme Court decisions are as infamous as Buck v. Bell (1927). In Buck, the court affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 law empowering Virginia to sterilize individuals deemed genetically “unfit.” State authorities had ordered the sterilization of seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck, the illegitimate daughter of a woman the state had already deemed to [...]

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 [...]

Mary Johnston, born in Buchanan in 1870 and later a resident of Richmond, was a novelist, historian, playwright, suffragist and anti-lynching activist. Her 1900 novel To Have and To Hold broke existing publishing records by selling 60,000 copies in advance and more than 135,000 copies during its first week of publication. A romantic tale of [...]

Lucy Randolph Mason. Born in Alexandria in 1882, Mason was also related to George Mason and John Marshall. After a conventional education in Richmond, Mason became an expert in industrial matters and a firm public advocate of collective bargaining and labor rights. It was this that drew her to the attention of John L. Lewis, [...]