The notice below is to appear in the spring issue of Colonial
Williamsburg, the journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. It is
posted in advance here in hopes of bringing early to the problem the
research skills of the list.
Questions are best addressed off-list to [log in to unmask]
Best regards,
Dennis Montgomery
Editor
Colonial Williamsburg
In an early draft of his history of what came to be Colonial
Williamsburg, the Reverend Doctor W.A.R. Goodwin, the Bruton Parish
priest who persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr., to finance the
restoration of the eighteenth-century city, wrote:
In 1881 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad arrived in
Williamsburg. Eager to help pay for itself by transporting the
crowds which were converging upon Yorktown to take part in the
Yorktown Centennial celebration of the Surrender, the railroad
presumptuously ran itself down the middle of the Duke of
Gloucester Street, over the site of the ancient Capitol, and
went on its way to Yorktown, its desired temporary destination.
That was 125 years ago. Colonial Williamsburg, the journal of the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has for the past seven years been
on the hunt of a photograph of the railroad tracks on the Duke of
Gloucester Street. Other foundation departments have searched years
more. So far, no luck.
The C & O spur seems to have been the idea of Collis P. Huntington,
the California railroad and Newport News shipbuilding tycoon. Its
construction, if tradition may be credited, resulted in the removal
of the last above-ground vestiges of the Virginia Capitol begun in
1751. By 1897, the Capitol site belonged to the Old Dominion Land
Company, a Chesapeake and Ohio subsidiary, which that year deeded it
to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The
Reverend Doctor Goodwin negotiated Rockefeller-restoration rights to
the site from the A.P.V.A. in 1927.
Colonial Williamsburg, proposes now to enlist in its quest for such
a photo the assistance of its best and biggest asset, its readers.
The magazine offers to pay $200 to any individual who has rights to,
and first provides for publication in the magazine, an 1881
photograph, to be returned undamaged after copying, of railroad
tracks on the Duke of Gloucester Street. Otherwise, it will pay $200
to any individual who can for the magazine certainly identify such a
photo--as opposed to suggest a search for--in the collection of any
historical institution, if it includes that institution's
identification nomenclature. (It matters not to the magazine if the
person works for that institution, but in such cases the journal
requires that individuals clear with supervisors
conflict-of-interest issues.) In either case, the magazine will pay
an additional $100 for each different 1881 photograph of railroad
tracks on Duke of Gloucester Street to a limit of $500.
Submissions should be made to:
Production Specialist David Gouge
The Colonial Williamsburg Journal
Post Office Box 1776
Williamsburg, Virginia 23187
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