Tag: Virginia Humanities

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Tunnel vision

Local filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner’s The Tunnel details the history of the newly reopened Blue Ridge Tunnel, located near Rockfish Gap. submitted photo

By Lisa Provence

Nothing happens quickly with the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel. Not its mid-19th-century eight-year construction, nor Nelson County’s nearly 20-year effort to reopen it, nor the documentary recently released by local filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner.

“I thought it would only be a few years, weaving the reopening and the history of the tunnel,” says Academy Award-winner Paul Wagner, who directed The Tunnel. “I had no idea it was going to take almost nine years.”

When it opened in 1858, the hand-dug Blue Ridge Tunnel was the longest tunnel in North America. About 800 Irish immigrants used star drills and black powder in those pre-dynamite days to carve through Rockfish Gap’s granite, dangerous work that, along with cholera, killed dozens and maimed many more.

The idea of intercutting the two stories—the difficult construction of the tunnel and the nearly two-decade effort to reopen it—appealed to Wagner, who describes the film as “the creation and re-creation of the Blue Ridge Tunnel.”

Says Wagner, “We’ve made a lot of historical films, and often there are not visual materials to tell those stories. It was nice in this case to have a present-day story that was directly related to the historical story, that gave a story thread in the present that reverberated against the historical story line.”

The film focuses on the Irish laborers who fled the famine in Ireland to find work and who were considered more expendable than enslaved workers. This isn’t the Wagners first Irish-centric film. Out of Ireland traced eight workers in the United States, one of whom worked on the railroad.

The Irish in America “have been an interest of ours,” says Wagner, and The Tunnel, which became available on YouTube on St. Patrick’s Day, uses students from the Blue Ridge Irish Music School to help tell the story with music and dancing—and a haunting violin solo.

The Tunnel also tells the story of the enslaved workers and the institution of slavery “in such a powerful way,” says Wagner.

Engineer Claudius Crozet, who was hired to construct a 17-mile railroad from Mechum’s River in Albemarle to Waynesboro, wrote to his board to explain having to pay $2,400 compensation for the deaths of two Black workers. The enslaved laborers contracted out to Crozet could not be used for the black powder blasting, not out of concern for the men but because of their value as property.

“It was an insight on the thinking of the institution of slavery and how it worked,” says Wagner.
Filming provided some challenges. The eastern portal had waist-high water. “We’re vaguely outdoorsy, but I do not have hip boots in my closet,” says Wagner. “I’d wade into water up to the waist in the dark holding a camera.”

Despite that discomfort, Wagner says it was not an arduous shoot. “One of the joys was that you could just walk in there and turn your camera on and end up with these beautiful images,” he says. “Between the light and the dark, the water, the brick walls, the stone, and especially the lighting as you walk in and out of the tunnel. The lighting effects are so beautiful without even trying.”

During the 1950s, a 12-foot-thick bulkhead was built in the tunnel for propane storage, and blocked passage through until restoration work began in 2018. Wagner describes the magic of seeing the light at the other end of the tunnel after it was blasted out.

“I had been in there many times and never seen light,” he says. He compares the experience to December 29, 1856, when workers broke through the rock. A newspaper clipping said, “Light now shines through the Blue Ridge.”

“This is what it was like,” says Wagner. “I had a little emotional reaction.”

The image of a tunnel is symbolic in itself and often mentioned in near-death experiences, he says. “There’s something powerful, almost spiritual about the tunnel.”

Along with the history, it’s also a great local story, one that ties into the rails-to-trails movement, tourism, and recreation, and intersects with the Appalachian Trail and the Route 76 bike trail, says Wagner. “Go with your kids, ride your bike, but there is a real dark and tragic side of the story that’s worth remembering.”

The film was a labor of love for the Wagners. “We didn’t raise a lot of money to do it,” he says. “We did it as a side project over the years,” ultimately getting some funding from the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation, the Virginia Tourism Corporation, and Virginia Humanities.

“We want as many people as possible to see it,” he says. Historical preservation isn’t just about places like Monticello or Montpelier, adds Wagner. “This is about historic preservation, too. It’s the common people. It’s landscapes—natural and manmade—that are also valid to think about as historic sites.”

