Interested in commercial fishing techniques used in Virginia’s Northern Neck around the turn of the 20th century? Take a look through the Northumberland County circuit court records.

Around 1895, Earnest Krentz and Lanius B. Williams entered into a partnership to harvest fish from the Potomac River near Hack Creek using fish traps or weirs. Krentz supplied the equipment and Williams constructed and managed the traps. Following Krentz’s death in 1900, his widow, Dolly, contracted with another person to use the equipment, and conflict arose between her and Williams over who controlled the sites that had been used while Earnest lived. She claimed that the two sites were owned by the partnership and should be divided between them. Williams countered that he alone was entitled to both locations. In the spring of 1901, Dolly sued Williams (Northumberland County Chancery Cause 1902-010, Dolly Krentz, widow, etc. vs. Lanius B. Williams) on the chancery side of the Northumberland County circuit court to prevent him from interfering with her use of the most profitable spot. After hearing from both sides and reviewing the evidence, the judge ultimately sided with Williams and dismissed Dolly’s suit.

Out of the testimony and exhibits in this suit, a detailed depiction emerges of the equipment, terms, construction designs, and customs surrounding the use of fish traps in this area. For instance, when an individual chose a site for his weir, he installed a pole at the spot and attached a green bush to the top of it to indicate that he intended to occupy that particular location. After “bushing a stand,” custom demanded that other fishermen place their traps no closer than roughly 1,200 yards. Additionally, diagrams submitted as evidence in this case show the locations of other traps in that portion of the river and list their owners’ names.

The Northumberland County Chancery Causes, 1759-1912 (bulk 1786-1912), join the growing list of localities whose chancery causes have been digitized and made available on the Chancery Records Index through the Library’s innovative Circuit Court Records Preservation Program (CCRP).

-Sam Walters, Local Records Archivist

The final images from the Augusta County chancery causes are now available on the Library of Virginia’s Chancery Records Index. With this addition, all Augusta County chancery causes covering the time period from 1746 to 1912 can be viewed online—a  total of 10,268 suits and 878,490 images.  The collection is one of the most significant collections of historic legal records in the nation.  From 1745 to 1770, the boundaries of Augusta County encompassed most of western Virginia and what became the states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio, and parts of present-day Pennsylvania as far north as Pittsburgh. The Augusta County chancery causes are the most voluminous of any locality in Virginia and are one of the longest and most complete continuous collections of chancery records of any locality in the country.  Cases are also included from the Staunton Superior Court of Chancery, with a jurisdiction of over 28 localities, from 1802 to 1831.

Following are a few suits of interest found in this latest addition of Augusta County’s equity suits. Augusta County Chancery Cause 1818-099 is a dispute over the estate of John Edmondson that included numerous slaves. The suit contains a chart documenting the hiring out of slaves owned by Edmondson. Administrator of Andrew Moore vs. Representatives of John Stuart, etc., 1845-015, gives some perspective on the ways in which national events impacted the lives of Virginians. The suit documents the negative effect on property values in western Virginia  resulting from the opening up of five million acres of land  by the Louisiana Purchase.

Augusta County Chancery Cause 1855-034 concerns bounty land for soldiers who served in the French and Indian War. During that war, George Washington led a regiment of Virginia soldiers in the Battle of the Great Meadows, also known as the Battle of Fort Necessity. After the battle, his soldiers were given a land grant that would become known as the Savage Grant, named after Virginia Governor John Savage who made the grant legal. In 1772, the interested parties were supposed to meet to divide and distribute the land. Very few of the recipients actually inhabited the land—they either sold the land to third parties or the property reverted due to lack of improvements to the land. The chancery cause involves dozens of descendants of the French and Indian War veterans who claimed their ancestors never received the land to which they were entitled.

Receivers of Nicholas C. Kinney, etc. vs. Administrator of Jeremiah Aude, etc., 1857-082, contains considerable detail about the relatives of a British immigrant named Jeremiah Aude. Though a substantial owner of real and personal property in Augusta County near present-day Waynesboro, Aude died without a will.  His closest remaining relatives all lived in Great Britain. They made claims to his property in the United States, but in order to acquire the property they had to prove they were related to Aude and become United States citizens. Exhibits filed in the suit include numerous certificates of burials, marriages, and baptisms dating back to the 1700s copied from church registers in England.  Also included is a genealogical chart illustrating the individual heirs’ relationships to Aude.

