The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has approved eight new historical markers, including one in Roanoke that recognizes the nation’s first Black ambassador, one in Cumberland County that recognizes a Black politician during Reconstruction who used the courts to defend himself against white attackers, and one in Emporia that recognizes civil rights attorney Samuel Tucker.
Others recognize the home of the wealthiest woman on the Eastern Shore during the 17th century and sites in Charlottesville where enslaved people were once sold.
Following the board’s approval of the markers, it can take upwards of eight months or more before a new marker is ready for installation. The marker’s sponsor covers the required $3,000 manufacturing expenses for a new sign.
Virginia’s historical highway marker program began in 1927 with installation of the first markers along U.S. 1. It is considered the oldest such program in the nation. Currently there are more than 2,600 state markers.
Here’s what the board says about the eight new markers:
Gargaphia
The site of Gargaphia, the home plantation of Anne Toft (ca. 1642-ca. 1687), is about a mile southeast of the marker site. Toft came to Virginia about 1660, when fewer than one-fifth of English arrivals were women. Closely allied with Col. Edmund Scarburgh II, a burgess and Virginia’s surveyor general, she acquired more than 30,000 acres in Virginia, Maryland and Jamaica, on which indentured and enslaved laborers worked. While she was single, she engaged in international trade, defended her interests in court and became the wealthiest woman on the Eastern Shore. Around 1671, she married Daniel Jenifer of Maryland. A great-grandson, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, was a signer of the U.S. Constitution.
Sponsor: Eastern Shore of Virginia Historical Society (Shore History)
Locality: Accomack County
Proposed Location: U.S. 13 at intersection with Gargatha Landing Road
The Lewis Family
John Lewis (ca. 1594-1657), a Welsh immigrant, patented land in this area in 1653, and his family later acquired hundreds of additional acres on both sides of the Poropotank River. His gravestone and those of other family members are in a cemetery a short distance south of here. Among Lewis’s descendants were John Lewis, a member of colonial Virginia’s Council of State; Fielding Lewis, a member of the House of Burgesses, a director of Virginia’s primary gun factory during the Revolutionary War and brother-in-law of George Washington; and Meriwether Lewis, private secretary to President Thomas Jefferson and leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Ocean (1803-1806).
Sponsor: Virginia Lewis and Clark Legacy Trail
Locality: King and Queen County
Proposed Location: Buena Vista Road (Virginia 14) near intersection with Poropotank Drive
Sales of Enslaved People in Court Square
Between 1762 and 1865, auctioneers sold enslaved men, women and children at various locations in Court Square: outside taverns, at the Jefferson Hotel, at the “Number Nothing” building, in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse (where sales were then recorded), and, according to tradition, from a tree stump. After Thomas Jefferson’s death, 33 enslaved people from his Monticello estate were auctioned at the Eagle Hotel in January 1829 to satisfy his debts. Enslaved Charlottesville residents Fountain Hughes and Maria Perkins recalled Court Day sales as dreaded occasions that separated Black families. Such sales were frequent in Virginia, where the domestic slave trade was central to the economy.
Sponsor: City of Charlottesville – Historic Resources Committee
Locality: City of Charlottesville
Proposed Location: Court Square Park
John Lipscomb Robinson
John Robinson (born John Lipscomb), a free person of color from Cumberland County, was a wagoner and landowner before the Civil War. Twice attacked by white men in 1864, he fled to Amelia County and later used the local courts to convict many of his attackers and defend his property rights. An active Republican during Reconstruction, he was one of 24 African Americans elected to serve in Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1867-68, where he voted with radical reformers. As a state senator (1869-73), he helped set up Virginia’s new public school system and voted to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. For 30 years he owned and operated the Effingham House tavern near here.
Sponsor: Cumberland Middle School
Locality: Cumberland County
Proposed Location: Anderson Highway, Cumberland
Samuel Wilbert Tucker (1913-1990)
Samuel W. Tucker, civil rights attorney, was born in Alexandria, where he organized a sit-in at the whites-only public library in 1939. After graduating from Howard University in 1933 and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he moved to Emporia. During the 1960s, he became head of the Virginia NAACP’s legal team and a partner in the Richmond law firm of Hill, Tucker and Marsh. He pursued several successful U.S. Supreme Court cases, co-authoring the brief for Griffin v. Prince Edward County (1964) and arguing Green v. New Kent (1968) and Wright v. Emporia (1972). Tucker’s work helped overturn the tactics that localities had used to resist federal school-desegregation mandates.
Sponsor: Rodney D. Pierce
Locality: City of Emporia
Proposed Location: Near intersection of East Atlantic Street and North Main Street
Edward Richard Dudley III (1911-2005)
Edward R. Dudley III was born in South Boston and was raised in the family’s home three blocks west of the marker site. After high school in Roanoke, he graduated from Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina and earned a law degree in 1941 in New York. Working with Thurgood Marshall on the NAACP’s legal team, he challenged racial discrimination in education, voting and transportation. President Harry Truman appointed Dudley minister to Liberia in 1948 and ambassador in 1949, making him the U.S.’s first Black ambassador. Dudley worked to secure equal treatment for Black foreign service officers. After returning to New York, he became borough president of Manhattan in 1961 and served on the state’s Supreme Court (1965-1985).
Sponsor: Nelson Harris
Locality: City of Roanoke
Proposed Location: Intersection of Gilmer Avenue and Gainsboro Road Northwest, northwest corner
State Military Reservation
The State Rifle Range, built in 1912, was the first permanent training facility for the Virginia Volunteers, later the Virginia National Guard. During World War I, the post was leased to the U.S. Navy for warship crew training. Virginia’s first state-owned airfield opened here in the 1920s, and the post was renamed the State Military Reservation (SMR) in 1928. During World War II, the U.S. Army leased the SMR, named it Camp Pendleton, and conducted a building campaign that accommodated the training and housing of thousands of troops. The post reverted to Virginia after the war. The Camp Pendleton/SMR Historic District reflects the Virginia National Guard’s evolution over more than a century.
Sponsor: Virginia Department of Military Affairs
Locality: Virginia Beach
Proposed Location: General Booth Boulevard at the State Military Reservation
Holly Knoll
Robert R. Moton (1867-1940), born to formerly enslaved parents, became a nationally prominent educator and retired to Holly Knoll, which he built in 1935. His wife, Jennie Booth Moton, was president of the National Association of Colored Women while residing there. Meetings held at Holly Knoll fostered the growth of the United Negro College Fund, founded by the Motons’ son-in-law Frederick D. Patterson in 1944. The property was a frequent gathering place for African American leaders and intellectuals during the civil rights movement. Student sit-in organizers met with business executives here early in the 1960s, leading some facilities to desegregate. Holly Knoll is a National Historic Landmark.
Sponsor: DHR
Locality: Gloucester County
Proposed Location: Virginia 662 at Holly Knoll