Since the Blue Ridge Tunnel opened in November, 35,000 people have gone through it, according to former Nelson County supervisor Allen Hale.

“I think the film really captured the spirit of the project and paid tribute to the people who built it,” says Hale. “It was a lost treasure. The film does a wonderful job of re-claiming this lost treasure.”

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Culture

Pick: Leah ‘n’ Lulu’s Virtual Picnic

Former Charlottesville resident Lulu Miller discusses her new book, "Why Fish Don't Exist," Thursday at noon. Publicity photo

Outside chances: The environment is getting a healthy respite right now thanks to less human activity around the globe. Is it possible to get back out there with intention and a newfound respect? Two area authors consider the role of nature in our lives during Leah ‘n’ Lulu’s Virtual Picnic, an immersion in “environmental writing in your own backyard.” Poet Leah Naomi Green (The More Extravagant Feast) and author Lulu Miller (Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life) will read and discuss their work, then offer writing prompts to the audience. Outdoor seating is recommended.

Thursday, May 28. Free, noon. Zoom registration required. virginiahumanities.org.

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Arts

Building bridges: Lua Project connects cultures in Mexilachian Son

The Lua Project presents Mexilachian Son: New Songs for An Emerging Virginia Culture on May 11 at Luray’s Warehouse Art Gallery, and on May 12 at McGuffey Art Center. Image: Martyn Kyle

The fandango in Veracruz felt familiar to Estela Diaz Knott.

Under a tent, musicians strummed guitar-shaped instruments of different pitches—requintos, jaranas, and leonas. With their feet, they stomped and scuffed rhythms on tarimas, rectangular wooden platforms that serve as both stage and percussive instrument. They mixed centuries-old verses with ones they made up in the moment. They played son jarocho, a folk style of Mexican son, or song, from the region.

As they played and sang, their audience danced, ate, drank, and laughed. Music and voices drifted through the air, mingled with the smell of smoked carnitas on the grill, and transported Knott, who was there to perform, more than 2,000 miles north, to her hometown of Luray, Virginia.

“Holy shit,” Knott said excitedly to her bandmate Dave Berzonsky. The fandango felt like an Appalachian fiddle festival.

For Knott, the daughter of an indigenous Mexican woman from Juarez, Mexico, and a Scotch-Irish-American man from Virginia, it felt like her two cultures were coming together. Knott and Berzonsky were inspired to blend the music of Veracruz with the music of Appalachia, and they’ve spent the last two decades doing exactly that.

In two performances this weekend, the pair, who live in Charlottesville and perform as Lua Project, will share their newest music in a Virginia Humanities-sponsored project, Mexilachian Son: New Songs for An Emerging Virginia Culture. They’ll be joined by Christen Hubbard on mandolin and fiddle, Matty Metcalfe on accordion and banjo, and Zenen Zeferino Huervo, a poet and singer from Veracruz, on vocals and jarana.

The Mexilachian Son project grew out of a previous Virginia Humanities grant in which Knott and Berzonsky, along with Zeferino and dancer Julia del Palacio, sought to introduce son jarocho music to Appalachian Virginia. This time around, they’re examining how the poetry of son jarocho compares to the poetry of the English, or Appalachian, ballad.

With Latinx immigrants coming to the United States, “This form of music, san jarocho, is beginning to disseminate itself” here says Berzonsky. “And one way to allow that style of music to re-plant itself in a new country is to write stories about this country.”

Knott, Berzonsky, and Zeferino interviewed Latinx immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley and used their stories to write new verses for “La Guacamaya” and “Las Poblanas,” two songs in the son jarocho tradition that have been sung for at least 300 hundred years.

Musically, it wasn’t easy. Appalachian and son jarocho music are based on two different core rhythmic feels (four beats for Appalachian, three beats for son jarocho), and that makes vocal phrasing (in two languages) “rather tricky,” says Knott.