The Augusta County Chancery Causes, 1746-1912, scanning project was funded by the Circuit Court Records Preservation Program and a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

To learn more about the Augusta County chancery collection, see these previous blog posts.

In November of 1860, executor William F. Smith was in a pickle.  Charged with settling the estate of Elizabeth P. Via of Augusta County, he had recently been a defendant in both a chancery and a judgment suit from seven of Via’s heirs that challenged the validity of her will.  The heirs objected to the provisions that Via made for her slaves, namely that they all be emancipated.  Additionally, she left $4,000 to transport them to a free state and set them up in homes there.  The remainder of her estate was to be distributed amongst Via’s heirs who were not pleased by this and thought it in their best interest to have the will invalidated so that they could get everything, including the slaves that were left at Via’s death.  The will was upheld, however, and then it was time for executor Smith to get on with the business of carrying out Via’s wishes.  But there were some questions that he struggled to answer about his job as executor.

At issue were several points.  Did children born since Via’s death have an interest in the money left to the slaves?  What should happen to the residue of the $4,000 after the will’s provisions were carried out?  How should title to any house or land purchased for the emancipated slaves be done?  The slaves had been hired out since 1859 due to the dispute over the will, so did the money earned by their hire belong now to them or to the estate?  Smith sought the court’s guidance on how to answer these thorny questions and fulfill his duties as executor.  He then filed accounts with the chancery suit to prove that he had properly carried out his tasks.

Included in the accounts is a two-page document written by Smith titled “Account for removing and settling slaves in a free state.”  Beginning 28 January 1861, and ending 7 February of the same year, this master account reads like a travel journal of Smith’s trip to Columbus, Ohio, with his assistant, Mr. Larew, and Via’s 18 newly emancipated slaves.  Line by line, one can follow the party as they get train tickets and meals in Staunton, look at land in Franklin County, Ohio, buy the land and have it surveyed, purchase livestock and household goods, and finally return home to Staunton via train and omnibus.  Accompanying this master account are individual vouchers for goods or services provided that reveal more details about the items purchased to set up the farm and housekeeping in Ohio.  Included in other accounts are receipts for registering Via’s former slaves as free negroes in Augusta County prior to their departure for Ohio.  One of the final items on the master account is $14.00 for “cash paid negroes,” Via’s final bequest for their new life of freedom.

Through the lens of estate accounts, this chancery suit offers a rare glimpse of what followed emancipation.  It is common enough to find evidence of slaves freed in deeds and wills, but what happened after that is usually a mystery, especially if the freed persons then left the state.  The Franklin County, Ohio, Recorder’s Office has digitized their early deeds, and the deed for the sale of 110 4/10 acres of land from Edwin W. Warren to Elizabeth Jane and others (Elizabeth P. Via’s negroes) can be uncovered easily enough.  What happened to these eighteen people after 1861?  Did they stay together on their new land in Ohio?  Did they drift apart to other parts of Ohio or the country?  Did any of them return to Virginia after the Civil War?  This the records do not show.

Read the entire chancery suits that are filed together on the Chancery Records Index as Augusta County 1860-016, James W. Bishop, etc. vs. Administrator of Elizabeth P. Via, etc. and Executor of Elizabeth P. Via vs. James W. Bishop.  The judgment that decided Via’s will, James W. Bishop, etc. vs. William F. Smith, Exr. of Elizabeth P. Via, ended June 1860, is at the Augusta County courthouse; although a copy of the final order was used as evidence in the chancery suit.

-Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce that digital images from the Prince George County chancery causes digitization project are now available on the Chancery Records Index. Both the images and the index cover the years 1809-1917 and are available to researchers on the LVA’s Virginia Memory site. 

