The Shenandoah County School Board made national news earlier this year when it voted to restore the names of Confederate generals to two schools. Two of our reporters teamed up to delve deeper into the controversy and the history behind it. Here's WMRA's Randi B. Hagi with part two of this series.
Why were Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary originally named after Confederate generals? For insight into that decision, we have to trace the county, state, and country's turbulent history back through time, from the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement.
As tensions escalated between the North and South after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Shenandoah County residents held a public meeting demanding a convention "with other slave states in an effort to gain concessions from the North," according to a Richmond newspaper from the time.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the U.S., declaring in December 1860 that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery" had released South Carolina from its obligation to the federal government. Virginia and the other southern states followed.
The majority of white men eligible to vote in Virginia – including in Shenandoah County – overwhelmingly approved secession in a statewide referendum. But 44 counties that did not want to go to war with the U.S. seceded again, thus forming the new state of West Virginia. That included Stonewall Jackson's hometown in Harrison County. Seven more counties were given the option to join. Some, like Hardy County, did – making Shenandoah the new border of the Commonwealth.
I spoke with Mike Scheibe, with the coalition that advocated to reinstate the Confederate names, about who was living here at that time.
MIKE SCHEIBE: Shenandoah County has never been wealthy … and it wasn't during the Civil War, either. I mean, farms were small. I mean, we're not looking at plantations and thousands and thousands of enslaved people here during the 1850s and 60s.
HAGI: … Yeah, I think from the records that I've seen … the biggest proportion of people who were ever enslaved in Shenandoah County was about 10% of the population, or just above that, about 10.5%. … It still matters very much to those people who were enslaved.
SCHEIBE: Oh absolutely … That history, I think, should be spotlighted somewhat and highlighted, and it seems like it is happening.
Census records show that in 1820, there were nearly 2,000 people enslaved in Shenandoah County – more than a tenth of the population. By 1860, the enslaved population had declined to 753 people, who were held in bondage by about 200 individual enslavers. The largest plantation owner was John G. Meem, a dry goods merchant from Lynchburg, who enslaved 36 people here.
In the following years, just over 1,200 white men from Shenandoah County would serve in the Confederate Army, whether by choice or conscription. Based on a review of service records, a quarter of them shared a surname with a local enslaver, or appeared to be that man themselves. Two hundred and sixty Shenandoans served directly under Jackson in the "Stonewall Brigade," which fought many of the bloodiest battles of the war. Turner Ashby commanded his cavalry alongside them in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862.
SCHEIBE: The I-81 corridor, if they didn't fight on the land around it, they marched on it or camped on it at some point. … So, you know, the amount of bloodshed here and the crazy numbers of battles and small skirmishes and things that happened, I think, is a lot more reason why people relate more to the Civil War.
That local history includes Stonewall's 1862 encampment and the later military actions on Rude's Hill – a property sitting a stone's throw from the modern-day high school. There's also Union General Phillip Sheridan's 1864 dispatch from Woodstock, in which he boasts about burning down farms throughout the valley.
After the war, the Reconstruction era in Virginia saw the implementation of the Underwood Constitution – which was adopted by a historic state legislature that, for a brief time, included African American delegates. That constitution established the state's public school system, which would remain segregated for nearly another century. By the 1920s, there were two public schools for Black children in the county – each with one room and one teacher to serve students from first through seventh grade.
ZACHARY HOTTEL: If you're an African American and you want to go to high school, initially you have to go to Manassas.
Zachary Hottel is an archivist at the Shenandoah County Library in Edinburg.
HOTTEL: Winchester and Harrisonburg build segregated high schools … but there's no transportation. So students are taking the Greyhound Bus to get there. Most of them, though, still are boarding, so that's an added expense. … It's not until World War II that there's an actual bus to take these students.
That's the Shenandoah County in which Laura Marquetta and Willie Mitchell grew up.
MARQUETTA MITCHELL: We did go to an all-Black, at that time, "all-colored" school here in Strasburg.
Mitchell chairs the Queen Street Sunset Hill Alumni group. She and her husband have researched and curated historical exhibits about the schools for local museums.
MARQUETTA MITCHELL: It was a one-room school, blackboard in the front. … There was a coal or wood-burning stove. … I really got involved with grammar and the English language. Dangling participles, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, loved it!
But change was on the horizon following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision – although it would take years of social, political, and court battles before the Mitchells and their peers across Virginia would set foot in formerly all-white schools.
Special thanks to the Massanutten Regional Library, Shenandoah County Library, and Shenandoah County Public Schools for their archives and assistance. This series referenced the following research materials:
Online resources
- Ancestry's U.S. Census records
- Encyclopedia Virginia
- Library of Congress census maps
- Shenandoah County Library's Shenandoah Voices Oral History Collection
- VMI's Stonewall Jackson Papers collection
- West Virginia Archives and History's "A State of Convenience: The Creation of West Virginia" collection
Books
- "A History of Shenandoah County," John M. Wayland, 1927
- "Echoes of Shenandoah," Shenandoah County Retired Teachers Association, 1977
- "Jacksonian Heritage" 1960 yearbook
- "Life and Letters of 'Stonewall' Jackson by his wife," Mary Anna Jackson, 1892
- "Reflections : early schools of Shenandoah County, Virginia," Shenandoah County Historical Society, 1995
- "Schools in New Market, Shenandoah County, Virginia," Nancy Branner Stewart, 1992
- "Shenandoah County in the Civil War," Richard B. Kleese, 1992
- "Shenandoah County Men in Gray," Thomas M. Spratt, 1992
Publication and government archives
- New York Times archives
- U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia records
- Shenandoah County School Board minutes
- Shenandoah Herald archives
- Shenandoah Valley archives
