Stateside With Rosalea: Virginia

At the time it became the tenth state to ratify the US Constitution in 1788, Virginia was much larger than it is today. In 1792, part of Virginia west of the Appalachian Mountains and known as Kentucky County became a state in its own right; and during the Civil War, West Virginia seceded from the Confederate State of Virginia and was admitted to the Union as a border state.

This year, poor Virginia is being visited by that most fearsome of festivals—a sesquicentennial. You can see an interview about the events here, in which both the interviewer and interviewee struggle with the S-word. (Here’s a clue, folks: Just call it a Ses-kwee and be done with it.)

The anniversary is of the American Civil War, and the commemoration is starting a couple of years early to include events that led up to the war. You can watch a live webcast of the kick-off symposium on April 29 at the official Virginia civil war website http://www.virginiacivilwar.org/

Now no longer part of Virginia, Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, was the site of John Brown’s Raid in October, 1869, in which fiercely anti-slavery Brown, his three sons, and some other blokes captured the government armory. Their raid is widely held to be the spark that ignited the 1861-65 national conflagration. Virginia was the site of the “bookend” battles of the Civil War, and many of its cities changed hands between the Union and Confederate armies several times.

One such city was Fredericksburg. Which reminds me... what with piracy being much in the news today, America’s own pirate—as he was popularly portrayed in the British press—lived in Fredericksburg for a time before moving north to join the Continental Navy and fight the British during the Revolutionary War. On the base of the mug I bought at Jones’s birthplace in Scotland, it says “Fredericksburg. Alexandria. Scotland”. The link to Alexandria, VA, is a tavern there, where Jones met up with Lafayette and De Kalb before journeying north to Philadelphia and into the annals of US history.

But enough of wars! Were I to visit Virginia today, the place I’d most want to go is Shenandoah National Park, if only because one of the most beloved songs of my childhood is “Shenandoah”—confusing as it is, geographically, since it mentions the “wide Missouri” about a thousand miles away. Here is a link to a video someone posted of the Statler Brothers version of the song cut with images of “places and people of the greater Shenandoah region of Virginia.”

This time of year, the park is full of wildflowers. It’s home to black bears, and part of it—Rapidan Camp—was the forerunner to Camp David in that it was the summer retreat of President Hoover. Every day when he was there, an airplane would drop mail and newspapers. In 1932 Hoover gifted his fishing camp to Virginia, and in 1935 the Shenandoah National Park was created as part of a plan to bring the national park experience already available in the West closer to population centers in the East.

Much of the park isn’t what it seems. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps—one of the federal government’s work creation schemes—set about building what the National Park Service calls “wilderness by design”, trying to re-create the biological diversity that had been destroyed. More than 450 families were relocated from the Blue Ridge areas of the park during the 1930s.

Which brings me to another Brown. Postmaster Brown is pictured in this article about how the Resettlement Administration—forerunner of the Farm Security Administration, now today’s Farm Service Agency—deliberately portrayed the people they moved as poor and ignorant in order to win public support for their mission of relocating “entire farm communities to areas in which it was hoped farming could be carried out more profitably.”

So there you go. While the first things that come to mind when you think about Virginia might be scary acronyms—CIA and US DoD, for example—it’s also a place of pirates and postmasters, beautiful ditties and Dutchman’s Breeches. The last of which is a wildflower, related to bleeding hearts and just as deadly.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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