The following are a few suits of interest found in the newly available Prince George County chancery digital images.  Richard W. Backus vs. Admr. of John B. Williams, etc., 1837-003, references the postponement of the sale of a slave named Ursa because she was ill. Divorce suit 1875-001, David Harrison vs. Eliza A. Harrison, includes a letter from the court clerk referencing the destruction of a marriage license by the “Raiders” during the Civil War. Another divorce suit, Bettie Hays vs. William Hays, 1908-003 provides detailed testimony given by the plaintiff of spousal abuse by her husband. (These divorce cases join one already mentioned here on Out of the Box – a divorce in which the husband claimed that the child his wife gave birth to could not possibly be his.) In chancery cause 1916-023, Cubit Stith vs. Lucy Jackson, etc., Cubit Stith describes himself as an uneducated colored man who was born a slave. He and his daughter, Lucy Jackson, were in a bitter dispute for control of a piece of property that had recently increased in value due to DuPont locating a plant near it. Stith stated that Jackson “cursed him and used abuse too foul to repeat” when he asked her to turn over the deed for the property and that she talked “about selling the property and [threatened] to turn him out of the said property as well as her mother, which would leave them homeless in their old age.”

The Library of Virginia, in partnership with the Scott County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, is pleased to announce that digitization of Scott County’s historic chancery causes is now complete. Both the index and images are available to researchers via the Chancery Records Index on the LVA’s Virginia Memory site.

The Scott County chancery collection covers the years 1816 through 1942 (with digital images posted through 1912). The chancery, or equity cases, are a valuable source of local, state, social, and legal history and serve as a primary source for understanding a locality’s history. They often contain correspondence, property lists (including slaves), lists of heirs, and vital statistics that reveal detailed stories that help tell the story of Virginia. Cases contain useful biographical, genealogical, and historical information and document a broad spectrum of citizens—rich and poor, black and white, slave and free.

Chancery Cause 1873-034, Sampson S. Robinett vs. Samuel Babb, etc., helps document post-Civil War relations as it brings to light lingering bitterness between pro-Union and pro-Confederacy residents living together in Scott. In chancery cause 1897-057, Town of Gate City vs. Col. J. B. Richmond, the city attempted to stop a citizen from blocking what it considered a public road. A large map of Gate City was used as an exhibit. Chancery Cause 1901-058 reveals the religious beliefs of the members of the Regular Primitive Baptist Church of Copper Creek who split into two factions over the doctrine of absolute predestination. Cases are often humorous, such as chancery cause 1898-031, a divorce case highlighting a “knocking spirit” – a ghostly disturbance that the defendant’s counsel suggested was used to scare his client.

The Scott County Chancery Causes, 1816-1912, join the growing list of localities whose chancery causes have been preserved and made available through the Library’s innovative Circuit Court Records Preservation Program (CCRP). The CCRP, funded through a $1.50 of the clerk’s recordation fee, is committed to efforts, like the Scott County chancery causes digitization project, that preserve and make accessible permanent circuit court records. Unfortunately, the downturn in the real estate market and the General Assembly’s diversion of CCRP funds have negatively impacted the CCRP’s budget in recent years and slowed the pace of digital chancery projects. The projects remain a high priority for the agency and it is hoped that the initiative can be resumed in full when the economy and the agency’s budget situation improve.

-Sam Walters, Local Records Archivist

“It was a hot summer day on August 5, 1865, when George Kiner and Diana Bumgardner arrived at the courthouse in Augusta County, Virginia, to apply for a marriage license. They brought with them an order from Capt. John Collins, Provost Marshall, directing the court to issue the license as ‘they being in all respects entitled to such license.’ While there were other couples that day applying for marriage licenses, George and Diana were the only couple with such an order. This was indeed a historical event as they were the first African American couple to be issued a marriage license in Augusta County.”

-African American Marriage Index 1865-1899, Augusta County, Virginia

At first glance the story of George Kiner and Diana Bumgardner is one of love triumphing over the tragedies of slavery and war. But documents found in the Augusta County Chancery Causes reveal not a lovely wedding born of true love, but a shotgun affair with a groom forced to the altar at gunpoint. In his bill for divorce filed in the Augusta County courts in February 1866, George Coiner (the predominant spelling in court documents was Coiner, but Kiner and Koiner were also used) painted a less than idealistic picture of his wedding day. George Coiner, a former slave, was working in a field when two armed soldiers, one white and the other black, came to arrest him and forcibly carry him off to Staunton. Without giving him time to protest or argue, George Coiner was arraigned before General Isaac Duval’s forces on the complaint of Dinah Bumgardner, a former slave of Frank Strouse.

