Alta Lee (later Newman), at her parents' Alta Lee Dairy. CREDIT: Chantilly History Project Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.
From the podium of a historic library in Leesburg, Virginia, recently, two Center for Mason Legacies student researchers showed archival images typifying the region’s "horse country" affluence: valuable thoroughbreds and cultured gardens being enjoyed by polished elites. Yet others in the photographs, they noted, go unnamed in captions or library data. These anonymous Black grooms and gardeners and the local communities they came from formed the focus of the afternoon talk, held at the the Thomas Balch Library on December 8, 2024.
In the summer 2024 project they were presenting, overseen by CML in collaboration with the Friends of the Library’s Black History Committee, doctoral student Annabelle Spencer and recent graduate Shemika Curvey created Spatializing Black Stories: Geographies of Community in Loudoun County, Virginia, a visually rich "story map.” Before a Balch Library audience of more than 60 (online and in person), they discussed their focus on two predominantly Black Loudoun County communities as exemplars of the many forms of "placemaking" Black Virginians pursued across the twentieth century, despite obstacles placed in their way: St. Louis, near Middleburg, and the town of Willard, on the Fairfax County line.
Placemaking, Spencer said, is "the endowing of meaning at a location," turning spaces into "geographies," and "geography into an heirloom," through owning land and homes and establishing businesses and social and worship communities that can be passed to future generations. For St. Louis, the research helps resurrect a well deserved reputation for Black equestrian and agricultural expertise that helped build the county’s renown. In the case of Willard, deemed worthy of a U.S. post office in 1900 but razed in 1958 for Dulles Airport, nearby White residents reaped financial windfalls from the airport’s arrival even as the government displaced and erased the generational wealth of local Black families through low-balled eminent-domain payouts.
These are stories often spoken of locally but only recently recognized in public and academic accounts. Several in the Balch audience helped promote the research, therefore. In keeping with CML methodology for recovering Black historical narratives, Spencer and Curvey consulted not just scholarly works and historic documents from the Balch, Smithsonian and other archives, but also artifacts and knowledge shared by those from the communities and their descendants. Local collectors and chroniclers shared photographs, documents, artifacts and personal recollections for the project. One former resident of Willard and active community historian, Louis Jett, took the podium following the student presenters to recount stories and share form the thick binders he’s filled with family photos, news articles and other documents that chronicle Willard’s existence and erasure.
CML’s community-based approach even enabled Spencer and Curvey to match actual names to unnamed figures from the archive. One unidentified man Spencer came across in a Smithsonian photo, called just “gardener” by archivists, was immediately recognized by Curvey as a relative of one of her oral history subjects. “That's a pattern," Spencer said of the recurrent anonymity for Black figures. "The metadata ... is sometimes not curious."
This is how CML’s combination of digital, geospatial and archival research is designed to work, Director George Oberle told the audience. The researchers’ discoveries demonstrate that stories become "lost" not through "a paucity of resources available that document the Black community," but rather, “a choice not to recognize them."
The students asked audience members to further assist in filling in gaps by getting in touch if they recognized anyone shown. They soon did. In a slide image of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hosting the president of Pakistan at her Wexford estate, both sat horseback beside an unnamed groom on foot, his back to the camera. Two audience members approached Spencer after the talk to identify him as David Lloyd, a forebear of someone they knew.
CML Associate Director Wendi Manuel-Scott emphasized that the work validates often unrecognized Black contributions. “Our work as historians, and working with our students, is not to tell a story of people just ‘oppressed,’” she said in her introduction, “but to tell the story of people who resist, people who thrive, who collectively invest in the next generation.”
The program, which can be viewed online here, was supported by grants from the African American Community Alliance and the Van Huyck Chockley Family Foundation.
December 12, 2024