New exhibit tells the story of a Rockbridge County family, and the slavery and emancipation that shaped it (2024)

The African country of Liberia and the Rockbridge County village of Brownsburg may seem like worlds apart, but both reside within the heart of Stanley Land.

These two places also share the same space in a new exhibit inside the two-room Brownsburg Museum. “Interwoven: Unearthed Stories of Slavery” tells a decidedly local story about one Brownsburg family whose struggle and significance have now rippled throughout the U.S. and the world.

“The exhibit is not about slavery, it’s not about racism,” said museum director Julie Fox. “It’s about one family’s journey starting with Jacob Halliburton, who was an enslaved man born in 1810 in Brownsburg, and the story of his family’s success and survival.”

Epitomizing that success is Land, one of Halliburton’s descendants. Today he is a successful 72-year-old chemical industry consultant in Houston. But in 1970, Land was a Rockbridge High linebacker who became the first African American football scholarship recipient at the University of Virginia.

“Education was important for him [Halliburton], and he made sure his children and his children’s children were capable,” said Land. “It allowed his offspring to seek bigger and better opportunities down the road. That theme has gone through this family for 160 years. It’s created a sense of pride, and with pride comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes the desire to be successful.”

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In graphics and photos and maps, “Interwoven” shares the brutal black-and-white reality of slavery in Rockbridge County.

“There is a misconception that slavery in this part of the valley was not as prevalent or harsh as in other southern states nor as damaging to the enslaved population,” one exhibit placard states. “However, the numbers tell a different story, one of economic wealth built from exploitation.”

Consider: From the 1830s to 1860, slavery grew faster in Rockbridge County than in any other county in Virginia. In 1860, slaves accounted for 23.7% of Rockbridge County’s population.

Born enslaved in 1810, Jacob Halliburton Sr. had nine children with Abigail “Abbey” Lewis, another slave. (Terms such as “husband” and “wife” could only be used euphemistically at the time, since slaves weren’t legally allowed to marry.)

Their oldest child, William E. Halliburton, was owned by Andrew Patterson and was the father to four children with Priscilla “Scylla” Jane, who was owned by Hugh Adams.

When Adams died childless in 1857, his will manumitted, or gave freedom to, Scylla and the children. Three years later, she was able to purchase William’s freedom for $1,500.

Virginia law at the time required newly emancipated persons to leave the commonwealth within one year of emancipation. So in 1860, the Halliburtons boarded a ship to Liberia, a colony created by the U.S. government through the American Colonization Society to get rid of a growing free Black population.

The Halliburtons are listed on the ship’s “bill of laden,” which could have been the last record of the family, except for a letter found 160 years later — and the work of the Brownsburg Museum.

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In 2022 the museum, in partnership with the Historic Lexington Foundation, organized a one-day tour of five “slave houses” that still stand around Brownsburg. Hundreds of people showed up, inspiring the museum to create an exhibit to feature the lives of those forced to live in these houses.

The all-volunteer museum committee met with congregants of local African American churches, enlisted the help of graduate students at UVa and a U.S. history dual-enrollment class at Rockbridge County High, and gleaned historical documents housed within the Washington & Lee University special collections.

One of those documents is a letter that, according to local lore, was found folded inside a coffee can that fell out of a wall of an old home during a renovation.

Addressed to Jacob Halliburton, the letter was written by son William on July 1, 1866, from Bensonville, Liberia.

The irony that this material is preserved and presented by an institution named for two slaveholders isn’t lost on Goodhart. “We’re doing everything we can as we wrestle with our namesakes and histories and traditions of this place to make open and accessible the history entrusted to us,” he said. “It’s essential. Archives is the place to go and see if there’s something that has a curveball for your perspective.”

One such curveball is the legacy of slavery in Rockbridge County.

“I’m born and raised in Rockbridge County,” said Valerie Clay, the Rockbridge High dual-enrollment teacher. “There was kind of this belief that we didn’t have a lot of slavery in Rockbridge County.”

In fact, that’s what her schoolbooks taught when she was a child, she said, but her students’ research of courthouse records proved that notion wrong.She learned alongside her class: “Don’t always rely on the secondhand account, the secondary sources like textbooks. They should be a springboard for you to do your own research.”

