Small Towns West and North of Richmond VA

 

When most travelers think of Virginia, the places that first pop to mind are suburban Washington, DC, the Chesapeake Bay, and Virginia Beach. Devotees might pay visits to  Civil War battlefields,* presidential homes (Monticello and Mt. Vernon top the list),  and specialty whiskey tours in the Appalachians. But how many think of Goochland County? Where you ask? Exactly!

 

Tuckahoe Plantation Exterior

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interior

Interior

 

 

Mahala Boyd, enslaved at Tuckahoe

Where the enslaved quarters were located

 

Recently we visited some friends living near Richmond. Virginia’s capital has the usual sprawl and ring roads, but it’s amazing how quickly the pace slows when you leave it. We stayed at a Vrbo in Tuckahoe on Richmond’s western edge booked by our friends. We were shocked when we drove down a one-mile dirt lane to encounter an elegant white mansion. Tuckahoe Plantation was the childhood home of Thomas Jefferson. It was owned by the Randolph family but when William Randolph III died in 1745- one year after his wife- an agreed upon codicil in Randolph’s will made Peter Jackson the caretaker of his three children. (Easily done, as Peter’s wife was a Randolph.) Young Thomas spent ages 2-9 at Tuckahoe and, according to legend, developed distaste for slavery there. (That might be apocryphal given that TJ did precious little to free enslaved people.) For the record, we didn’t stay in the plantation house; we bedded in a farm house a few hundred yards away, but we got a private tour of the house with the James River running within sight of the back door.

 

The town of Tuckahoe was six miles away, near the campus of the University of Richmond. The town is prim and neat and its population of 49,000 is twice as large as all of Goochland County. Our friends lived in Manakin-Sabot, which has 4,634 people–if you can find them. Some maps list them as separate villages and our GPS didn’t recognize either until we put in Richmond in the address for our friends’ road. The county seat is Goochland, but GPS has trouble with it as well unless you ask for Goochland Courthouse (pop. 1,301), which is distinct from Goochland or Goochland Maidens! 

 

 

You are in horse country in Goochland County and many of the others heading north toward Front Royal and Winchester. We’re talking miles and miles of white fences to contain horses. If you had a lumber monopoly, you’d be able to buy New England and lease it to Canada. As for the livestock, we’re not talking heavy Percherons, Clydesdales, or swaybacked nags. These well-groomed beasties are thoroughbreds, riding horses, and polo ponies.

 

Our original homeward plan was to keeping going west, perhaps stop in Charlottesville, and then decide whether to follow the Skyline Drive or proceed to I-81N. Rain changed our decision–the Skyline Drive’s views would be limited and 81 is a high-speed curtain of trucks–so we decided to meander on some backroads. As for the towns of Goochland County, there pretty much aren’t any! Just dots of the map with names like Crozier, Gum Spring, Oilville, Fork Union, and Kent’s Store. 

 

 

 

As we drove west and north of Richmond, we witnessed Virginia’s contrasts. Make no mistake, horse country is beautiful and you’ll see lots of Virginia’s signature architecture, large white homes with second-story front-facing verandahs upon which no foot ever trod. You’ll also see rural life many steps down from McMansions. Local businesses tend to be repair shops, farmstands, antique shops, fabricators, and visitor centers to tell you what you can do in the area. Hint: If you’re enjoying the scenery and tranquil pace of life, you’re already doing what you can do there!

 

Unless you wish to veer east again to Culpepper or forge northward toward Front Royal, there’s not much in the way of a full-services town. Front Royal is generally considered a supply center for the Skyline Drive, the Appalachian Trail, or the Shenandoah Valley, though it’s a fairly sleepy place and many people push northeast to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Since those two towns sort of defined the southwestern edge of our childhood explorations we headed north to Winchester, grabbed some food, connected with Route 81, and joined the trucks trekking northward. But I’ll say it again, Virginia horse country is mighty pretty–even in the rain. 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

 

* Virginia is littered with Civil War sites, so it scarcely matters which part you visit.

