Select Sites in North Carolina
Doug and I had both listened to Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sullivan Sorin. The book was eye-opening and heartbreaking, to say the least. It tells …
Category: History
Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site
I’m not gonna lie, I’d never heard of Maggie Lena Walker, but the National Park Service made a historic site of her home, and we were in Richmond, Va., so off we trundled for a …
Richmond, Va.’s Hollywood Cemetery
We had to go to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va., so Doug could pay his respects at the graves of two more U.S. Presidents, James Monroe (our fifth) and John Tyler (our tenth). Monroe’s over-the-top …
Searching for Andrew Jackson’s Birthplace
Andrew Jackson, the problematic seventh President of the United States, was born in 1767 in South Carolina, at the plantation farm belonging to his mother’s sister and her husband, the Crawfords. Or maybe he was …
The John Marshall House
John Marshall (1755-1835) was described by President John Adams as the most important founding father never to become president. He was a lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, and the longest-serving Chief Justice of the United States, …
President James K. Polk Birthplace
James Knox Polk was the 11th president of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849. Before he became president, Polk was the governor of Tennessee, and then served as the speaker of the U.S. …
Architecture / Civil War / History / Museums
Various Sites in Richmond and Eastern Virginia
We did a straight shot down I-95 through Virginia on our way south, primarily stopping in Fredericksburg and Richmond. Here are some items we thought were interesting along the way. The Markel Building was supposedly …
White House of the Confederacy
I had a little bit of hesitation about touring the White House of the Confederacy (WHC), worried it would celebrate the Lost Cause mythology/“if only the South had won the war” trope. I was pleasantly …
Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond
Just two short months ago we visited the Poe House in Baltimore, so of course we made sure to visit the Poe Museum in Richmond, Va. If you refresh yourself on that story, you’ll recall …
Historic St. John’s Church
St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Va., is not just the oldest church in the city (built in 1741), it is the site of a major speech that one could argue ensured the success of …