When Malfourd “Bo” Trumbo was a circuit court judge in Botetourt County, he would often walk through the courtroom at the end of the day and find someone sitting there.
The person varied from day to day, but the story was always the same.
“I’d say, ‘Can I help you?’ and they’d say, ‘My spouse is in the clerk’s office doing genealogy work and I had nothing better to do.’”
Trumbo, being a gregarious sort as befits a former state legislator, jokes: “I’d tell the bailiff to charge ’em a $2 entertainment tax.”
There’s a serious side to this, though, one that Trumbo is quick to turn to. In this case, he could turn to his point quite literally. A few years ago, Trumbo sat for an interview in the jury room at the courthouse (he’s now retired from the bench, and that courthouse has been demolished to make way for another). Lo! On the wall in the jury room was a map that showed the history of Botetourt County. Botetourt once stretched all the way to the Mississippi River and took in all of Kentucky and parts of present-day West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and even a little slice of Wisconsin. That’s a lot of genealogical history across the Midwest that still resides in the Botetourt County Courthouse (or will once it’s reconstructed).
“Everybody who is less than 250 years old has to come to Fincastle,” Trumbo said, meaning researchers who live in communities in those states formed from Botetourt County. He then proceeded to tick off all the ways that people who moved from Botetourt County helped shape the country. “The next time you wager at Churchill Downs, remember that the person who started Churchill Downs was William Clark’s grandson,” he said — and, as any good student of Botetourt County history knows, William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) passed through the county long enough to marry one of its daughters.
We Virginians are known for our love of history (at least the parts we like to remember). In the case of Botetourt County (and some other western counties, such as Augusta County, from which Botetourt County was formed in 1770), that history includes a lot of places that are out of state. Sometime in the next few years, Botetourt County will have the opportunity to share that history with visitors.
The $165 billion state budget that Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed in 2022 included $6 million for a history museum in Fincastle. It’s no secret how this happened. Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt County, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and was one of the budget conferees who negotiated the final version of the spending plan. “As vice chairman of Appropriations and knowing the money we had available to us, I saw an opportunity to insert something for Botetourt County — a great opportunity to demonstrate our history,” he said.
Since then, though, that project has been stalled, largely for lack of a place to put this new museum (Fincastle is a small place) and lack of a county match to access the funding.
Those two obstacles were cleared away this week with the announcement that Google has purchased 312 acres in Botetourt’s industrial park with plans to build a data center campus. At Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, County Administrator Gary Larrowe laid out what the county intended to do with the $14 million the tech giant paid for the property, plus another $4 million it’s giving for community projects. The big ticket items were three new fire trucks, three new ambulances, two vehicles for the Sheriff’s Office, a community center and a renovation of the Buchanan library. All those things were measured in the millions. Also on the list was something comparatively smaller: $500,000 to complete the county’s match for that state funding for the museum — and a commitment to put the museum on some of the non-industrial land at the Greenfield industrial park.
Alas, the years of delay have coincided with years of inflation, so there’s still not enough money to build the museum yet, but Austin said Tuesday that a $3 million fundraising campaign would soon begin.
Botetourt County already has a historical museum; it’s in an old house in Fincastle. This new facility would represent a major upgrade and put Botetourt in a league that other counties would envy. Many localities have history museums, but they are often small and poorly funded. We Virginians may love our history, but we don’t always love it with our wallets.
Austin’s idea for a larger museum was born out of a trip to Abingdon, where he visited the William King Museum of Art and was taken aback by what he saw — in a good way. That museum is kind of a big deal. It’s the only nationally accredited museum in Virginia west of Roanoke, for one thing. What caught Austin’s eye was how so much of Washington County’s early history had its roots in Botetourt County. William King was part of the wave of Scots-Irish immigrants who settled the Great Valley in the 1700s. His father, Thomas King, came first and settled in Fincastle. William King came later, in 1784, at the age of 15, and spent five years apprenticed to a merchant in Philadelphia. (See, here’s another Philadelphia connection for us; I elaborated on some of the others in a previous column.) By the 1790s, William King had moved farther south, setting himself up as a successful merchant in Washington County — so successful that when he died, he was a millionaire, and being a millionaire then was a lot harder than it is now.
