Browse Items (1533 total)

Alma Mason talks about how black schools in Louisa didn't have indoor plumbing or electricity even after the white schools did . An education to the core, her love for her children comes through in her description of her long career in segregated…

Steve Fleming talks about how the Jim Crow laws governing public interactions were not always held to in private. Whites in the lower part of the county often socialized with African American men and women at so called Nip Joints. Everyone had a…

Josephine Fleming talks about being employed as domestic help in Richmond. She remarks on one of the most visible signs of the racial boundaries as she describes how she wasn't allowed to enter or leave through her employers front door, only the…

Josephine Fleming discusses how they learned about African American issues in the nation from the Afro newspaper. They learned about events involving Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Emmett Till that sparked the Civil Rights movement. Although…

Josephine Fleming talks about how being a maid was one of the very few jobs open to black women. She describes riding the bus into Richmond with the other maids and some of the conversations they often had on the bus returning home at the end of the…

James Braxton talks about his grandfather who was half indian and half white

Until 1877, married women in Virginia could not own property, so the size of their inheritance certainly made them consider marriage carefully.

Matriarch of the sisters was Clara Garland, born about 1800 and a 65 year old women at the end of the…

Angus Duncan comes back to visit his nanny, Ellen Hooker, who was born into slavery. Duncan keeps a life-long bond with this woman who helped to raise him. Race relations are many layered and often complex.

The Louisa Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was chartered in 1919 but its members had been at work for years to help honor those, living and dead, who served the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The UDC was instrumental in…

LeRoy S. Hughes is one of the few, proud Montford Point Marines. He’s also a Congressional Gold Medal recipient.

The 87-year-old Louisa native became one of the country’s first black Marines after President Roosevelt established a presidential…

When the comedic, yet poignant, movie “The Help” hit theaters and DVD, women of all ages and walks of life were driven to watch with a kind of frenzied urgency.

The film portrays young black women in the segregated south and the movie’s…

Stop 7: Hampton's Wagon's Captured / Rosser's Charge / Custer's First Last Stand

Nearby stood Trevilian Station, south of which Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton had parked his wagon train on the evening of June 10, 1864. At daylight the next…

Stop 4: First Shots Fired at Bibb's Crossroads

A 9,300-man Union cavalry force under Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, on a raid to destroy parts of the Virginia Central Railroad, camped a few miles east on June 10, 1864. The next morning, Gen.…

Stop 5: Poindexter House / Hart's Battery / Hampton's Charge

After the Battle of Trevilian Station began nearby on June 11, 1864, the fighting along the Fredericksburg Stage Road grew serious and bloody. Constrained by heavy woods, the…

Here in Oakland Cemetery, beneath small, rectangular stone markers, rest as many as 60 Confederate dead from the Battle of Trevilian Station. Most of them were never identified.

Immediately inside the gate are the graves of the three Towles…

After breaking off the fighting of June 11, 1864, Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton's cavalry division withdrew to a position near here. Gen. Matthew C. Butler's South Carolinians spent the next morning preparing a stout defensive position along the bed…