New beginning includes working with recently formed African American Association
Scores of Rappahannock residents gathered in one of the oldest buildings in the Town of Washington last Sunday to celebrate a hopeful new beginning for an organization that has been the keeper of Rappahannock County history for more than 60 years.
It was a day of welcome — as the Rappahannock Historical Society hosted a well-attended open house at its circa-1790 Gay Street location — both for a surge of new members and in the society’s open invitation for community groups to join forces to collaborate with it.
“We’re anxious to begin some one-on-one dialogues, to encourage involvement and engagement with the historical society,” said Michael Dennis, who has stepped in as its temporary board chair.
Dennis announced the society, originally started in 1964, will hold its general membership meeting in September, when a long-term board and officers will be proposed and elected.
“This organization almost disappeared,” Dennis said. “We look forward to its next, new vibrant phase.”
Newly named Executive Director Eva Grimsley, left, talks with Rosa Crocker, behind is a portrait of her great, great uncle Rev. Barnett Grimsley. (Photo/Luke Christopher)
Almost history
Just a few months ago, the society was rescued by a group of locals who realized its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status would be lost if action were not taken immediately.
After the deaths of its long-time leaders, John and Judy Tole, within four months of each other, the last surviving board member, 86-year-old Lilian Aylor, was sought out at her home in Winchester, to sign a resolution permitting the nonprofit to reorganize. Aylor herself died two weeks later.
After securing the resolution, the group began meetings — involving long-time society employee Eva Grimsley — to determine a future direction. In addition to interim board chair Dennis, Grimsley now has been named executive director, Kees Dutilh vice chair, and Helen Williams and Fred Catlin board members.
Signs in remembrance of recently lost member Lillian Aylor and long-time Society leaders John and Judy Tole. (Photo/Luke Christopher)
Collaborations in the works
The historical society welcomes joining forces with an organization called the African American Association for Rappahannock County (AAARC), Dennis said.
“The more we learn about one another the stronger we become as a community,” he said.
Last August the AAARC was founded to better preserve the county’s African American history. It came out of earlier conversations with Lilian Aylor, Nan Roberts, Lois Goodall, Joann Baltimore, Marie Davis and others who had envisioned working with the Rappahannock Historical Society to research, study and better preserve the county’s African American history. While no inroads were made at that time, the hope is that that will change.
“Our ultimate goal is to join forces, to become one with the historical society,” Goodall said. “For now, our group will continue to exist as long as there is a need for it. We have a lot of work to do, there is a lot of history here that nobody knows.”
Driving through Rappahannock County and observing the formidable stone walls that run through fields and mark property lines, “I’m reminded that those walls were built by my ancestors,” Goodall said. “I want to know more about those people. We can all learn from their experience here.”
She said members of AAARC will bring forth the true history, good and bad — history that has been overlooked and ignored.
“We need to know about all people — otherwise we form assumptions and misunderstandings that are incorrect,” Goodall said. “My ancestors fought in the Civil War, in the Union Army – they fought for their own freedom. Their story should be told.”
Goodall said she first became interested in history after learning that an ancestor in her family line served as the first and only African American treasurer of the United States, Azie Taylor Morton, who held the position during the Carter Administration, 1977 to 1981.
“I was raised by a single mother, I didn’t even know who my father was,” Goodall said. “But I had this incredible example within my own family of someone who rose above her challenges and really made a difference.”
Lois Goodall, center, of the African American Association for Rappahannock County (AAARC) addresses the crowd at the Historical Society open house last Sunday. (Photo/Luke Christopher)
Talks are already underway to involve the historical society with other groups, such as organizers of the annual John Jackson Piedmont Blues Festival in Woodville in the fall and Scrabble School in Castleton, a historic Rosenwald school built in the early 1920s for African-American children.
New direction
Grimsley is pleased with the direction the revitalized society is taking and looks forward to working with AAARC.
“We’ve done a lot of Black history here — we have wills or sales that list those enslaved,” she said. “We’ve maintained records of who is named on those documents.
“As executive director I will be able to make decisions — that will be nice,” Grimsley said. “There is a lot of work to do and we’re looking forward to having some volunteers help us get our records digitized,” among many other tasks.
Grimsley’s family has been in the county for generations. She is a descendant of Daniel A. Grimsley, a Confederate veteran, state senator and later a judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. An advocate for unity and reconciliation, Judge Grimsley chronicled the Civil War and welcomed President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 for a two-day tour of the Culpeper battlefields.
But the history in Rappahannock County is of interest to everyone, not just people like Grimsley, with family roots here.
“People like to find out who owned their property — maybe they were a shoemaker, or it was a doctor’s house,” she said. “It’s important to know history — good and bad, how life was, how hard things were — how much work it took to run a farm, or [for] a woman to run her household.”
One of the society’s treasures is a collection of letters between family members in Rappahannock with relatives who moved to Missouri in the 1860s.
Before reading these letters, “I didn’t know there was a stagecoach that stopped at Gaines’ Crossroads, which is Ben Venue,” Grimsley said. “I didn’t know people would go up to Alexandria and take a steamboat west from there.”
She said the society had more than 13,000 names on a cemetery database started years ago with many volunteers going out and gathering all the information they could from the tiny family cemeteries hidden among corpses of trees or behind crumbling stone walls.
“All the little graveyards, and also all the churches, descriptions of how to find these places — we’ve got a huge amount of information, we add to it all the time, but it’s all on CD and it needs to be redone,” she said.
Grimsley said Rappahannock is unique and everyone should value its history.
“We’ve managed to keep the county so much more like it used to be than all the surrounding counties,” she said. “When I hit the line — come over the mountain at Chester Gap or drive down 211 from Warrenton and see those mountains reaching out in the distance, it makes me so grateful.”
