Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney pens a note in his City Hall office.
Valuable treasure is tucked away in Mayor Levar Stoney’s office at Richmond City Hall.
Open one of the drawers of his desk, and it’s filled with handwritten letters from constituents. Some are penned in elegant cursive; others from schoolchildren are crafted with colorful crayon.
“I save all these,” he says. “The kids’ letters are the best.”
In an age of email and text messaging, Stoney appreciates a handwritten letter. “I think it shows a human connection,” he says. “This is something we can hold onto even as we get into an era of new technology.”
Stoney says the letters also help to chart his life’s journey. “The note that has the most significance to me is the one I don’t keep at the office. It’s from my father,” he says. Stoney was a freshman at James Madison University when he received his now-late father’s letter of encouragement in the mail. “I was doing something that I was the first in my family to do, and that was to go to college,” he says.
Stoney carried this letter with him on the campaign trail as a reminder of “the significance of a child born to a janitor who was running for mayor of the capital city,” he says.
A handwritten letter, Stoney says, “shows you take the time to think of someone.”
Letter writing was not part of his regular routine, Stoney says, until he met his mentor, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe. “He said to me that you should always write a handwritten note to let folks know you’re thankful,” Stoney says.
When he moved into the mayor’s office in City Hall, Stoney discovered a handwritten letter in one of the desk drawers. It was from his predecessor, former Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones, “offering pieces of advice and saying ‘I wish you the best of luck in the role,’ ” Stoney recalls. “I’ll probably do the same.”
Some of the letters and drawings Mayor Stoney has received from young Richmonders
More than sentimental objects, handwritten letters can also serve as important historical documents in a way that emails and texts cannot. “Handwritten letters are as close as we come to touching the past,” says noted Civil War historian Edward Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. “They allow us to read not only the words, but the emotions with which the words were written. The size of the letters, the spacing of the lines, the intimacy of the signature — all give us insight into the lives of people in the midst of their own histories.”
Ayers adds, “The most powerful letter I’ve ever seen is one written by an enslaved woman to her husband as she and their youngest child were on the cusp of being sold in Charlottesville. The anguish and sadness fill the small page.”
The U.S. Postal Service reports a decrease in the annual first-class single-piece mail volume — from 31.6 billion in 2009 to 17.5 billion in 2018 — but Crystal Duncan, who heads the Manakin-Sabot post office, hopes more people will start sending letters in the mail again. Duncan got into her career partly because of the joy she felt at age 5 when she received cards in the mail from her sister, who is 14 years her senior.
“I was so excited to get those letters out of the mailbox when I was younger that I kept her letters and will treasure them always,” she says. “In my opinion, that’s something that you cannot put a price on, and an email can’t put that special touch like a handwritten note,” she says.
Gillian Jabe, a Richmond area homeschool mother of 10 children, cherishes her box of handwritten letters. When Jabe was a girl, one of her best friends, Stephanie Davis, moved to another state. The two stayed connected through letters that were “full of boy talk, favorite songs on 45s, hopes for the future and all the silliness that is a teenage girl,” Jabe remembers. “It’s when we still signed our letters ‘Friends Forever’ and ‘LYLAS’ (Love You Like A Sister).”
The letters carried the friends through “boyfriends, bad hairstyles, divorces and even an estrangement. We have grown up together from schoolgirls to adult women with children,” Jabe says.
“Your written words are pieces of your soul, I think, when you care to write them down and share,” Davis says. “These letters … feel like time capsules to me.”
Richmond author Ken Jungersen regularly writes letters to his relatives in Denmark. “One of them collects stamps, so I always make sure to get a lot of different U.S. stamps on the envelope,” he says. He also sends handwritten notes to friends, and he recently sent a card to a co-worker who was struggling. A handwritten card he received in return still moves him: “You’re a true friend by any measure and will remain so forever,” he reads.
Handwritten letters can make a positive difference for people, Jungersen believes, and most would agree it’s a joy to find a handwritten letter inside the mailbox. “It’s a whole lot more exciting than seeing a bill,” he says.
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