The Shenandoah County School Board is set to vote Thursday on whether to restore Confederate names to two schools.
What used to be Stonewall Jackson High School is now Mountain View High School.
What used to be Ashby Lee Elementary is now Honey Run Elementary.
The 2020 name changes have not sat well with some in the county. Those who opposed the name changes in the first place remain on the school board; those who favored them are now gone and a new school board might well take the unusual step of returning Confederate names to public buildings.
The debate over this has followed the expected path. A comment forum on the Strasburg-based Northern Virginia Daily newspaper roils with the back-and-forth:
“This Board seems quite eager to embarrass our students and turn our County into a state-wide, national and international target of derision and disbelief. Naming schools for men who killed American soldiers, and who led others to kill in the pursuit of keeping Blacks enslaved, is full-on racist.”
“The woke mafia shouldn’t be able to turn this place into a Nova Suburb anytime soon.”
“If we went back to the previous names would we stick out like a sore thumb and bear the stigma as most likely being in the minority? I don’t think a reversal will reflect on our County in a positive way. Better to leave things alone.”
“Sorry to tell the apologists for the last School Board, but no one is celebrating slavery here. We are however celebrating and honoring our ancestors. And in this case, a Virginia hero who put the Valley on the map.”
You get the idea. None of the arguments are new. In a previous column, I noted that it’s ironic that Shenandoah County is the place debating the wisdom of name changes when Shenandoah County itself underwent a name change: It was originally Dunmore County, named after Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last colonial governor. Once American revolutionaries chased Dunmore out to sea, never to return, his name was stripped from the county.
That makes sense, but this does not: The town named after Dunmore’s eldest son remained unchanged. That town is Fincastle, in Botetourt County — named after the viscount of Fincastle. Why did American patriots not complete the process and rid Fincastle of its name, too? Mind you, I’m not suggesting we do. I have a Fincastle address. I like the way the name looks and sounds. But its origins seem just as objectionable as Dunmore County — maybe even more so. At least Dunmore actually served as governor, and did a few good things before he ran afoul of the locals. His son had nothing to do with Virginia. Why do we honor him?
(Fun fact: Lord Dunmore ordered the Norfolk waterfront burned. He also offered enslaved workers their freedom if they sided with the British, and many took him up on that offer. History is complicated. If you want to know more about that era, check out our Cardinal 250 project on little-known stories about Virginia’s role in the Revolution and sign up for the monthly newsletter. )
All that brings me to this point: We are very inconsistent about name changes.
Virginians rebelled against the crown and threw off the monarchy — we celebrate this every Fourth of July — yet we kept the royal names affixed to 26 counties, a number now reduced to 24 only because Elizabeth City County and Princess Anne County were merged into Hampton and Virginia Beach.
Nine counties were named after members of the House of Stuart: James City, Henrico, Charles City, Elizabeth City, York, Gloucester, Princess Anne, Fluvanna, Prince George.
Three counties were named after members of the House of Orange: King and Queen, King William, Orange.
Fourteen counties were named after members of the House of Hanover: Brunswick, Hanover, King George, Caroline, Prince William, Amelia, Frederick, Augusta, Louisa, Lunenburg, Cumberland, Prince Edward, Charlotte and Mecklenburg.
This list doesn’t include cities, a legal distinction that came later, but which bear royal names — most notably Williamsburg (King William III) and even Thomas Jefferson’s own Charlottesville (Charlotte, the wife of King George III).
It also doesn’t include counties named after British nobility who weren’t members of the royal family, such as Bedford County (named for John Russell, the Duke of Bedford, who was a British cabinet minister, albeit one who was accused of spending too much time at his country estate playing cricket and shooting pheasants) and Halifax County (named for George Montagu-Dunk, the Earl of Halifax, who as president of the Board of Trade helped found a port city in Nova Scotia that now also bears his name). Nor does it include counties named after other British figures, such as Pittsylvania County, named after British Prime Minister William Pitt, who was considered a friend of the colonies, or Rockingham County, named after Lord Rockingham, another prime minister we liked. And then there’s my own Botetourt County, named after Lord Botetourt, the last royal governor we liked.