In her own bill for divorce filed in 1868, Dinah, or Diana Kiner as she is named in her divorce suit, claimed that George seduced her with the promise of marriage and had “carnal intercourse” with her that resulted in a pregnancy. When he was deposed, Dinah’s former owner backed up her allegations stating that George admitted to sleeping with Dinah in March of that year, but George argued that he only knew of Dinah because of frequent visits to see his nephew, another member of the Strouse household. George repeatedly affirmed that “he never had carnal knowledge of her person… nor did he ever use any language toward her tending to express any passion or partiality for her.”

Coiner was not afforded an investigation or an opportunity to disprove Dinah’s claims but “was condemned unheard and informed that unless he married her forthwith, he would be sent off to Richmond the next morning.” Not wanting to risk being arrested and carried off by strangers, George “was obliged to yield to the superior power of those who had possession of him, and a license was obtained, and he was compelled, at the point of the bayonet, to submit to the marriage, though it was in opposition to all his wishes.” One of the officers told George “not to be uneasy, for as soon as the ceremony was over, he could leave her.” Which was exactly what George did, claiming that Dinah was a “woman of loose morals” and “little better than a common strumpet.”

In 1868 the marriage was dissolved and both parties were granted full liberty to marry again, so ended the first African American marriage on record after the Civil War in Augusta County. The chancery causes George Coiner vs. Dinah Coiner (1868-010) and Diana Kiner vs. George Kiner (1868-015) are open for research and available digitally as part of the Augusta County Chancery Causes, 1747-1912, a scanning project funded by the Circuit Court Records Preservation Program and a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce that digital images for Lee County Chancery Causes, 1857-1912, are now available on the Chancery Records Index. Because they rely so heavily on the testimony of witnesses, chancery causes contain a wealth of historical and genealogical information and are especially useful when researching local, state, social, and legal history. The Lee County chancery collection offers a glimpse of life in Lee County during the 19^th and early-20^th centuries by documenting the African American experience, women’s history, Southern business and labor history, and the impact the railroad’s arrival had on a region. Following are a few suits of interest found in the collection.

Lee County chancery causes contain several suits illustrating the experiences of women in the westernmost part of the commonwealth. In Mary V. Pennington by etc. vs. M. C. Parsons, etc., 1887-019, Mary Pennington sought to gain control over land gifted to her by her father. The land was being sold by her husband, William Pennington, who had become “indebted and greatly embarrassed.” In 1907, Elizabeth Smith faced a similar dilemma. Elizabeth R. Smith vs. J. K. P. Legg, etc., 1907-045, protested the sale of Smith’s land sold for a set of blacksmith tools. Elizabeth Smith did not agree to the sale, but her husband, Samuel L. Smith, “commenced to abuse her and threatened to beat her, and to kill her father B. W. Barker if she did not sign the deed,” forcing her to agree to the sale. Both suits were dismissed by the court.

The arrival of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad had significant impact on the region with suits filed by and against the company appearing several times in the chancery collection. In Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. vs. Nimrod Noe, 1891-012, the railroad attempted to halt payments Nimrod Noe received in a condemnation proceeding by claiming that Noe falsely represented the damages and losses done to his property by the arrival of the railroad. In the Petition of A. L. Loyd, Administrator, 1902-003, a settlement is sought for B. H. Loyd’s family after his death in a railroad accident. B. H. Loyd, an engineer with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, was killed after losing control of his locomotive and colliding with another train on a foggy night.