So meaningful was the Brownsburg experience that many of her newly graduated high schoolers have declared college majors in anthropology and museum studies.

“The work that those individuals put into this, I’m getting chills just talking about it,” she said.

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By “those individuals,” Clay means an impressive cast of local talent who donated months of their time and talent bringing “Interwoven” to life.

As a white woman and volunteer museum director, Julie Fox paraphrased a quote she heard to explain her commitment to this African American family: “‘We don’t inherit guilt but rather we are bequeathed with the obligation to improve society.’ We have the responsibility to improve the community by sharing the cultural history of the area in a robust way.”

Dee Papit, owner of Lone Wolf Marketing agency based in Brownsburg, estimated she donated $30,000 of her time toward scripting and visualizing the exhibit. Her Richmond-based colleague, Brian Thompson of BLT Design, gave the equivalent in design services.Local historian Larry Spurgeon, who is president of Rockbridge Historical Society, was also vital to the project.

Describing “Interwoven” as a community passion project, Papit said, “I was completely blown away by this story, it’s incredible. We’re a bump on the map and we have this amazing story of these enslaved people from Brownsburg, and we have documentation and the descendants.”

Sprinkled throughout the exhibit’s historical record are quotes from descendants such as this one: “There is more to our history. There’s more to it than just being a part of people who were enslaved and shackled and labeled as inferior. There’s more to us than that.”

These descendant voices “make it deeply personal for a visitor,” said Papit. “History doesn’t always connect people, but a great story will.”

Or as Fox said, “For such a small place, it tells such a big story.”

To fabricate the exhibit, the museum paid Photo Works Group of Charlottesville $30,000 — a steeply discounted price, said Fox, that included two donated days of installation and labor. The museum also printed a 64-page glossy catalog for sale. These expenses have been covered in part by grants from Virginia Humanities, Washington & Lee, NAACP of Rockbridge County and private contributions.

Also in the eclectic exhibit: slave dwelling photographs by internationally renown German photographer Gesche Wurfel, “make do” artifacts found around the slave houses, and a pew from a local African American church on which Jacob Halliburton Sr. may have once sat.

So far, 379 visitors have witnessed “Interwoven” since its opening in March, or more than 10 times Brownsburg’s population. On a recent Saturday, 30 people from across Virginia as well as visitors hailing from New York and Texas walked through the doors.

Among them was John Friedrichs, a historic brickmason from Lexington who had a professional interest in the masonry of nearby slave cabins, some of which he’s helped restore over the years.

He recalls one such dwelling that had holes in the wall where shackles were once bolted.Before he got to work on the brick, he said, he brought in some sage, lit it, and as the sweet smoke wafted through the space that once held chained humans, he said to the emptiness, “I come in peace.”

* * *

As a direct descendant of Jacob H. Halliburton II — another of Jacob Halliburton’s sons and William’s brother — Land remains the exhibit’s most passionate visitor.

A Rockbridge High graduate of 1970 who’d grown up with his grandparents, Land seemed destined for the draft and the Vietnam War when his coach, Ted Campbell, got him recruited to be one of the UVa’s first Black football players.

He graduated in 1974, signed as free agent with Houston Oilers, but got hurt — and tired of playing football. He returned to Rockbridge High to teach and coach.

Married with his first child on the way, he got hired by Dow Chemical in 1979 and embarked on a lifelong career in chemical sales that took him to Richmond, St. Louis, Michigan, and ultimately Houston.

Other than a preliminary phone call from the museum committee, Land wasn’t involved in the exhibit’s design.So when he first visited this spring, “I was blown away — it was like a smack in the face. I had just wanted to do research so my kids could have some understanding of my family’s history, and here was an entirely created exhibit that describes that history. It’s amazing, and it brings about a great deal of pride.”

It also brings an eagerness to know more: “I want to know if I have cousins in West Africa whom I’ve never met before.”

Land may have some help in that effort. JulieFox’s husband, Chris, recently emailed him that one of Land’s best friends from Rockbridge, Xander Lipscomb, had toured the museum. Lipscomb shared that his son now works for the U.S. State Department and is a colleague of the U.S. ambassador to Liberia.

“Now here’s a contact for future research,” Land said.

Interwoven, indeed.

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