THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510190343
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
LENGTH: Short : 34 lines
VIRGINIA LANDMARKS OF BLACK HISTORY
Sites on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places
EDITED BY CALDER LOTH
University Press of Virginia. $40, $18.95 paper.
Sixty-four Virginia sites with significant connections to black history are profiled in this book. Among them are schools like Belmead, also known as St. Emma's Military Academy, in Powhatan County, which was founded in 1895, and which graduated about 10,000 young black men in its 77 years of existence. The book also includes colleges like Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), churches and the birthplaces of notable men and women. Occasionally there are poignant reminders of the nation's ignoble past, as in the photographs of slave cabins at Ben Venue or Berry Hill, or the Franklin and Armfield office on Duke Street in Alexandria. (Franklin and Armfield was a slave-trading firm, the largest, according to editor Calder Loth, in the antebellum South from 1828-1836.) The property, which included a townhouse - now used for offices - and slaveholding pens, remained in the hands of slave traders until 1861. by CNB