[For this year’s installment of my annual Charlottesville series—following the boys and my annual trip to my childhood home, natch—I’ll focus on a handful of representative places around town. Leading up to a tribute to the public schools that nurtured this AmericanStudier!]
On the elided
but still evocative histories all around us.
In this
long-ago 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 place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Defining places—from your hometowns or anywhere else—you’d highlight?
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