Courtesy of the Gloucester Museum of History
T.C.Walker mural.
Drive down Main Street in Gloucester, and it is hard to miss the colorful mural honoring Thomas Calhoun (T.C.) Walker. Known as Virginia’s “Black Governor,” Walker’s imprint can be found throughout the county. If you know where to look.
Special Collection, University of Virginia.
T.C. Walker.
Less than a year before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Walker was born a slave, only to grow up to become the first Black to practice law in Gloucester County. His impact on the community extended to serving two terms on the Gloucester County Board of Supervisors beginning in 1891. Then in 1934, he was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the advisor and consultant of Negro Affairs for the Virginia Emergency Relief Administration, the only Black to hold statewide office in FDR’s Works Project Administration. As a civil rights spokesperson, Walker pushed for education and land ownership for Blacks, seeing both as key to the advancement of his people.
T.C. Walker’s home is just one of eleven fascinating historical sites that make up Gloucester’s African American Heritage Trails Tour. Created as part of Gloucester County’s 350th Celebration in 2001, the self-guided driving tour provides a history lesson on how the Black presence in the county significantly influenced the county’s culture and development. Although the windows in Walker’s home are boarded up, the National Park Service has awarded Hampton University a grant to restore and stabilize the house so that it can eventually welcome visitors.
The engrossing histories of the people and places along Gloucester’s African American Heritage Trails Tour are represented through eleven stops in all. They highlight American history, albeit parts of it that have not been traditionally taught in school, not simply Black history. A guide to the driving tour, complete with directions to each site, can be viewed online (https://www.gloucesterva.info/DocumentCenter/View/10314/African-American-Heritage-Trails-Tour?bidId=), making it easy to use your phone to navigate from site to site through downtown Gloucester and down sun dappled country roads.
Because schools for Blacks received less funding, offered a shorter school year and only went as high as sixth or seventh grade, Walker appealed to the school board for a secondary school. Told that no funds were available—popular opinion dictated that Blacks needed instruction only in basic reading and writing—Walker donated the down payment himself before spearheading a fundraising effort that included Chicago businessman Julius Rosenwald, known for matching funding raised by Black communities for school construction.
Special Collection, University of Virginia
Gloucester Training School
Today, the eponymous Thomas Calhoun Walker Education Center sits on the site of what was opened in 1921 as the two-classroom Gloucester Training School, a name chosen to reassure Whites who fought publicly supported higher education for Black children. A new brick school was constructed in the early 1950s to serve the county’s entire Black student population and named for Walker. From 1986 through 2012, the school functioned as an elementary school bearing Walker’s name and as of 2013, the education center continues to honor Gloucester’s own civil rights pioneer by housing the School Board offices. It is also another stop on Gloucester’s African American Heritage Trails Tour.
Photo courtesy of Virginia Department of Historic Resources
The Montgomery bus boycott may have had Rosa Parks, but Gloucester had Irene Morgan. Morgan was just as unwilling as Parks to follow the arbitrary rules of ridership then demanded of Blacks. One of the driving tour’s stops is the former site of the Old Hayes Store Post Office, which was also a Greyhound Bus stop. Shortly after boarding the bus in 1944, Morgan and another Black passenger were instructed by the bus driver to surrender their seats so Whites could sit. Morgan refused, earning her a warning from the driver that he would have the Saluda sheriff arrest her. When the sheriff boarded and attempted to serve her a warrant, Morgan tossed it out the window and, amazingly, kicked the man. Not surprisingly for the time, she was eventually arrested and jailed.
Lawyer and civil rights activist Thurgood Marshall, along with the NAACP, took up Morgan’s appeal and the Supreme Court ruled in her favor. Not long after, a song was written to celebrate the victory, with the lyric, “You don’t have to ride Jim Crow, ‘cause Irene Morgan won her case!” Blacks found that it was not as simple as all that, and it would be another eleven years before Rosa Parks took the same stand that Morgan had and created a lasting victory.
One of the most dazzling sites on the driving tour is the stately mansion at Cappahosic on the banks of the York River. Built in 1935 as Dr. Robert Russa Moton’s retirement home, the home quickly became a mecca for friends and like-minded associates from near and far to come to discuss and attempt to resolve pressing issues such as education. Moton had been the second president of the prestigious Tuskegee Institute after Booker T. Washington, guiding Tuskegee from a teacher training school to an accredited college and university.
Courtesy of Mike Wilton.
Manor House at the Moton Conference Center.
After his death, Moton’s son-in-law and successor at Tuskegee, Dr. Frederick Patterson, oversaw the next chapter of the home, expanding it into a conference center with residential space and training facilities. During the tumultuous ‘50s and ‘60s, the Conference Center developed into a think tank on social justice issues. It was here that the United Negro College Fund was conceived and also here that the Greensboro Four—the quartet of Black college freshmen who sat down at a “Whites Only” lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro and garnered national attention for the cause—developed their sit-in strategy. Significantly, it was here, under a 400-year-old live oak that Martin Luther King, Jr. is reported to have written parts of his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The grandson of former slaves, Eldridge Cook represents a different kind of notable in Gloucester County. Inspired by T.C. Walker’s belief that hard work and dedication were the key to achieving one’s dreams, Cook bought his first freight truck when he graduated high school at age 17. With the creation of Cook’s Oyster Company and later Cook’s Seafood Company, he began transporting seafood from local markets up and down the east coast. The building from which he operated his companies for 70 years is another interesting stop on the tour. Cook worked until he was 95, all the while contributing to his church and community, before passing on at age 98.
Among the more picturesque stops on the tour is Zion Poplars Baptist Church, which was built in 1894. Boasting a three-story steeple and slender chimney, the church houses one of the oldest independent Black congregations in the county. Four of the seven united poplar trees that the church’s founders met under still stand today. Be sure to stroll through the well-kept cemeteries where congregants such as Lucy Bright (1863-1933) are buried, a small stone angel resting on her gravestone.
Other sites along the tour pay tribute to Private James Daniel Gardiner, Woodville School, Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial School, Bethel Baptist Church and the Servants Plot.
The self-guided driving tour will introduce you to a some of the county’s most compelling residents, sites and buildings. It is an American history lesson as absorbing as it is informative.