ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996 TAG: 9602270025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DON'T KNOW much about history?
There are better ways to learn - safer, too, especially in heavy traffic - than to stop your car to examine the hundreds of historic signs that dot Virginia's roadsides.
Even so, we like those signs, and the colorful stories they tell of old battles and settlements, heroes and inhabitants, farms and homes that have long since disappeared from view. They mark telling milestones from a distant past when a place tended to be a more distinct thing. They can evoke memories for an area's old-timers, and insights for newcomers and travelers.
So kudos to the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors for recently pledging funds to help replace several such signs in the New River Valley that have been stolen or destroyed, as well as some found to be historically incomplete and in need of revision.
The project has been launched by the state's Department of Historic Resources. It is seeking a federal grant and matching local funds to replace some 360 historic roadside markers statewide that are either missing or that need to be updated to reflect recent research on the subjects addressed in the signs.
The updates, assures John Salmon, a staff historian with the state department, are not to make the stories more politically correct, but to fill them out with a fuller context of information.
The state stopped public funding for the signs in 1976 - a shame since development keeps changing Virginia's historic landscape. (As one example, there's that Wal-Mal superstore being planned on the site next to George Washington's boyhood home in Stafford County.)
In Western Virginia, Montgomery County is one of several growing jurisdictions that are rich with history. Roadside reminders of it shouldn't go the way of Burma Shave and "Diversity Enriches" signs.
LENGTH: Short : 41 linesby CNB