I’ve got relatives in the state of Virginia. My in-laws, actually. My mother-in-law and father-in-law live in Warrenton, just 45 miles or so from Washington, DC. And I have two sisters-in-law who live in Fairfax, only 15 miles from the district. I’ve spent about six weeks of my life in total vacationing in Virginia, and I can tell you without reservation that if you enjoy history, you’ll enjoy Virginia.
The Revolutionary War took place partly in Virginia, and so did the Civil War. Drive just a short way from my in-laws’ homes and you can visit Yorktown, where General Cornwallis and the British were pinned down and eventually surrendered to General Washington. Plenty of buildings and graveyards still exist from the 1700’s and the 1600’s, as well. You can visit George Washington’s house at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s house at Monticello. There’s Jamestown, the first English settlement in the western hemisphere, which was established in 1607. And nearby Colonial Williamsburg, which operates as a living history museum.
As for the Civil War, you can visit the town of Manassas to see the site of what the Confederates called the Battle of Manassas Junction and the Union called the First Battle of Bull Run. At Richmond you’ll see the remains of the Confederate capitol. And there’s the McLean House in Appomattox, where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sat down to sign Lee’s papers of surrender. The pencil he used is still there. And Robert E. Lee’s homesite is in Arlington National Cemetery.
When you drive around Virginia, you never know what you’ll discover. My in-laws have taken me to small, out-of-the-way towns where we ate lunch in 300-year-old buildings. And as I said, Washington, DC is right there close by, with the White House, the Capitol, all the monuments and the Smithsonian.
The University of Virginia in Charlottesville is located on a site that was decided upon during a living room chat in 1817 between former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sitting president James Monroe and sitting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Today, the University of Virginia is known as one of the original “public ivy” colleges. The Ivy League, officially, consists of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown and Cornell. Those are all private schools and are some of the oldest, most prestigious and most selective in the country. The original “public ivies”, which are also old, prestigious and selective, but not private, include the University of Virginia, the University of Vermont, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.
Virginia alumni include professors like writer William Faulkner and justice Antonin Scalia and students like explorer Richard Byrd, vice-president Alben Barkley, Senators Robert and Ted Kennedy, justice Thurgood Marshall, senators Evan Bayh, Kit Bond, John Warner, John Cornyn, Chuck Robb and Lowell Weicker and President Woodrow Wilson.
But that’s not even close to being all of them. There’s Doctor Charles Pepper (and yes, he’s that Doctor Pepper), Doctor Walter Reed, writer David Baldacci, poet Edgar Allan Poe and Will Shortz, the guy who makes up the New York Times crossword puzzle. TV personalities from the University of Virginia include Katie Couric, Kimberly Dozier, Brit Hume, Tina Fey and Dylan Walsh. There’s painter Georgia O’Keefe. And in the world of athletics, Ronde and Tiki Barber, Rick Carlisle, Mike Cubbage, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Bowie Kuhn, Herman Moore, Matt Schaub, Ralph Sampson, Dawn Staley and Don Shula.
The good news for Boise State fans this season has been that Virginia has never really hung its hat on its football program. The Cavaliers have had four losing seasons out of the past five, and in the 127 years they’ve been playing football, they’ve managed to reach ten wins in a season only once, and that was 25 years ago.
As I said, if you love history, you’ll enjoy Virginia. And since Boise State’s visit to Virginia, the Cavaliers’ chances of a winning season are also now history.
