Louisa County – The UncommonWealth

Archives Manuscripts & Special Collections

Ghosts in the Archives: Communing with the Virginia Historical Inventory

Occasionally, we ask guest writers to share information or stories about researching in our collections, public library programming or activities, and other topics which Library…

Guest ContributorOctober 18, 2017

Archives Digital Projects

Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative Digital Collection

In 1820, Rachel Findley won freedom for herself and more than 35 of her descendants in a Powhatan County court in a law suit dating…

Greg CrawfordFebruary 3, 2016

Virginia Untold: Deeds of Emancipation and Manumission

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on the record types found in the forthcoming Library of Virginia research database: Virginia Untold: The…

Ed JordanJanuary 27, 2016

Archives Education & Programming

"There is yet enough left of the old barbarism of slavery": Violence in Post-Emancipation Virginia

This is the first in a series of four blog posts concerning post-Civil War Virginia and the lives of freedpeople after Emancipation. The posts precede…

Gregg KimballJune 10, 2015

A Different Kind of Local Record

Smallpox is an infectious disease caused by two variants of a virus—variola major and variola minor. Since smallpox was certified as eradicated by the World…

Callie FreedJuly 11, 2014

Manuscripts & Special Collections

A surveyor’s view of wartime Virginia

Editor's Note: Hopefully the captured notebook, referenced in the first paragraph of this article, survived its stay at the Herald and has now found a home…

Trenton HizerSeptember 29, 2010

That’s Some Magic Bullet: Thirty-Eight Years After Revolutionary War, Bullet Exits Louisa Man’s Arm. Surfaces in Library’s Vault

Edward Houchins, a veteran of Captain Edmund Curd’s Company of Goochland Militia, petitioned the General Assembly on 10 December 1818, requesting an increase in his forty-dollar-a-year…

Craig MooreAugust 18, 2010