The Lee County chancery causes are also not without their share of scandal. F. E. Parsons sued her late husband’s heirs seeking dower rights to land inherited by her husband in F. E. Parsons, widow vs. Ellen Jessee, etc., 1897-006. The heirs claimed that F. E. Parsons, nineteen at the time of her marriage, only married their sixty-year-old father to gain ownership of his property. The widow accused her husband’s children of attempting to intimidate her by circulating “false and scandalous charges,” including accusing her of having an abortion before the marriage.  In the divorce suit Lilly C. Turner vs. Richard M. Turner, 1894-082, Lilly Turner describes her husband as “living in open adultery for some time” and taking “pleasure in writing [her] about his filthy conduct.” Filed as an exhibit in the case is an 1893 letter Richard Turner sent to his wife describing the women he was having affairs with.

Lee County joins fifty-seven counties and cities whose chancery causes have been digitally reformatted and made available through the Library’s innovative Circuit Court Records Preservation Program, which seeks to preserve the historic records of Virginia’s Circuit Courts. 

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

A small slip of paper on display in the Library of Virginia’s latest exhibition You Have No Right: Law and Justice in Virginia, running 24 September 2012-18 May 2013, was of immense importance to twelve people. It discloses, even though it does not state the fact in so many words, that on 2 May 1772 they gained their freedom after being held in slavery since each of them was born. The piece of paper and the fates of those Virginians illuminates a disturbing and little-known part of Virginia’s history, the enslavement of American Indians.

The paper came into the possession of the Library of Virginia in 1988 when it acquired a copy of volume two of John Tracy Atkyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery in the Time of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke . . . (London, 1765–1768) that had once been in the library of the colonial government in Williamsburg. One of the librarians in the cataloguing section showed it to me, knowing of my interest in that library. When she lifted it from her desk to hand it to me, a piece of paper that had been slipped between leaves in the middle of the volume fell out and fluttered to the floor. We were surprised, and I was even more surprised when I saw what it was. It was a 1780s or 1790s copy of the judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway (or Robin, or Hardaway), an unusually important case decided in the General Court of Virginia. The librarian and I presented the judgment to the archivists who added it to the meager surviving records of the colonial General Court.

The court case had two parts. First, attorneys argued about whether a 1682 law that allowed for the lifetime enslavement of Indians imported from other colonies had been repealed in 1684, 1691, or 1705. For decades Virginia’s courts had assumed that the 1684 invalidated the 1682 law, and “under that persuasion,” one of the attorneys informed the court, “hundreds of the descendants of Indians have obtained their freedom, on actions brought in this court.” The court concluded the first part of the case by deciding that the 1682 law had remained in effect until 1705.  This decision enlarged the number of residents of Virginia who could not hope to gain their freedom by claiming to be descendants of Indian women illegally enslaved between 1684 and 1705.

A jury trial then established that the twelve people were descendants of an Indian woman who had been illegally enslaved. The jury awarded Robin, Hannah, Daniel, Cuffie, Isham, Moses, Peter, Judy, Autry, Silvia, Davy, and Ned, all of unstated age, one shilling in damages. Each received one penny, but each also received freedom.

Some excellent 21^st-century scholarship demonstrates that English-speaking Virginians enslaved many more Indian residents of Virginia in the 17^th century than earlier historians believed and that the enslavement may very well have taken place in spite of the laws or in the absence of laws governing the enslavement of Indians. Because almost all of the records of the colonial General Court burned in the fire that destroyed the state court house and much of the business district of Richmond in April 1865, the specific record of the outcome of the important 1772 freedom suit naming the persons freed is especially rare and valuable.

It was critically important that the twelve plaintiffs were descendants of “Indian women,” not of Indian men. In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly had passed a law that arose from a case that Elizabeth Key filed in the Northumberland County Court. She was the daughter of Thomas Key, a white man who had been a burgess in the 1630s, and one of his enslaved female laborers of African origin or descent. Elizabeth Key claimed her freedom as the daughter of a free man and won her case, but the assembly then changed the law. The act of 1662 explained that because “some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree” it declared “that all children borne in this country shalbe held bound or free only according to the condition of the mother.”

