[Back in March,
I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville
stories in anticipation of a
book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town,
because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about
another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city.
So here they are!]
On the elided
but still evocative histories all around us.
In this
post AmericanStudying cities to which I’ve had the chance to travel, I
mentioned how impressed I was by the presence and intimacy of Rome’s histories,
the way in which you could turn any corner and find yourself confronted by the
Colosseum, the Forum, or any number of less famous but equally historic sites.
To my mind, that element contrasts noticeably with our tendency in America to
separate the historic sites from the present cities around them, to demarcate
their existence as an area to be visited (or, saliently, to which to take
tourists and other visitors to our city, but probably not venture ourselves) but
not a part of the place’s ongoing life and identity. Such separations and
demarcations are far better than not remembering or maintaining the histories
at all, of course—and that has been an option in America far too often, so I’m
always happier to see the maintained sites in whatever form—but it nonetheless
makes it easier to treat the
past as a foreign country, rather than as integral to and interconnected
with ours.
Moreover, there
are reminders of those histories all around us, if we know where and how to
look for them. Throughout my life I have frequented the area of Charlottesville
known as Barracks Road: the shopping
center was home to the Shoney’s (aka Bob’s Big Boy) that was a favorite
childhood restaurant, the Baskin Robbins that was a favorite dessert site, and
the toy store that was, well, just a favorite spot, as well as to the Barnes
& Noble where I worked for eight months between college and grad school; Barracks
Road itself was close enough to my high school that my bus and car routes often
included it, and a longtime high school girlfriend lived just off the road; and
so on. Yet I had virtually no sense of the history comprised by that
name: that a group of more than 3000 British and German prisoners of war
were housed at a site along the road for nearly two years during the Revolutionary
War (after the Continental Army’s 1777 victory at the Battle
of Saratoga), in what came to be known as the Albemarle Barracks (the site
itself is just outside of the city limits, in Albemarle County). Like the name,
the shopping
center’s sign obliquely gestures at that history, featuring a Revolutionary-era
horseman.
So the
reminders, like the “Indian
Names” on the landscape about which Lydia
Sigourney wrote so beautifully, remain. On the one hand, those slight
echoes might make the overall elision of the past more frustrating: Barracks
Road was for a time one of the South’s most significant Revolutionary War
sites, and now I would wager that most Charlottesville residents know it solely
(as I did for all those years) for the shopping center. But on the other hand, the
echoes represent a continued presence, indeed an illustration of the influence
the past has in creating the present—and as such as they also offer an
opportunity to begin to connect with and learn about those histories, as long as
we recognize and follow their clues. Which is to say, Sigourney was wrong to
mourn the vanishing past in her poem, not only because Native Americans didn’t
vanish (although that too to be sure), but also because the past never goes
anywhere. It’s always there, quietly but crucially constituting our world,
waiting to be discovered and better understood.
Next Cville
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Stories from your town(s) you'd share?
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