Thematically, they had more freedom. “La Guacamaya” is the word for the blue macaw and is a metaphor for a beautiful woman, and Lua Project’s version celebrates beauty in the Shenandoah Valley, in the form of the happiness of the Peralta Manzanares family, the flowers of Monticello, and apples (not only is “Manzanares” a word for “apple picker,” but co-writer Zeferino visited Virginia during the apple harvest).

“Las Poblanas” is a song about healing. Lua Project’s version examines the political conflict between the Scotch-Irish settlers—who came to the Valley as indentured servants, were promised land after serving their term, then denied that land, over and over again—and the new immigrants, Latinos who come to America to flee violence and poverty and end up working the harsh, emotionally and physically laborious jobs that no American wants to do. It’s a song about being “needed but not wanted…seen but not heard,” they say, and how an older generation’s work and sacrifice can inspire and sustain a younger generation’s dreams.

Through song, these stories are heard and retold, which has been particularly meaningful for Knott, who says that for most of her life, she felt as though she lived on a bridge, running back and forth between Mexican and American cultures, being both and yet neither. Through music, she’s come to realize that she is not on the bridge, she is the bridge. “Bringing those two beautiful, rich, amazing cultures that live in me together is why I choose to make my life’s work through music,” she says.

“I want to sing on behalf of the voiceless, or the ancestor, or the widow too broken to sing,” adds Berzonsky. “…when you hear the songs, you realize the differences among us are not great…that what divides us is often an illusion concocted by those that benefit from that division.”

And with Mexilachian Son, Lua Project insists there’s much to celebrate, too, and in fandango style. “The nature, the cuisine, the music. I want to thread these things together, to bind them, so that we waken ourselves to our shared destiny, our common humanity,” says Berzonsky.

“I realize this is an elevated speech for a couple that writes songs, but nonetheless, that’s the light we are trying to put out into the world.”

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Arts

Building happiness: Sculptor Mark Cline offers a double take through roadside attractions

Artist Mark Cline is known for his eye-catching, large-scale foam and fiberglass sculptures that are installed in unexpected places. He and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland. Photo by Pat Jarrett/Virginia Humanities

If you’ve seen a parade of 8-foot-tall ants climbing the side of a building, a life-sized foam replica of Stonehenge, or a T-Rex lunging through the trees with a Union soldier in its mouth, then you know the work of Mark Cline.

Dubbed “Virginia’s Roadside Attraction King” by Atlas Obscura, Cline has spent decades building foam and fiberglass sculptures, many inspired by monster and science-fiction movies. He’s got thousands of works at truck stops, amusement parks, restaurants, and other unexpected sites in the commonwealth and around the country.

Despite his relative fame as an artist, the Waynesboro native doesn’t seek accolades. “One time NPR asked me, ‘How do you want to be remembered? Give us three words.’ And I said, ‘A good man.’ They were expecting ‘a sculptor’ or ‘an entertainer,’ but none of that’s important. It’s really not important,” he says.

What matters to Cline is knowing that every project created in his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia, entertains the people who see it. Whether he’s built a giant octopus eating a boat in a lake or installed Spiderman scaling down the outside of an old building, his projects mean something.

“[Seeing these sculptures] gives people a chance to smile. It gives them a chance to laugh, and laughter has been proven to heal people,” he says. “I had a conversation with my daughter earlier today saying, ‘Honey, if you can find something that you go into in your life that helps people, then you have found your place in heaven.’ Because that’s where heaven is. It’s a place that’s above poverty. It’s above hate. It’s above pettiness. It’s all about healing, and you’ve got to do it through whatever talents you have.”

You could call it divine intervention that Cline became a sculptor at all. He describes being 19 years old, “jobless, penniless, and fresh out of high school with no immediate or long-range plans.” One day, sitting on a park bench and feeling frustrated, he asked himself what he wanted out of life. As he wrote in his journal, he realized he wanted happiness—and the only way he would find it was by helping others.

