Virginia Vignettes

Bacon’s Castle is the oldest datable brick residence in Virginia, a rare surviving example of Jacobean architecture in America. Built in 1665 by immigrant Arthur Allen, a supporter of the colonial governor and member of the House of Burgesses, Allen was driven from his house in 1676 when Nathaniel Bacon and men staged an uprising [...]

The Barter Theater, located in the Blue Ridge highlands of Abingdon, Virginia, was founded by Robert Porterfield in 1933 and designated the State Theater of Virginia in 1946. It is the longest-running professional Equity theater in the nation. (The Actors’ Equity Association is a live-theater labor union.) Opening its doors in the midst of the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

African Americans’ Great Migration unfolded over generations; all told, roughly from 1910 to 1970, some five million Black Southerners left the region. Though Virginia was an important scene of this drama, the African-American departure from the Commonwealth began centuries earlier. The internal slave trade, tearing thousands of families asunder at the auction blocks, [...]

In 1998 Congress declared Virginia the “birthplace of country music”-largely because of recordings made in Bristol, astride the Virginia-Tennessee border, in 1927. The foundations of Virginia’s music were laid over centuries of migration and interaction of peoples of African, European, and American Indian origin; but Bristol in 1927 represents a watershed.
Although playback machines and [...]