As Austin toured the King Museum, he was struck by how many of the artifacts on display came from Botetourt County — many long rifles used on what was then the frontier came through furnaces and iron mines in Botetourt. The King Museum, Austin said, does a great job of telling how settlers pushed through Southwest Virginia and on into what is now Tennessee and Kentucky. Botetourt, he believed, needed something similar to tell its story — how pioneers first went through Fincastle for their land transactions before heading west. Austin sees a museum with traveling exhibits and a video display that shows how the county’s borders have changed over the years.
Botetourt may not seem that exciting now — the southern, most populous part of the county is essentially a bedroom community for Roanoke — but it has an exciting story to tell. Part of that is the story of colonizing the territory west of the Blue Ridge: When Botetourt was on the western edge of white settlement, it had a fort that George Washington once inspected, and that became a refuge for settlers during wars with the Native tribes. With its iron mines and furnaces, Botetourt was an early industrial center. In the 1850s, the James River and Kanawha Canal pushed as far west as Buchanan. We tend to forget about that canal project today, but at the time, it was the interstate highway of its day, an attempt to knit together the eastern part of the state with the Kanawha River in modern-day West Virginia that flowed west into the Ohio River. By the time the canal reached Buchanan, it was also obsolete, put out of business by a new technology: railroads. The Civil War touched Botetourt in a way it didn’t touch much of western Virginia. Whether what happened in Buchanan when Union Gen. David Hunter marched his men through should be considered a battle or a skirmish is a matter of definition; although it sure felt like a battle to the people of Buchanan at the time: Nearly 30 buildings burned.
Austin thinks Botetourt’s story hasn’t been well-told, and he has a more contemporary example to point to: Two years he sponsored a resolution to name part of U.S. 220 after Norvel Lee. “I knew nothing of Norvel Lee until I was asked to carry the resolution — what a great story,” he said. Lee was an Olympic gold medalist from Botetourt, a boxer who punched his way to victory in the 1952 Games in dramatic fashion. (He was a substitute for another boxer and had to lose 15 pounds in two weeks to get down to the proper weight to qualify.) Lee also figured in a landmark civil rights case that helped chip away at the legal foundations of segregation. Lee’s story went untold until Botetourt County author Ken Conklin wrote his book “Norvel.” Now, a historical marker to Lee stands alongside U.S. 220 north of Eagle Rock, and Lee’s boxing gloves are on display at the Botetourt County Historical Society.
That society has already amassed so many artifacts that only about half of them are on display in the old house that now functions as its museum. Among the highlights: an original courtroom witness chair from 1770 (along with a mannequin to represent the woman who was sentenced to dunking for being too loud), a piano that was brought to Botetourt on the canal and an early telephone exchange from Oriskany that shot out sparks during thunderstorms. “We’re very excited,” said Executive Director Lynsey Ally, at the prospect of having a proper museum facility in which to exhibit these things.
Austin sees this museum becoming a tourist attraction, something that would prompt the growth of a restaurant trade in Fincastle, a town where restaurants have never been able to stick for very long. “People get tired of eating at Applebee’s,” he said. (For the record, the nearest Applebee’s is 14 miles away, across the line in the Bonsack section of Roanoke County.) Austin’s passion has long been economic development. As a county supervisor, he was a main driver behind Botetourt’s sports complex, which, in season, draws travel teams for softball tournaments. As a delegate, he’s been involved in pushing a pilot program to expand the talent pipeline for health care workers in the Roanoke Valley. For him, this museum is an economic development project, just one that takes a different form.
Trumbo, who served on the committee charged with helping plan the facility before retiring to Williamsburg, puts it in a different context: “This isn’t just a museum. This is an attempt to provide an opportunity for Botetourt County to tell its heritage. People want to know who they are. It doesn’t matter who they are, what race they are — people want to know who they are.”
And a lot of people across the country have ties back to Botetourt County, whether they realize it or not. Tuesday’s announcement about Google came in a building at Greenfield that also hosts community college classes. On the wall outside was a map of Botetourt County — the same one that showed the county stretching all the way to the Mississippi. You can see it above or, as county officials were fond of saying this week, “you can Google it.”