He hitchhiked to Waynesboro, went to the employment office, and asked for a job. “They said, ‘We don’t have anything.’ I said, ‘Well, okay.’ I turned around and was getting ready to walk out the door—I had my hand on the doorknob—and the lady says, ‘We have something.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

The job was with Red Mill Manufacturing, a plant where they made figurines out of resin mixed with pecan shell flour. After work one day, a co-worker showed Cline how to make a mold of his hand. It was a revelation. “I said, ‘I can make all kinds of stuff out of this.’ He said, ‘You sure can, Mark. Here’s a five-gallon bucket. Go home and play with it.’”

That fortuitous connection gave Cline an outlet for the overactive imagination he’d embraced as a child, back when he built inventive props for school plays and pulled practical jokes like slicing off a fake hand in art class. The adult version of his creative streak became sculpting with fiberglass.

He taught himself how to do it, since “there was nobody out there to show me how it was done.” As a result, he developed his own technique—and for now he’s the only one in the world who sculpts the way he does.

As part of the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program at Virginia Humanities, which pairs master artists with vetted apprentices, Cline is passing on his creative approach for the very first time. He’s begun teaching and mentoring Brently Hilliard in fiberglass sculpture. Through the process of mutual discovery, he hopes to transmit the aspects of the craft that matter most to him.

“I could teach anybody how to be a sculptor,” Cline says, “but it’s no good unless you’re using your talents for something good. So ultimately I would like to see [Hilliard] use whatever I teach him to help others and inspire them in some way.”

Being an artist isn’t easy, he says. The work itself requires a willingness to suffer. “I lost my first wife over it. I had two major fires. I came so close to going bankrupt, one time I was on the courthouse steps.” But he welcomes the failures as well as triumphs “because that’s where you learn.”

Turns out the young man sitting on that park bench had it right. “Twenty-four hours a day on this planet, someone is being entertained by something that I’ve built, something that came out of me, something that I created,” he says. “My goal was to create happiness, and that’s exactly what this stuff does.”

Cline and his apprentice, Brently Hilliard, will be celebrated at the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, along with 14 other master/apprentice pairs on May 5 at James Monroe’s Highland.

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News

Vaughan’s passing: Visionary founder of Virginia Humanities remembered

Rob Vaughan “didn’t just love his work at Virginia Humanities, he lived it,” says current executive director Matthew Gibson. John Robinson

Rob Vaughan, founder of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, died March 6 at age 74, after a rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to his obituary. He leaves behind the largest, best-funded, and what a colleague calls “the gold standard” of humanities organizations in the country.

When then-UVA president Edgar Shannon tapped Vaughan, an English teacher working on his Ph.D., to explore starting a new humanities organization in 1974, he chose a man with an uncanny ability to connect the stories of all of Virginia’s communities, and to underscore the importance of those stories.

Kevin McFadden, chief operating officer of what is now called Virginia Humanities, describes Vaughan as a “builder” who “knew how to create the invisible structures that gather and unite people for a common purpose.”

McFadden worked with Vaughan for 17 years, starting out at the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is now in its 25th year and was Vaughan’s favorite program of the many created during his tenure.

Besides the better-known programs like the book fest, Encyclopedia Virginia, radio shows “With Good Reason” and “Backstory,” and the Virginia Folklife Program, the foundation supported thousands of projects, some that became institutions in their own right, such as the Moton Museum in Farmville, American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU. Those organizations were helped by grants “at a critical moment that helped each one flourish on its own,” says McFadden.

Vaughan wooed Sarah McConnell away from WINA in 1999 to host “With Good Reason,” and he took copies of the show, which interviews leading scholars, to listen to when he traveled, she says.

Every year, Vaughan delivered a lecture to the General Assembly on the history of the legislature going back to the House of Burgesses, she says. “He was not political, but he knew all Virginia lawmakers across the aisle.” And that, she says, helped achieve a “more diverse Virginia.”

McConnell describes Vaughan’s style as “entrepreneurial. He never said ‘no’ to a new program.”

Donna Lucey, author of Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, works on Encyclopedia Virginia. She also calls Vaughan an entrepreneur and says he encouraged that among his staff, and gave them plenty of autonomy. “If they had a great idea, he’d let them go for it.”

