Virginia Vignettes

Danville’s Wendell Scott, born in 1921, was the first – and remains the only – African-American to win a top-level NASCAR race. He began as a taxi driver, mechanic, and legendary moonshine runner. After military service during World War II, he began racing, and winning, on the old Dixie Circuit and local outlaw tracks. His [...]

An incident that dramatized the tensions generated by the transition from a rural to a progressive order in the early twentieth century occurred at Hillsville on 14 March 1912: the great Carroll County shootout. Floyd Allen, head of a clannish mountain family, had been charged with aiding his nephews escape from the sheriff’s deputies after [...]

Although Virginia’s balanced economy absorbed some of the shock of the crisis, the state was not “depression proof.” It was a time for rigid economizing on the farms. Many farmers stopped growing tobacco because it did not pay the fertilizer and marketing costs. Practically no agricultural machinery was purchased, and deterioration in buildings and equipment [...]

Although it had high hopes of burying “demon rum,” the Virginia Prohibition Commission found the task of enforcing the law overwhelming. Smuggling networks infiltrated from the Midwest into the Shenandoah Valley, from Maryland down the Eastern Shore, and at any convenient Chesapeake Bay landing site. Furthermore, local moonshining became a popular and lucrative enterprise, notably [...]

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in Tennessee during Reconstruction, but it was not active in the Old Dominion. However, thanks to antiforeign hysteria generated by World War I, the “Invisible Empire” made a comeback across America in the 1920s. It again had little influence in Virginia–one historian estimates it had 20,000 members in the state–but in [...]

Virginians played a major role in the Mexican War. Winfield Scott of Dinwiddie County, who had performed heroically in the War of 1812, was given command of the American army that captured Mexico City after a remarkable campaign that overcame disease, formidable defenses, and larger forces. Zachary Taylor of Orange County, a veteran of the [...]

From the time of the Revolution, Virginians had considered canal systems that would bypass the fall lines of the James and Potomac rivers and link the eastern Tidewater with the western part of the state, perhaps as far as the Ohio River. The James River Company, chartered by the assembly in 1785 at George Washington’s [...]

Although Indians had inhabited the Shenandoah Valley for centuries (the name of the river comes from an Indian word meaning “beautiful daughter of the stars”), European settlement of the Shenandoah Valley did not begin until the 1730s. The vast majority of settlers in the Valley were of German and Scotch-Irish background who had left Europe [...]

A struggle between England and France for control of North America was likely, but George Washington’s actions at the direction of Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie clearly brought the crisis to a head. The British and Dinwiddie wanted to prevent any French move into the Ohio River valley and sent the twenty-one-year old militia major, George [...]

There were three William Byrds in Colonial Virginia. William Byrd I, the son of a London goldsmith, arrived in America in 1669. He inherited 1,800 acres from his uncle near the fall line on the James River and parlayed his good fortune into a profitable trading business and high political positions. At his death in [...]