Two other pieces of paper on exhibition in You Have No Right demonstrate that descendants of enslaved Indian women continued to file freedom suits in Virginia courts well into the 19^th century. In May 1820, after seven years of tedious and delayed proceedings in the courts of Wythe and Powhatan Counties, Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time. When she was a girl in 1773, one year after the General Court issued its judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway, the court ruled that she and her family, too, were entitled to their freedom as descendants of an illegally enslaved Indian woman. But her owner, who lived in the part of Cumberland County that in 1777 became Powhatan County, sold rather than freed her. She lived in slavery in far-away Wythe County for forty years until learning in 1813 that she should have been freed in 1773.

When the Powhatan County Court finally issued its ruling in the May 1820 judgment Rachel vs. John Draper, Sr. that Rachel Findlay was a free person, she was an old woman with thirty or forty descendants, all of whom had lived all of their lives in slavery and should have always lived free. It is not known whether any or all of her children and grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren ever learned that they, too, should have been living in freedom and not in slavery since their births or whether any of them actually became free as a result of her persistent pursuit of her law suit. A court judgment was not self-enforcing, especially for a group of people like Rachel Findlay’s descendants who probably lived in wide dispersion, perhaps some of them outside of Virginia. Some of them may have lived the remainder of their lives in slavery, too, as she did for forty-seven years.

About the time that Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time, members of the Evans family lost a freedom suit in Lynchburg in Charles Evans, etc. vs. Lewis B. Allen, 1821-033. Their story is truly tragic. In preparation for their case, members of the family or perhaps their court-appointed attorney compiled and submitted to the court a genealogical chart that demonstrated how the family members were related to one another. That sheet of paper is also on display in the Library of Virginia’s exhibition and together with other evidence might have persuaded a court that they were entitled to their freedom. However, their attorney, former Congressman Christopher Henderson Clark, had a stroke sometime in 1820 and failed to appear in court on behalf of his clients. As a consequence of the case not being presented when scheduled, the court dismissed it in 1821, leaving all of the people and the descendants of the females stuck in slavery for the remainder of their lives.

Slavery and the laws that created and protected it were cruel and unjust. Adding to the cruelty and injustice were the many unpredictable factors, like the illness of an attorney, that could prevent people from presenting their cases in court, or like the sale of Rachel before she could become free. It is now clear that colonial Virginians enslaved more Indians than historians once knew about, and it is evident that many more people had been illegally enslaved than historians once believed. Men, women, and children of African, American Indian, and also of European and mixed ancestry like Elizabeth Key fell victim to the system of slavery that sustained Virginia’s economy and society from the early years of the colonial period to the end of the American Civil War.

It is also now convenient for the first time to do thorough research on some of the freedom suits that people filed after the American Revolution. People who filed suits seeking freedom and alleging illegal enslavement often sought justice through local courts of chancery. The record of each surviving court case contains unique personal stories about the enslavement of one or more Virginians and the conditions under which they lived and how they attempted to gain their freedom. As part of the Library of Virginia’s project to preserve and make available to researchers the records of the commonwealth’s local chancery courts, archivists at the library have to date digitized thousands of case files containing several million pages of documents, including more than one hundred freedom suits. They are processing and digitizing more every day. The records of the cases that have been digitized can be viewed online in the Chancery Records Index.

Clerks of court did not know or use the surnames of the people who filed freedom suits, so to identify freedom suits it is necessary to search for chancery causes in which the style, or title, of the case does not include a surname. In the search field for the surname for the plaintiff(s), simply enter a tilde ~ which will return a list of cases in which the surname of the plaintiff is not part of the official name of the case.

-Brent Tarter, Founding Editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography

The Virginia Circuit Court Records Preservation Program (CCRP) is celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year. Part of the Library of Virginia’s Local Records Services branch, the program was created in 1992 to address the preservation needs of some of the most important records in the state – the records of Virginia’s 120 circuit courts. The CCRP continues to not only preserve, digitize, and microfilm historic records from around the commonwealth but also to reach out to circuit court clerks in each locality, offering them consultative services and financial assistance through its grant program. Since its creation twenty years ago, the program has awarded over 1100 grants, totaling nearly $16 million, to Virginia circuit court clerks to help address the preservation needs of records stored in their localities.

