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The wand of Virginia Lottery advertising avatar Lady Luck
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One of the exhibition’s helpful touchscreens, here displaying the locations of the Library of Virginia and the expansion of its missions
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Poster for Virginia’s first psychedelic dance party
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The lock from the Southampton County jail cell that held Nat Turner
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Giavonni Giannini couldn’t get Thomas Jefferson to send him home.
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Models by architect Haigh Jamgochian. The Half-Moon House (top) was built for Howard Hughes, the “Mad Man Dapper Dan” used car salesman; it was demolished a few years ago. The Markel Insurance office building is below. The “UFO” aluminum-wrapped building is the only remaining work by Jamgochian.
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In 1852, Margaret Douglass, a former slave owner from South Carolina, opened a school for free Black children in Norfolk; she didn’t realize teaching them to read was illegal. She’s one of the profiles presented in the electrically rotating gallery.
On either end of the gallery for the Library of Virginia’s anniversary exhibition, “200 Years: 200 Stories,” are visually compelling screens presenting the dynamic visualization by Jeff Dobrow and Riggs Ward Design about the inner relations of the volumes, documents and ephemera in the library’s collection.
Curator and art historian Susan Glasser brought in Dobrow’s “From a Singular Point,” which can mesmerize you by the animation moving in kaleidoscopic patterns. This constant shape-shifting represents books, maps and the connections that these materials can make to an adventurous reader, a scholarly researcher or someone seeking to put names to question marks in their family tree.
The work reflects how, though you may be looking at yellowing pieces of paper with often hard-to-discern handwriting, attached is an invisible and often compelling story.
The library received its charter on Jan. 17, 1823, as a filing cabinet for the official government documents of the commonwealth of Virginia and as a library for legislators. But the mission grew, as did the spaces the library and archives occupied around the city. You can trace that progress on one of several informative touch-screen displays.
An impulse to preserve the state’s history was also part of the Library of Virginia’s origin story. By 1833, the heroic Revolutionary War generation was elderly and dying out. Other Virginians, faced with depleting farm lands and fewer opportunities, sought new lives elsewhere. A sense began to pervade those who had the time to think about such things that Virginia’s best days might be over. Some accounting needed to be made.
“And there was a concern about the loss of documents due to fires,” explains Gregg Kimball, the library’s director of public services and outreach. “Between Nathaniel Bacon burning Jamestown and Benedict Arnold coming through and setting Richmond on fire, these valuable links to the state’s past were quite literally going up in smoke.”
Since then, the library has amassed trillions of pages and thousands of terabytes of data.
On either side of the lobby is an electronic gallery of personalities, the renowned, the little known and the infamous, who carry their own throughlines in Virginia’s continuing story.
As other museums have done in recent years, using a certain number of evocative pieces to tell a complex story, the library hit upon 200 documents and objects.
The assortment is by turns serious, provocative and amusing, with the exhibition including the massive lock that kept rebel slave Nat Turner captured after a two-month hunt and incarceration in a Southampton County jail cell, models of buildings by architect Haigh Jamgochian (he of the UFO/Reynolds Wrap building by Willow Lawn and the sadly demolished Half-Moon House off Cherokee Road) and the magic wand of the Virginia Lottery’s former pitch-fairy, Lady Luck.
Here, too, are juxtapositions, such as a 1941 book of 50 songs (“Wildwood Flower,” “Darling Nellie Across The Sea”) as written and sung by the Carter Family, then with Sara, Maybelle and A.P. Carter. Nearby is an eye-catching purple and yellow poster advertising the Major-Trips presentation of “The First Psychedelic Dance in Virginia” with the “mind music electrically performed by” The Actual Mushroom, Aug. 4, 1967, where “A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All,” for perhaps the wildest night ever at the long-gone Tantilla Ballroom.
The Prophet Wabokieshiek, Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak), and his son Nasheaskuk gaze from their triple portrait. These Native Americans fought against both the British and the U.S. government. In 1833, on their way as captives to an ultimately brief incarceration at Fort Monroe, the men stopped in Richmond, where they sat for artist James Westhall Ford. They look out with vital expressions, rather than of defeat, and with strength, endurance — and curiosity.
Two pages of vigorous right-slanted, tightly written lines are from the records of the Albemarle County Court. In 1798 Giovanni Antonio Giannini sued Thomas Jefferson, to whom he was indentured as a vintner. His contract included passage home. A British blockade instead kept Giannini here for several additional years. He wanted to get home, though, and sought compensation from Jefferson. The court didn’t agree, and he never returned to Italy.
Here, too, is a minute book kept by Virginia chapter of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. The vigorous group, with a Richmond branch co-founded by Sophie Meredith, sought an equal rights amendment to the constitution. Meredith picketed the White House in August 1918. The 67-year-old underwent four separate arrests for demonstrating in Lafayette Park.
There is the front page of the May 31, 1890, Richmond Planet, edited and published by the pioneering Black civil rights activist, “The Fighting Editor,” John Mitchell Jr. Mitchell represented Jackson Ward on the city’s board of aldermen from 1890-96. By then, the tightening of race-based restrictions that he’d campaigned against, in print and politics, made Black electoral participation almost impossible.
The page’s headlines underscore the challenges of the period: ballot-box stuffing and fraud at Jackson Ward polling places alongside a report on the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee monument. “The South may revere the memory of its chieftains,” the article summarizes. “It takes the wrong steps in so doing, and proceeds to go too far in every similar celebration. It serves to retard its progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be bound. All is over —”
The papers on display are quiet, but not so the stories they can tell, revealed by interpretive texts. As so often happens in life, what you’re looking at has more to say than what you’re seeing. This is especially the case in the complementary exhibition for Black History Month, “ ‘I have this day committed to jail’: Records of Free & Enslaved Citizens from the City of Richmond Hustings Court.”
The exhibition is part of a library undertaking, supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission the National Archives, in a project called “Untold Virginia.” The Library is digitizing these records from the city of Richmond, and some have already been added through its crowdsourced transcription platform, “From the Page.” After the full transcriptions and the original documents are uploaded, they will be fully keyword searchable.
The documents on view on the lobby’s right side date from between 1782 and 1860. They include identification papers for free Blacks to allow them passage in the streets, records of criminal trials of free and enslaved Blacks for various petty crimes and felonies, and petitions of free Blacks to remain in Virginia.
Here is a record from 1856 of Jane Connelly, a free Black woman, accused of altering her own “free papers” to allow an enslaved man, James, to escape. She altered her name to read as “James” and made other changes. Connelly also forged a pass to take herself and James to Baltimore. The court found insufficient evidence to convict her and dropped the case.
This is but one story worth the telling, and the reading, of millions at the Library of Virginia.
“200 Years: 200 Stories” is open to the public and on view through Oct. 28. “ ‘I have this day committed to jail’ ” is on view through Feb. 28. Associated events include “First Civil Rights: Black Political Activism After Claiming Freedom,” a panel discussion to mark the completion of a documentation project in partnership with the of Virginia Humanities of the state’s first Black legislators, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m on Thursday, Feb. 23; “Collections Show & Tell,” about the preservation of stories and documents, including yours, 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 3; “A Woman’s Place Is in the House … of Delegates,” featuring a group of House members discussing their challenges and opportunities, 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 29.