Lucey, however, saw Vaughan as “a consummate politician walking the halls of the General Assembly where he knew everyone.” In 2017, the legislature passed a resolution honoring Vaughan.

“He had that Old World demeanor,” says Lucey. “I never saw a hair out of place. Even if he wore jeans, they were pressed.”

“I want to grow up to be like Rob,” says writer Earl Swift, who wrote three books as a foundation fellow, most recently Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.

“He was smart, empathetic, generous, and elegant—a man with a hungry mind, coupled with a profound faith that the ties that bind us, as a country and as people, are vitally important subjects of study, exposition, and support,” says Swift. “There was nothing fussy about his advocacy: He saw stories worth telling among Virginians of every walk of life, and every imaginable circumstance.”

With Vaughan, it always comes back to the stories—and to books. He was in a book group of men for over 40 years.

Observes McConnell, “He was really at base a shy preacher’s kid who loved books.”

A memorial service will be held at 1pm Wednesday, March 13, at Westminster Presbyterian Church.

“I want to grow up to be like Rob.” Writer Earl Swift

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News

Removing the mask: Series unveils racial issues within the community

A Virginia Humanities series addressed Charlottesville’s dark past and featured a panel that included moderators Samantha Willis and Justin Reid, with members Mayor Nikuyah Walker, Niya Bates, Jordy Yager and Zyahna Bryant. Eze Amos

By Jonathan Haynes

A little backstory: Charlottesville began as a plantation community with slavery as its foundational industry. Racial violence did not stop after Emancipation, but continued with lynchings and segregation, according to Monticello historian Niya Bates. The University of Virginia, she adds, was a big proponent of scientific racism at the turn of the 20th century. And, until last year, it had buildings named for famed eugenicists Harvey E. Jordan and Ivey Foreman Lewis.

Bates was one of the speakers at a June 22 panel, entitled Backstory Breakdown, which included Mayor Nikuyah Walker, freelance journalist Jordy Yager and student activist Zyahna Bryant. Part of the Virginia Humanities’ #UnmaskingCville series, the panel’s goal was to educate the public on racial issues affecting the Charlottesville area.

The first half of the program focused on Charlottesville’s past, and Yager traced modern wealth inequality to housing policy. He explained how, during the post World War II period, the Federal Housing Administration only offered subsidized loans for homes in neighborhoods that barred sales to black buyers—a policy known as redlining. While white Americans accumulated wealth through homeownership, which they would then pass down to their children, black Americans were effectively locked out of the housing market, which prevented them from integrating into white communities and accumulating wealth of their own.

During the evening’s second half, which focused on the future, moderators addressed the issue of Confederate statues.

Bates dismissed the notion that the statues were a source of pride in one’s heritage, explaining that they were erected in the 1920s to promulgate the Lost Cause narrative and intentionally placed in areas that intimidated black residents.

Bryant, who drafted a petition to remove the statues, expressed frustration that her tax dollars will go toward their maintenance. She said it would be cheaper to just remove them, since demolition would be a one-time expense.

Walker was outspoken on the impact mass incarceration and the war on drugs has had on the black community. “It’s about upholding a system of slavery,” she said, pointing out the racial disparities in drug arrests, despite similar rates of use. Yager concurred, noting that the language of the 13th Amendment prohibits involuntary confinement except as punishment for a crime.

This discussion continued into a Q&A, including a question about a new law Governor Ralph Northam had signed in Charlottesville the day before that requires the collection of DNA and fingerprints for two additional misdemeanors. Walker replied that Charlottesville is the locality that “fueled the law.” She cited former Charlottesville police chief Tim Longo’s “rounding up” almost 200 black men to request DNA after a victim described a serial rapist as a black male as evidence the policy is racist.

“I think it will continue to perpetuate those practices that lead to mass incarceration,” she said.

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Confronting a shameful past: Search for 1898 lynching site narrows

Historic researcher Jane Smith believes the 1898 lynching of John Henry James, which took place at a place identified as Wood's Crossing, is located on a strip of land currently owned by Farmington Country Club. A 1919 plat shows the blacksmith shop near where the hanging-by-mob took place. Information courtesy Jane Smith/Google maps

As big a role as history plays in Charlottesville’s identity, some events, like an 1898 lynching, were pretty much buried or forgotten until Jane Smith was doing historical research and going through old issues of the Daily Progress in 2013.

