#Rockbridge County

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection

Lexington Virginia. Shrine of the Southland. Lexington - Rockbridge Chamber of Commerce, April 1939 Travel brochure

[secretvirginia]

Creepiest Cemeteries in Virginia

Traversing a necropolis’ winding paths can be an unnerving experience, especially when the light begins to fade and fog rises among the crooked tombstones. Is that a mournful figure in the distance, or are you alone? For many Virginians, cemeteries are a place to visit loved ones long past, but an adventurous few hope to encounter something otherworldly. If you are brave enough to visit any of…

[middleland]

Ain't no fish here by Dan Keck

[iturnmycameraon]

Auction, Rockbridge County, Va

[claybefree]

Tulip Poplar

Sorrow is my own yard

where the new grass

flames as it has flamed

often before but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year

William Carlos Williams- The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

Every spring I have to ask for the name again. Tulip poplar, Saucer Magnolia, something like that, you’d think I wouldn’t be surprised by her anymore. Whereas last week empty arms cast veins of silhouettes across a cold carpet of previous year's leaves, today I’m able to come home from a long day of work, and face her canopy of flowers, half open like teacups, and that is miraculous news. I take it as further evidence that after two years the sucking wound in my chest has finally closed.

Each March was a celebration, a maelstrom of pink hung beneath the blue, pinks so dark along thick shouldered leaves, almost purple, and then bleeding out rapidly to porcelain white, there was no ignoring it. I notched one end of an eight foot pallet we brought home into the main cluster of stems, six feet up and propped the other end with a door. Of course the kids never climbed into the blossoms, but we did.

Now everyone’s gone but me and the whole yard creeps more every year, abandoned gardens filled with weeds crawling out of their beds, privet’s relentless march choking everything in between. A cold wind brushes the tulip against the rafter tails outside my bedroom, waking me. Limbs resting on roof shingles, a stitch of yellow rope left from a swing I hung years ago cut deep into the bark like a tourniquet. Her blooms will turn brown and slimy and clog the already rusted gutters. Neither tree nor house belong to me but as far as I’m concerned, I’m the steward of both, for now.

So I spend sixty dollars that I do not have on a bright orange pole saw from Lowes which I run up into underbelly pierced with morning light, trying not to focus on saw teeth tearing past bark into white flesh, or sap raining onto my cheekbones. I’m grateful for the strength I have in my arms for this work today but I worry I got started too late in the season and the half dozen or more wounds I’ve left will become infected and kill her. Despite all this I work for the better part of a morning, and pile up branches tall as me in the burn pit in the middle of the yard. In the fall I’ll light it up and likely scare the new neighbors. The blossoms lining the crooked pile go for broke and open their white faces wide to the sun.

The days are consistently warm enough and the new tires on my motorcycle beg to be chewed up, but my heart’s not in it. Not yet. One morning soon I’ll blast out 64 sometime before eight thirty, get away from the Florida interlopers that keep trying to kill me and hit the Blue Ridge Parkway and adjacent counties on this side of the mountain- Nelson, Rockbridge and Amherst.

The best road out there is also the most dangerous, and yet with half a dozen ways up to the Parkway, I still find myself on route 56 more often than not. A million years ago I guess, before someone gave it a name, the Tye river cut a gorge out of the mountains, twisting impossibly through the rocks and at some point homesteaders ran a road alongside and named that 56. Highly technical, it’s not the curves that will dump me. Every rental cabin and vacation home has a driveway cut into the shale and sandstone hills which provide, after every good rain, an opportunity for gravel to spill out on the tarmac. If I’m not on top of my game that’s what will kill me.

But before all that, when it breaks off from the Rockfish Valley highway, 56 passes through a couple thousand acres of farmland on one side, and the Tye river on the other. For some reason I think a good bit about the people who work that land. Last year the fields appeared to be left fallow, two years previous, in the fall, thousands of pumpkins were left scattered and rotting on the vine, collapsing into orange pulp. All I could think was that the pumpkin patch contract fell through.

I want to find the old timers and see if anyone will talk to me about August 1969, when Hurricane Camille dumped two foot of water in three hours and drowned birds in trees. When the Tye jumped its banks, broke the back of every bridge that dared cross it and cut the census of Massies Mill nearly in half.

Sometimes I see the pictures they post and get jealous of my friends who travel abroad, but I’ve decided what I need is to ride a motorcycle entirely too fast through the middle of some fields in Nelson county every three months and do that in perpetuity. I’ve been in that valley headed home late in the day with the sun low under the clouds turning everything golden, worried that I’m too far out. I’ve encountered the Tye river in a spring flood, washing across 56 nearly to the point where I had to turn back and find another route. I’ve ridden it half frozen in a driving rain, tucked behind the fairing with a mother of three on the back seat holding onto me for warmth.

Back in 2022, at my lowest, whenever I talked about tulip flowers or graveyard moss carried home from a chapel where it crosses over the mountain and heads down toward Vesuvius, my closest friends would encourage me to move out. They’d point to the marks on the door casing in the kitchen chronicling each child’s growth, five years worth, both hers and mine, and yeah, I got it. My argument was I’d have to find something else just like it- a shed for my tools, a garage for my bikes, somewhere to write. I dunno, man, I would say, it just feels like I belong here.

One of these days, instead of waving to them on their harvesters, I’m gonna pull over and talk to one of these guys. Yeah me, a wild eyed weirdo biker from the city rambling on about something I don’t know if I could even put into words. The idea of the two of us having a shared language with a place, a connection, whether it be on a tractor or a motorcycle, bound by both sorrow and joy. The connection running deeper because you’ve seen it flood, seen it bake, seen it come alive every year in a blaze of green.