 

 

 

 

 

A Call to Spy: Remarkable Women, Flat Film

 

 

 

A Call to Spy (2020)

Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher

IFC Films, 124 minutes, PG-13 (war violence)

★★★

 

A Call to Spy (incompletely) tells the story of two unsung heroes of World War II: Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) and Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte).

 

Many Americans assume that World War II began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Europeans, Russians, and the Chinese know it started two years earlier. By 1940, the situation was dire, with much of Europe and North Africa occupied (or controlled) by fascist Germany or Italy and North Africa indirectly so. In Europe, only Britain stood against fascism and suffered near-constant bombing by the German Luftwaffe.

 

Virginia Hall grew up amidst gentility in Virginia and yearned to be a diplomat. She had three strikes against her; she was a woman, she lost her left leg in a hunting accident in 1933, and she did not suffer fools gladly. After being disqualified for serious work, Hall made her way to Britain and was accepted in Winston Churchill’s SOE (Special Operations Executive). Because of her language skills, she was sent into Vichy, France,* to set up networks, report on German activity, recruit members of the French Resistance, and organize sabotage raids. There was scarcely time to train agents like Hall; as late as 1943, the average lifespan for spies was just six weeks.

 

Noor’s story is woven into Hall’s though the two shared only the fact that they were part of SOE Section F headed by Vera Atkins (Stana Katic). Noor, was born in Moscow to an Indian father and American mother, was a Sufi Muslim pacifist, a poet, a talented musician, and happened to be good with electronics. She was recruited to be a radio operator. If anything, she was in more danger than Hall as she and her 34-pound transmitter had to change locations constantly to keep ahead of Nazi detectors. Unlike Hall, she would be captured, taken to Dachau, and executed.

 

That could have been Hall’s fate as well. Infamous Nazi monster Klaus Barbie (Marc Rissman) considered her the most dangerous spy of the war and obsessed with trying to capture and torture her. Hall (1906-82) operated under code names such as Marie and Diane had an uncanny abilities to organize, recognize potential allies, disguise herself, and avoid capture. She also had a remarkable ability to tolerate pain. Few knew she was missing a leg and, in her one major slip-up of trusting Father Robert Alesch (Joe Doyle), a double agent, got out of Germany ahead of Barbie’s pursuit by walking across the snow-covered Pyrenees into Spain and making her way to Portugal for transport back to England. (Those who knew often heard her joke about “Cuthbert,” her name for the leather-and-steel prosthetic she wore.) She returned to France in 1944, disguised as an old woman after having her teeth ground down and stained. This time she was a radio operator and still avoided capture while collecting vital information in advance of D-Day.

 

U.S. General William Donovan recommended her for a Distinguished Service Cross to go with her Croix du guerre and an MBE. He vouched for her when she sought to join the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency after the war. Alas, her CIA career was marked by extreme sexism and was an unhappy one. To this day, Hall’s name is revered in France and nearly forgotten in the United States.

 

Both Hall and Noor deserve to be known. Alas, A Call to Spy serves only as an  introduction.  Even if you are not a big reader, pick up Sonia Purcell’s ironically named A Woman of No Importance to learn about Hall–even if you merely skim it. The movie leaves out so much, including her family’s disapproval and her marriage to French agent Paul Guillot, though he was 8 years younger and 6 inches shorter than she. The film provides enough to imagine Hall’s gallantry, but not the scope of the prison breaks, sabotage, and smuggling airmen and POW escapees out of France. Overall, the film is flat and lacks sparks.

 

I suspect Hall’s story was conflated with that of Noor to add notes of political correctness to the film. There was no need to do so. Almost no one saw this film, and Noor bloody well deserves a film of her own!

 

Rob Weir

 

*When France fell in 1940, it was divided into two zones, one controlled by the Nazis directly from Paris, and a southern collaborationist government from Vichy. Hall operated as “Marie” in Lyon (Vichy zone).

The Jackal's Mistress: Chris Bohjalian's Novel of the Waning Confederacy

 

 

 

The Jackal’s Mistress (2025)

By Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 308 pages.