She happened upon this July 12, 1898, headline: “He paid the awful penalty: John Henry James hanged by a mob today.”

James, who was black, was accused of sexually assaulting a young white woman near Pen Park, and had been taken to Staunton to avoid a vengeance-minded mob. When he was headed back to Charlottesville to face a grand jury, a crowd awaited at Wood’s Crossing four miles west of town, hauled him off the train and took him to a small locust tree about 40 yards away near a blacksmith shop, according to the Progress. There he was hanged and his body riddled with bullets for good measure. Sightseers took his clothes—and body parts—as mementos.

Historic researcher Jane Smith is homing in on the site where John Henry James was lynched. Photo by Eze Amos

Smith, who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, says UVA professor Frank Dukes first brought up the idea of participating in the Equal Justice Initiative, which opened a memorial to victims of lynching in April in Montgomery, Alabama.

The initiative has documented at least 4,000 lynchings in the southern United States, and its Community Remembrance Project is an effort to recognize victims by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers.

Charlottesville City Council asked Andrea Douglas, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center executive director, and Jalane Schmidt, UVA religious studies professor, to bring back the memorial for James. They’re arranging a pilgrimage to Montgomery in July to take soil from the lynching site and bring home the coffin-sized memorial to reside in Charlottesville outside the Albemarle courthouse at Justice Park.

The problem was, nobody knew the location of Wood’s Crossing.

“We’ve been in a vortex trying to sort this out,” says Smith. “I think we’ve probably figured out what happened. The crossing is no longer on the main road [U.S. 250] and the owner changed.”

In 1898, Warner Wood owned land that is now Farmington, which was developed in 1927. Smith says in the late 1920s, Ivy Road, which used to run north of the railroad tracks, was realigned and is now south of the tracks. She’s checked maps, plats and railroad schedules, and is convinced that what was once Wood’s Crossing is at the present day Farmington Drive.

Her initial research put the site on Ivy Road three-tenths of a mile west of Farmington Drive near Charlottesville Oil, based on a British rail enthusiast’s table that listed both a Wood’s and a Farmington station. “That was just wrong,” she says. She now believes the stations are the same and changed names after Farmington Incorporated bought the land from Wood’s heirs.

She also found a 1919 plat that shows the blacksmith shop mentioned in the Progress story on a strip of land now owned by Farmington Country Club.

And she says Warner Wood’s will was the “smoking gun” in pinning down the location of Wood’s Station.

Joe Krenn, COO and general manager of Farmington Country Club, says he had a “very productive conversation” with Smith. In an email, he says he’s confident the pilgrimage project team and the club leadership “can determine the accurate site and how to proceed from there.”

The pilgrimage organizers plan a ceremonial soil gathering July 7 with local dignitaries, community members and travelers present when Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker shovels dirt into the Community Remembrance Project receptacles, which means there’s little more than a month to figure out the lynching site.

Douglas, Smith, Schmidt and a representative from Albemarle County met with Krenn May 25. Schmidt describes the Farmington response as, “We want to help the community.” Krenn will take the matter to the club’s board May 31.

And in further research, Smith found an account that may lead to a still-living person who knew where the locust tree once stood.

The office of Virginia Humanities executive director Matthew Gibson is located near Boar’s Head Inn across from Farmington. “Learning that the site of the John Henry James lynching is across the street from our Charlottesville offices makes this particularly horrific part of our nation’s history feel even more real and tangible,” he says. “As our programming seeks to demonstrate, we can’t move forward together to heal the wounds of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow without an honest acknowledgment of the past that got us here.”

“I think it’s important we get this right,” says Smith. “Something in us makes place very important in the commemoration.”

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery has a wall of clear jars of earth collected from where lynchings took place. “We need to know to join in on that national mourning and commemoration,” she says. “That’s why it’s so important to know where it happened.”