The Gingaskin Indians and an African American Community Rich with Native Blood
Turn seaside at Eastville on Virginia’s Eastern Shore and you’ll be traveling on Indiantown Road. Most days this rural byway is lightly traveled. Traffic picks up just a hair when there’s some...
View ArticleHistorically African American Beaches; Vanished Relics of an Uncomfortable Past
The shorelines are indistinguishable from ones adjacent. They’re stretches of sand lapped by the Chesapeake Bay’s waves, full of life and memory, ceding ground as the sea level rises. These beaches are...
View ArticleSlabtown; A Community that Gave Its Existence for the United States
It’s easy to appreciate sacrifice at Yorktown Battlefield, where Americans secured their independence. Visitors there find historic fortifications, artillery and cemeteries containing the remains of...
View ArticleThe Elko Tract; A Lost City That’s Too Well-Known
In the dense woods east of Richmond, Virginia is a notorious ghost town–an empty grid of grown-over streets lined by sidewalks that sprout trees and sewers choked with decades of leaf litter. An idle...
View ArticleIrene Morgan; A Daring Act, A Humble Life
The story is familiar. An African American woman boards a bus in the segregated South and sits in the back, as required by law. The bus fills and the driver demands that she give up her seat to white...
View ArticleThe Forgotten Mass Grave at Harpers Ferry; A Strange Trip for Eight Raiders
Three feet down, the men struck something: a pine box. Waterlogged and rotting, yes, but a pine box nonetheless–exactly what they’d come looking for. They pried off the lid. A man’s spine was stuck to...
View ArticleWilliamsburg’s Civil War Battlefield and a Community at a Crossroads
The white clapboard house hides in plain sight on a short city street lined with recycle bins and compact sedans. Nothing on the exterior betrays what happened within those walls long ago, that...
View ArticleMelcenia Fields; the Hermit of Beury
When Melcenia Fields failed to retrieve her groceries, railroad workers knew something was wrong. Fields, inexplicably to all but herself, lived in the ruins of Beury, WV, one of dozens of company...
View ArticleSlabtown; Yorktown Battlefield’s Hidden History
This is the third in a six-part, yearlong series called Disappearing Virginia in Distinction magazine. This story originally appeared in the June issue as “The Sons and Daughters of Slabtown.” The...
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