BOTETOURT, Va. (WDBJ) – Botetourt’s Black history dates back more than 250 years. Most of it has gone untold for decades.
“I think it’s just a part of history that is often times overlooked,” said Lynsey Allie, Executive Director of the Botetourt Historical Society.
Allie curated an interactive exhibit called “Unspoken Names” at the Botetourt County Historical Museum that honors the enslaved. Some of the names include men and women who were slaves on the Greenfield Plantation in Daleville.
“So we have the one container here that is the ”unspoken”, and so most of the names currently are in there. Folks that want to come by and participate, they’re invited to reach in to the “unspoken” container, take a name out, read it out loud as an act of acknowledgement, and put it in the “remembered” container that we have here,” Allie said.
All the names were only found in court records and family bibles.
“I mean, that’s the only record that these people ever existed,” Allie said.
“Finding What Has Been Lost” is another exhibit inside the museum that includes a slideshow of photos during the segregation era, put together by a number of contributors. It shows photos of Black families in Fincastle and Buchanan, to students in Blue Ridge and those who attended Academy Hill in 1936 and more.
The museum also highlights Pleasant Richardson, a runaway slave from Botetourt who joined the union army and fought in the civil war; his medal hangs on the wall. It also shines a light on Olympic Boxer, Norvel Lee from Eagle Rock.
“A lot of parts of history are really important and people need to know about them,” Allie said.
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