★★★★

 

The Civil War is the most written about subject in American history, hence it’s hardly surprising to see novelists try their hand. Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian is the latest. That surprised me, but he seldom repeats himself.

 

This review is headed by something I saw at the Valentine Museum in Richmond as I was reading Bohjalian: the remains of a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. It was spray-painted and pulled from its base on Monument Avenue in 2020, a leafy street that used to be lined with “heroes” of the Confederacy before anger over police killings of African Americans led young people to counterattack symbols of the Lost Cause. Romanticism of a noble experiment prevailed throughout the South for a century and a half after the Civil War ended. It was as if slavery had nothing to do with the conflict, which just happens to be the biggest load of horse exhaust in our history. The second is that Confederates were gallant and gentlemanly.

 

The Jackal’s Mistress takes us to the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, where Union generals such as Sheridan and Hunter conducted a scorched earth policy to break the Confederacy. Forgotten is that Confederacy also looted the region, especially General Jubal Early and the brutal John Mosby and his gang-like “rangers.” Early and Mosby commandeered slaves, confiscated farm animals, raided food larders, and summarily hanged “traitors.” By 1864, though, Grant was nearing Richmond and the Confederacy’s only hope was that Lincoln would lose reelection and a favorable peace could be negotiated. That’s not what happened.

 

Bohjalian reminds us that people die and are maimed until the ink is dry on the surrender papers. Maiming is the fate of Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the 11^th Vermont regiment. As his troops regrouped, he was hit so badly that he lost two fingers and a leg. He lost so much blood that it was near-certain he’d die. His comrades left him in an abandoned house near Berryville, Virginia, with minimal supplies because any attempt to move him behind Union lines would kill him.

 

Instead, an elderly freeman named Joseph and his wife Sally discover Weybridge. They  inform Libby Steadman, their white employer who lives with her younger niece Jubilee, and shares work, food, and occasional shelter with Joseph and Sally. Her husband Peter, last she heard, was wounded and in a Union POW camp in Ohio. When Joseph kills Libby’s potential rapist–probably one of Mosby’s Rangers–Libby must dispose of the body. Libby has been lucky in one respect; she runs a mill necessary to the Confederacy, but she must maintain the fiction that Joseph and Sally are her slaves. Libby hates the “blue-bellies” from the North, but decides to nurse Weybridge solely on the hope that some Yankee woman might have done the same for Peter. But Libby has a house full of trouble. If Mosby or Early find out about the dead attacker or that she’s hiding Weybridge, the entire makeshift household will be a postmortem one. 

 

What could go wrong? All Libby needs are guns and ammunition for protection, a doctor to bribe into silence, ways to prevent anyone from discovering Weybridge, unavailable medicines, whiskey to sterilize his wound, protein to help him regain strength, ways to keep neighbors from talking, and more luck than a riverboat gambler.

 

Do you suspect a potential romance? The discovery of shared humanity and mutual understanding? Forgive and forget? Don’t be so sure! Jubilee is so contemptuous of their Union patient that she dubs him “Jackal,” though she’s intrigued that he was a professor at Middlebury College before the war and shares the household contempt for slavery. (Peter Steadman freed Joseph and Sally before the war.) Besides, Weybridge has a wife and two sons back in Vermont. Lots of things happen, but not aways in predictable ways. The Jackal’s Mistress is a veritable page-turner that is touching, thrilling, tragic, and tense.

 

Several final notes. First, Bohjalian based his tale on the true-life tales of Lt. Henry Bedell of Westfield, Vermont, and Bettie Van Metre of Virginia, her imprisoned husband James, and her black friends Ginny and Dick Runner. Second, Berryville is about 20 miles from the Union stronghold of Harper’s Ferry, an indication of how close the Confederacy was to defeat. Finally, the Confederacy raided my Pennsylvania hometown three times and burned it in 1864. Not so gentlemanly!*

 

Rob Weir  

 

* One of Bohjalian’s characters provides a perfect postscript from 1937. Commenting on Richmond’s statue of J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue she says, “… it’s hollow…. I find that telling. A hollow statue for a hollow cause.”