Twenty years later, access to Virginia’s historic court records has never been wider with more than 7 million digital chancery court images from fifty-seven counties and cities now available online through the Chancery Records Index (CRI), created to increase access to Virginia’s historic equity cases. In celebration of this important milestone, we’ve created this video celebrating the twenty year history of this innovative program that has helped ensure the preservation and accessibility of records that are a treasure trove of state and local history.

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

*Updated 16 October 2012*
On 16 October 2012, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an Op/Ed by Cynthia P. Morrison, Clerk of the Portsmouth Circuit Court and Frank D. Hargrove, Jr., Clerk of the Hanover Circuit Court, commemorating the 20th anniversary.

“Jugglery, slight of hand [sic], comic concerts, and songs” brought the congregation of Centenary Methodist Church and members of the Sons of Temperance, Pendleton Division No. 22, to the Lynchburg courts in 1881. In Peleg Seabury, etc. vs. E. A. Emerson, etc., 1881-030, the plaintiffs and defendants argued over the proper use of Halcombe Hall. Congregation members complained that the hall was rented out and “filled up for a public exhibition house, for theatricals, and concerts,” but the Sons of Temperance deny any intention of allowing it to be used for a “demoralizing tendency.”

The church purchased Halcombe Hall to promote the “cause of temperance” and objected to its use for such entertainments – especially the play, East Lynne, performed there by the Fay Templeton Star Alliance. The Sons of Temperance countered that East Lynne had “frequently been performed in said hall before the intelligent people of this city who have never pronounced it demoralizing” and that the “performance is of an elevating and refining tendency, and will not injure the morals of any, not even of those whose morals are unhealthy and have a natural demoralizing tendency.”

So what was this play that caused such concern in Lynchburg? Was it so very demoralizing? The play, based on a popular English sensation novel of 1861 written by Ellen Wood, saw many a melodramatic adaptation, starting with its first stage production in Brooklyn in 1863. The play became so popular that when a stock company needed revenue, East Lynne was the play of choice. The play’s elaborate and often implausible plot centers on infidelity and double identities. Lady Isabel Vane, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the impoverished Earl Mount Severn, marries stodgy, middle-aged lawyer Archibald Carlyle. Lady Isabel quickly becomes bored with her new life and elopes with her aristocratic lover, leaving behind her husband and infant children. After he deserts her and she bears their illegitimate child, Lady Isabel is involved in a railway accident and left for dead. Abandoned and tormented with remorse, she returns to her former home, unrecognizable because of a scarred mouth and blue spectacles, to become governess for her former husband and his new wife. There she is forced to watch as her own son dies and declares the play’s signature line (absent from the novel but often used as a gag by stage comics): “Dead! Dead! And never called me mother!”

For some, East Lynne is an examination of Victorian middleclass gender roles and a powerful drama of a woman’s struggles to find her way in society, but for others it’s just an overwrought melodrama with its roots in sensationalist fiction. Either way, East Lynne was immortalized on stage. In 1909, the Pictorial Leader declared that “more millions have witnessed East Lynne than have seen any other play that was ever written.” The tale of the lively heroine seduced away from her husband and children also made its way to the silver screen, with several silent movie adaptations, including one starring Theda Bara in 1916. The most famous film version arrived in 1931, starring Ann Harding and Clive Brook and directed by Frank Lloyd (who would go on to direct 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty). Nominated for best picture, East Lynne lost out to the Western Cimarron.

East Lynne ends with Lady Isabel falling ill after the death of her son and she soon dies in the arms of her former husband. Most stage versions saw Carlyle forgive his wife as she was dying but a few had Carlyle spurning her until the end. The 1931 film offers a different ending and has Isabel struck with sudden blindness, and, instead of staying put as one should, she continues walking until she wanders right off a cliff. Sadly, the same fate seems to have stricken the dramatic adaptations of the novel. The only existing copy of the 1931 film is at the UCLA Film and Television Archive where only an appointment will grant you access. While the novel sees the light of day in women’s studies and literature courses, the plays and films have mostly been forgotten, despite adaptations filmed as recently as 1982 when the BBC aired a made-for-television production. But, if East Lynne managed to make a return today, it’s doubtful that it would create the same moral outrage that it did in Lynchburg in 1881.

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist