[Inspired by my
annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on
AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a
special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers
of America conference in Williamsburg!]
Two interesting histories,
and one troubling one, found in the small
central Virginia city.
1)
A proto-industrial giant: Thanks in multiple
ways to its location on the James River—both because of the late 18th
century (John) Lynch’s
Ferry, which routed the tobacco trade and other traffic through the city;
and because of the early 19th century construction
of iron and steel factories along that river—Lynchburg became during the
antebellum period, as Thomas
Jefferson put it in 1810, “perhaps the most rising place in the U.S.” By
the 1850s, the city was rivaled only by New Bedford (Massachusetts’ whaling
center) in per capita wealth; and like any economic boomtown, it had its share
of vice, centered in the infamous
Buzzards Roost neighborhood. The Civil War, about which more in a moment,
changed the city’s trajectory as it did so much of the South’s (although
manufacturing continued throughout the postwar period)—but it’s certainly interesting
to imagine an alternative Gilded Age history with Lynchburg as an icon of
wealth.
2)
A Civil War capital, briefly: Compared to other
Virginia locales, Lynchburg
saw a minimal amount of action during the war: principally the June
18, 1864 Battle of Lynchburg, during which Confederate forces under the
command of General Jubal Early (aided, the legend goes, by
local prostitutes, hopefully operating out of Buzzard’s Roost for blog
paragraph continuity) repulsed Union troops
led by General David Hunter. Because the city did not fall at that time,
nor indeed was ever taken during the course of the war, it had the somewhat dubious
honor of serving as Virginia’s (and thus, in some meaningful ways, the
Confederacy’s, although Danville
was the official post-Richmond choice) final wartime capital after the
evacuation of Richmond, holding that title
from April 6-10. On the 10th, Robert E. Lee surrended to Ulysses
S. Grant at nearby Appomattox
Courthouse, ending both the war and Lynchburg’s brief stint with political
fame.
3)
A shameful practice: For nearly 50 years, from
the early 20th century through the 1970s, Lynchburg (or rather its
suburb of Madison Heights) was home to the Virginia State Colony
for Epileptics and Feebleminded, site of more than 8000 forced
sterilizations carried out in the name of eugenics. The most famous of those
thousands of victims was Carrie Buck, an 18 year old girl sterilized in 1924 for
being “feeble-minded” and the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell
(1927), the case in which the Supreme Court shamefully sided (in an overwhelming
8-1 decision, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for the majority) with
Virginia’s compulsory sterilization statute (ruling that it did not violate the
victims’ 14th Amendment rights). The sterilizations were only
stopped in 1972, making this shameful period of Lynchburg’s (and Virginia’s)
history at least as long as its era of economic dominance. But that’s the yin
and yang of Virginian places and histories, as this week’s series will
illustrate time and again.
Next VA place
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?
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