September 21, 2013

September 21, 2013

We drove an hour this morning arriving at Booker T Washington National Monument in southwest Virginia. By luck we arrived for their annual Harvest Festival and the park is filled with volunteers in period costume. While the docents were setting up we looked around the tiny museum. We met Booker before at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. A hundred years ago Booker was the most famous and influential black man in the nation. He believed former slaves needed to get educated and become financially independent. Respect will follow. That philosophy, which applies to all people, seems to have been lost today.

Booker was born on this farm as one of a dozen slaves. It was mostly a subsistence farm where only enough tobacco was grown as a cash crop to buy what couldn’t be grown or made locally. We walked around the farm talking to the volunteers. Their enthusiasm made this living history park quite interesting.  

After an hour we drove east to Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. This is the famous site where Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to Grant essentially ending the Civil War. The hamlet of Appomattox has been preserved, as it would have looked on April 9, 1865. We first stop in the courthouse building Visitor Center to watch two movies and peruse the exhibits containing lots of artifacts from the surrender. We then listened to a living history talk and walked through the old buildings. The surrender was negotiated in the McLean House. Ironically, McLean’s previous home was caught up in the first battle of the War in Manassas. He moved his family here to escape the war. Instead it followed him here.