Clay Blancett, 2024

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

This biography is not about a minister but instead briefly tells the life of a Presbyterian layman who was an inventor and industrialist. His life began on the farm as did many of the lives of antebellum entrepreneurs. Cyrus’s father Robert was born at Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia, June 4, 1780, into the household of a successful and prosperous farmer. Robert was deeply interested in the mechanical aspects of agriculture and was a skilled worker of wood and iron enabling him to improve existing tools and develop new ones.

When Cyrus Hall was born to Robert and Mary Ann (Hall) McCormick, February 15, 1809, it was into a home where his future would be directed vocationally towards the…

[jadetuin]

if i had a towering natural bridge of rock in my county i'd name it rockbridge county too. it's something u can only rlly EXPERIENCE in person because. You look at a photo of natural bridge and ur like "oh ok that sure is huh" but if you see a human in said photo you can maybe sort of comprehend how big it is?? THEN. If you go in person you will feel diminutive compared to nature's whims but in a cool way

[focusonthegoodnews]

Seeing double: Virginia Safari Park celebrates birth of two white rhino calves

https://wset.com/news/local/seeing-double-virginia-safari-park-celebrates-birth-of-two-white-rhino-calves-assistant-park-director-sarah-fitzgerald-natural-bridge-rockbridge-county-september-2024

[mysticalanimals]

RETURN TO MYSTICAL ANIMALS OF ANCIENT OAK

Copyright – Photograph taken by Cynthia Fain June 1998 Tonight I am writing from a very magical place called Raphine, Virginia in Rockbridge County. Imbued with primordial ambiance, this area sits nestled between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, where clean air and crystal blue skies abound. Woodlands, meadows and farms surround us and song bird melodies fill the air. As the sunsets, a…

[sohannabarberaesque]

Postcards from Snagglepuss

Just how natural IS this Natural Bridge exactly?

NATURAL BRIDGE STATE PARK, VA: Over Cedar Creek in Rockbridge County, Virginia, straddling US Hwy. 11 even (more or less supplanted for traffic in western Virginia by I-81 for the most part), happens to be perhaps the most legendary Natural Bridge known.

Perhaps one of the older sort of touristic distractions, even, come to think of it, with a heritage going back to Thomas Jefferson and a few close relatives of his. Eventually to include ownership by a former Confederate Army general of the Civil War and a couple of railroad men, promoting such widely ... and eventually handing such over to the Commonwealth of Virginia for further preservation.

And yet it must seem odd how this particular arch of karst limestone can manage to support a two-lane highway, never mind, as I noted earlier, where I-81 has siphoned off US 11's traffic for some years now. Not to mention the Blue Ridge Parkway being close to hand (but more on that later). Yet then again, Crazy Claws was bound to have the last word by remarking that "you have to imagine how long a natural bridge like this can hold on and support such traffic, to begin with!"

We were all, to put it simply, stunned.

Follow that with some comestibles by way of the Natural Bridge General Store just down Virginia 130--mainly sandwich meats, wholemeal bread, chips and the odd can of Brunswick Stew. Not to mention some nuts to snack upon. Thence, via US 501, to the Blue Ridge Parkway, whence this continues....

@warnerbrosentertainment @iheartgod175 @jellystone-enjoyer @ultrakeencollectionbreadfan @groovybribri @archive-archives @screamingtoosoftly @thebigdingle @themineralyoucrave @thylordshipofbutts @warnerbros-blog1 @funtasticworld @indigo-corvus @theweekenddigest @hanna-barberians @warnerbrosent-blog

[middleland]

Rockbridge State Nature Preserve, 11475 Dalton Rd, Rockbridge, Ohio (2) by jonohio

[vminews]

Spring FTX

April 11, 2024—Earlier this week, cadets completed Field Training Exercises (FTX). Commissioning-track cadets spent time on and off post. Army ROTC spent the weekend training at the Goshen Boy Scout Camp, while Naval ROTC Marines stayed at Sadler Farm in Rockbridge County for training. Air Force ROTC invited other schools to utilize VMI’s obstacle courses and the Leadership Reaction Course. Navy ROTC cadets trained at Smith Mountain Lake and in Norfolk, while the Coast Guard AUP travelled to Loudon County, Virginia, for training. Non-commissioning cadets participated in community service activities in the Lexington area, including Habitat for Humanity, and a timber framed project in Buena Vista.—VMI Photos by H. Lockwood McLaughlin and Rhita Daniel.

[bobmccullochny]

History

March 2

March 2, 1943 - During World War II in the Pacific, a Japanese convoy was attacked by 137 American bombers as the Battle of Bismarck Sea began. The convoy included eight destroyers and eight transports carrying 7,000 Japanese soldiers heading toward New Guinea. Four destroyers and all eight transports were sunk, resulting in 3,500 Japanese drowned, ending Japanese efforts to send reinforcements to New Guinea.

Birthday - American soldier and politician Sam Houston (1793-1863) was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia. As a teenager he ran away and joined the Cherokee Indians who accepted him as a member of their tribe. He later served as a Congressman and Governor of Tennessee. In 1832, he became commander of the Texan army in the War for Texan Independence, defeating the larger Mexican army in 1836 at the Battle of San Jacinto. He then served as Senator and Governor of the new state of Texas but was removed in 1861 after refusing to swear allegiance to the Confederacy.

[fitzz-siimmons]

Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, a national historic landmark in Virginia, USA

[fantaflip]

Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, a national historic landmark in Virginia, USA