Historical Markers in Virginia, Then and Now

Within that pile full of 100-year-old sheet music (which I wrote about here and here), there was one misfit: a yellowed 124-page, soft-cover book called the Virginia Highway Historical Markers:


It was published in 1930 to list all of the state's historical markers by county, accompanied by a history and overview of each county, interspersed with photos and paid ads for tourist attractions and hotels, meant to appeal to a new audience: people traveling by car. 


The markers are indexed by proper names used in the marker text. That index specifically mentions that it does not include names that are used "with such frequency throughout the book that the reason for not including them in the index will be obvious to the reader. Among these proper names omitted are the following: Virginia, America. United States, English, French, German, Irish, Scotch-Irish, Indian, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Civil War, War Between the States, Revolutionary War, Confederate, Union, Federal, North, South, etc."

The words "African" or "Negro" are not mentioned on that list of too-often-used names, yet are not listed in the index either. The name Nat Turner is not in the index. The words "slave" and "slavery" (though admittedly not proper names) are not included either.

It's interesting that "Indian" was too common to include in the list of words indexed. That makes it difficult to see how thorough the index is on that subject. I checked for the name Powhatan and found that there's a county named after the chief and he's mentioned a few times in the history paragraphs, but is nowhere mentioned in the markers. While looking for that, I saw the names of a couple of other tribes (nine other counties are named for tribes), but from what I could see, the markers are very light on historical detail about tribal history.

Pocahantas, of course, is indexed more often (12 times), but seems to be mentioned in only one marker, which reads:

At the mouth of this stream Captain John Smith in 1608 found an Indian "King's house" called "Petomek." The river takes its name from this. Here the Indian Princess, Pocahantas, was kidnapped by the English in June, 1612.

On page 143 in the section about the town of Petersburg in Dinwiddie County, it notes Petersburg is near the spot where Pocahantas "saved the life of Captain John Smith"... but there's no marker for that event.

As far as I could tell from looking through the book, there were no black people in Virginia in 1930 and slavery never existed. There was no marker noting the spot where the first Africans were brought to shore in Virginia in 1619. Such a marker was finally erected in 1994, and was moved to a more accurate location in 2015:


Old Point Comfort and Fort Monroe, the site of the landing and the relocated marker, does make an appearance on page 123 of the 1930 book, but it's only as a spot of later military significance and accomplishment. (Oh, and as a chance to mention that Jefferson Davis was held prisoner there for two years after the Civil War, including which cell he was in and where his window can still be seen.)

Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion finally got a marker in 1991 in Southampton County:


I wonder how many other markers about the history of Virginia's native and African-descended people have been erected since this book was published? How many are still missing?