This Week in Virginia History

This week in 1913... A sea of humanity blocked the streets around Richmond’s First Baptist Church. They hoped to catch a glimpse of Daniel Webster Davis’ funeral cortege. Davis was a giant in Richmond’s African American community -- a lifelong educator, organization builder, poet, and pastor.

This week in 1921... Swarms of Confederate veterans made their way into Charlottesville. It was the annual Virginia veterans’ reunion replete with picnics and receptions. And this year had an extra draw -- the unveiling of a new monument to General Stonewall Jackson in the newly minted, whites-only Jackson Park.

This week in 1851... Joseph Abrams walked up to the Richmond courthouse. Today he was manumitting his slaves. All nine of them. But this was no ordinary transaction. And Joseph Abrams was no ordinary man. Only seven years earlier he himself had been enslaved.

This week in 1918... A century before the COVID-19 pandemic that we’re all intimately familiar with, a deadly influenza ravaged the nation and the world. Near the end of World War I, it began in Virginia on army bases, and soon spread throughout the state. As illnesses grew and grew, it hit Charlottesville and Albemarle County hard in early October.

This week in 1760... Children excitedly entered the small white building in Williamsburg. It was the first day of school. But this wasn’t any regular school. This was the Bray school for free and enslaved Black children. The first of its kind in Virginia.

Today in 1914... At 6am the bells rang in Charlottesville’s Presbyterian Church. They rang every hour on the hour until 6pm. A reminder to voters that it was Election Day. And not just any old regular election day. Today voters decided in a special referendum if Virginia would become a dry state. Prohibition.

Rude. Cantankerous. Arrogant. These were just a few of the many adjectives that professors and students used to describe modern languages professor George Blaettermann. But his arrival at the University of Virginia had started with such high hopes.

Trouble began when the Doeg Indians raided a Virginia plantation. The colonists retaliated. But they attacked the wrong tribe -- which meant that that tribe retaliated. Before long, large scale raids and attacks were coming from all sides.

Virginia Governor William Berkeley tried to calm everyone down by launching an investigation. But the governor’s cousin Nathaniel Bacon wouldn’t listen. He insisted on fighting the Indians, which Berkeley refused. Bacon got together a group of disgruntled colonists, and a civil war broke out between Berkeley’s loyalists and Bacon’s rebels.

Political pamphleteer James Callender knew how to ruffle feathers. Thomas Jefferson began supporting him and his anti-federalist writings. But Callender went too far and got thrown in jail.

When he got out, he demanded that Jefferson help him out... or else he'd expose Jefferson's secrets.

This week in 1863... During the Civil War, the Confederate government forced free and enslaved Blacks to labor for the Confederate army. They were required to report to the county courthouse where a doctor examined them and determined what work they were fit to do. That’s how James T.S. Taylor ended up in Washington, DC. He was a free Black man from Albemarle County. But he refused to work for the Confederates. So he ran away to Union lines in northern Virginia.