March is Women’s History Month, and the first day of this month marked no better time to meet Ann Woodlief, a former English professor at VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University), an author, a genealogy buff, and a Huguenot descendant. But, her interest in Virginia’s Huguenots goes well beyond a minor hobby as she’s the National Librarian (600+ volumes, mostly focused on Virginia and the Huguenots), President of the Virginia branch, and Webmaster for the Manakin Huguenot Society.
Ann’s book about the James River is on-line, since it since it was originally published in 1985 and it is now out of print. In River Time: The Way of the James offers Ann’s perspective on this river with more than a passing nod to how impersonal this body of water may seem at times, yet how many nuggets of history its waters often reveal.
Some American streams were immortalized in the nineteenth century by artists–the Mississippi River by Mark Twain, the Hudson River by Washington Irving and a school of artists, even the sluggish Concord River by Henry David Thoreau. But the James has not yet been adequately captured either in words or art. Its long human history of combining aristocratic longings with materialistic exploitation may have failed to inspire artistic imagination. Its art does, however, epitomize the American longing to keep the best of both the natural and the industrialized worlds, the past and the future, even if reality dictates otherwise.1
Since the James River seemed to escape so many historians’ attentions, Ann took it upon herself to document its history and nature. She does so with the air of a person who is both familiar with that river’s past and its often unpredictable day-by-day behaviors. While no one can predict what future this water holds for its geography and its dependents, Ann is most interested in how the river’s past might shape that unknown.
My delight is with her obvious interest in Virginia’s Huguenots and in how their introduction to Virginia’s early eighteenth-century “wilderness” began to shape how future generations perceived their heritage. Ann wrote:
By 1700 the frontier was still just upstream a ways, in the more hostile world of granite, islands, and rapids above the tidewater. In July a ship sailed into Hampton filled with 207 Huguenots, exiled for years from their cozy, prosperous villages in France, who hoped to build a French Protestant town in the Norfolk area. They were welcomed by Governor Nicholson with disturbing news; their destination had been changed and they were to go up the James. William Byrd I, inheritor of land in the Falls area and influential in the colony, had had the last word on their fate. They were to settle in the wilderness above the Fall Line, securing that land for the white man.2
This introduction of white French Calvinists (a theory) into a British Anglican neo-society was the touchstone to how the Huguenot descendants shaped Virginia’s religious, political, and social history throughout that century and beyond. While Ann focuses more on the James River throughout her book - which comes with historical images - her interest in this ethnic group has won my heart and rabid interest.
If you, too, are interested in Virginia’s Huguenot history, you might want to attend their spring meeting at their headquarters on Huguenot Trail on 14 April, with lunch and a speaker who took her boat and her dog and sailed into John Smith’s shadow on the James. And, she lived to write a book about it. You can contact the Manakin Huguenot Society at manakintown [AT] yahoo [dot] com.
Posted by river queen in Reviews