Why didn’t we change all those? Two years ago, in a previous column, I posed this question to Roger Ekirch, a University Distinguished Professor of History at Virginia Tech. His answer: When Americans first started to rebel, they felt they were simply asserting their lawful rights as Englishmen. They weren’t rejecting their British heritage, they just wanted to do their own thing. They particularly liked King William III and Queen Mary as upholders of the Bill of Rights of 1689, which became a rough model for our own. Framed that way, the question for Shenandoah County becomes: Does the county want to endorse its Confederate heritage or reject it as wrong?
Still, that doesn’t explain my curiosity about why Dunmore was out while Fincastle stayed in.
Update: Ed McCoy, a historian and journalist from Botetourt, told me something I didn’t know: There was a brief attempt to change the name. Ed tells me: “In 1794, some Fincastle residents petitioned the General Assembly to change the town’s name to Monroe. The GA complied, and Fincastle officially became Monroe. Three years later another group of residents, claiming they knew nothing of the first petition, sent their own petition to change the name back to Fincastle claiming the town was already well know as Fincastle. So Fincastle was known as Monroe and Fincastle, and at times listed as Monroe (Fincastle) or Fincastle (Monroe) well into the 1800s. Finally, in 1821, the GA incorporated The Town of Fincastle, and that was that.While there’s nothing I could find to indicate why Monroe, it’s possible to presume it’s after James Monroe who was completing a term as a US Senator from Virginia. Perhaps the first petitioners didn’t think much of Lord Dunmore’s son after the Revolution.”
We have more modern inconsistencies: Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville was forced to change its name from that of a slave-holding champion for liberty (well, partial liberty) to Patrick and Henry Community College, named after two of the counties it serves — even though those counties are named after the same Patrick Henry. I’m not making a case one way or another for whether these names should or should not be changed, but it seems odd that Patrick Henry’s name is deemed inappropriate for a school yet is considered OK for not one but two counties. If there’s a difference there, it involves a lot of nuance and we don’t seem to live in a nuanced age.
Likewise, Lord Fairfax Community College was renamed Laurel Ridge because Lord Fairfax was a slaveholder — yet we still have our most populous county, as well as a city, named after that same slaveholder.
Granted, it’s easier to change the name of a single institution than a place name for a county that’s home to more than 1.1 million people. I remember years ago when there were proposals in some places to name streets after Martin Luther King Jr., one objection was that it would be a hardship on people and businesses on that street to change their addresses. That seemed a true, but weak, objection to me: Must we always be shackled to decisions of the past? When I first moved to my current residence, the road had no name other than whatever number the state assigned to it. Our mailing address — which I’ve forgotten now — was something like Route 1, Box Such-and-Such. Then came the county’s 911 system and every road, every single one, had to be renamed, which meant everybody had to go about changing their address on every government or business form. That was a hassle, but I also like the idea that the county’s fire department can find me after my microwave flames up into a miniature Chernobyl.
Over time, lots of things have gotten renamed because political tempers changed — what is now Liberty Street in Harrisonburg used to be German Street until World War I made it out of fashion.
We also have lots of things that haven’t gotten renamed. Danville has a bridge named after a segregationist judge who presided over the Bloody Monday civil rights protesters of 1963. His portrait has been removed from the courthouse, but his name remains on one of the main bridges across the Dan River.
Thomas Jefferson, who has come in for some name changes, had something to say about this, way back when. Inscribed on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial is the advice he gave to future generations: “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Or, as the great philosopher Paul Simon put it in one of his songs: “Every generation throws a hero up the pop chart.” The Shenandoah County School Board will decide Thursday who its heroes are.