Virginia History

History and gardening fans get together April 20 through 27, 2013, throughout the Commonwealth to tour gardens of houses great and small from the Tidewater area to the Highlands. The Rappahannock Valley portion of the tour will be held Tuesday, April 23, in the Fredericksburg area, including Stafford County:

"To celebrate the anniversary – this tour will feature homes that were opened 80 years ago! Featured locations include Belmont in Falmouth, Virginia, The Snowden House, Chatham, Brompton and Fall Hill. All of these properties enjoy spectacular views of the area and the Rappahannock."

Tours will be offered in different venues throughout the state through Saturday, April 27. Check out the Garden Club of Virginia's Web site for information on all the tours and check out books from the library featuring homes and gardens in the Old Dominion.

The Central Rappahannock Regional Library will host Civil War 150, a national traveling exhibition, on display at the library headquarters, 1201 Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, from Tuesday, November 27 to Sunday, December 16.

The library is inviting the public to an opening reception, Friday, November 30,  at 5:30. National Park Service Chief Historian John Hennessy will briefly address the themes of the exhibit.

As part of the area’s ongoing commemoration of the war’s sesquicentennial, the library invites the community to view this major exhibit that explores “the war and its meaning through the words of those who lived it," to experience the battle through the eyes of major political figures, soldiers, families, and freedmen. Through reproductions of documents, photographs, and posters, the exhibition invites visitors to learn about events that took place during the war. By virtue of letters, personal accounts, and images, learn how people grappled with the end of slavery, the nature of democracy and citizenship, the human toll of civil war, and the role of a president in wartime.

Related Web Resources

The Civil War 150 exhibition planners recommend these titles for possible group discussions. Videos whose titles are linked may be found in the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Please click on the title to begin the reserve process. Other videos on this list may be available through our interlibrary loan service.

Historical Documentaries

The Civil War 150 exhibition planners recommend these titles for possible book group discussions. Books whose titles are linked may be found in the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Please click on the title to begin the reserve process. Other books may be available through our interlibrary loan service.

Causes behind the Civil War:

This interview airs beginning October 10.
Larry McIrvin explains the life of the Civil War soldier, both Union and Confederate, with uniforms, arms, and equipment and shares his experience as a Living Historian on CRRL Presents, a Central Rappahannock Regional Library production.

This interview airs beginning May 23.
In the fifth and final of a series on the expansion of the Fredericksburg Area Museum, Senior Vice President of Collections and Exhibitions Mary Helen Dellinger meets with Debby Klein to talk about the completion of this amazing project. We also take a peek at some of the new exhibit spaces on CRRL Presents, a Central Rappahannock Regional Library production.

The Seventeenth Child, by Dorothy Marie Rice & Lucille Mabel Walthall Payne, sets down the memories of a childhood lived in the countryside of 1930s Virginia by a black woman who grew up before the Civil Rights Movement made so many gains.  These remembrances are plain, soft-spoken and ring true to an age that was certainly different from the one we know.  In some ways, it was a harder time as in her earliest years even basic food was very hard to come by and the sharecropping system made it difficult for all farmers, black and white, to get ahead or even stay afloat during the bad harvest years.

But it was the warmth of family, faith, shared hardship and simple joys that made those days good as well as difficult. The children worked, not only because their help was needed but because it was understood that working was a good thing in and of itself. They helped pull and tend tobacco, can vegetables, sew quilts, raise chickens, and shell corn.  Lucille Payne tells of how hard it was to earn money. How sometimes her mother might not be paid much more than fifty cents for a hard day’s washing of filthy clothes in a dark and cold shed. Well, fifty cents and a hambone that might not be fit to eat without it being scrubbed, too, and sometimes not even then. But her mother said, “Well, you accept what they give you; next time it might be better.”

It wasn’t all about acceptance. Sometimes Lucille would see her mother spit in the water while she washed and she would ask her why she did that. “That helps to get them clean.”  But I know she was just so angry because she had to survive.  When you have so many children you have to survive the best way you can.  Likewise, when white children rode the bus to their segregated school, leaving the black children to walk and even calling them names, the black children got a bit of revenge…and a chance to be better than their so-called betters with an act of charity.

When one thinks about the U.S. Civil War, or the War Between the States, one does not come up with images of food and recipes.  Rather, it is the exact opposite: we think about hunger and even starvation.  But the truth is, some of the most creative recipes are invented at times when the basic food elements are scarce.

The American Revolution didn’t start with the Tea Party.

For more than 100 years before that, the immigrants who came to America had very cogent reasons for leaving the civilized world. Many were hotheads—rebels against the king and his policies on religion. Others had come to the colonies hoping to make their fortunes and discovered much to their dismay that the king was very interested in taking a cut of their profits through high taxes, particularly on tobacco.

In Virginia, high taxes meant that the small farmers were left landless when they could not pay. Their farms were taken by wealthier landholders and the dispossessed went to the frontier to find new land to support them and their families. Not surprisingly, this meant clashes with the native population, some of which were quite bloody. Royal Governor Berkeley’s refusal to support the frontier farmers with soldiers—and his obvious friendships with the wealthier Tidewater land barons--led to Bacon’s Rebellion against the king’s most powerful representative and was but one example of the tension felt between the colonists and their royal masters’ representatives.