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Complex Numbers #1031786 added May 2, 2022 at 12:01am
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Charlottesville
Some of the entries this month will be from "Invalid Item"  . This is one of them.
Prompt # 1 May, 1st. '22 — A bit about the history of your town/area.
Every place has a history. Some towns were founded to support gold rushes, others were close to oceans.
What's the History of where you live? What was the early industry that made your town the place to be? Who founded your town and when?
Before the Europeans invaded, it was the Monacan people who lived here. As I understand it, the Monacan claimed most of the Piedmont region as their territory, and they didn't get along with the Powhatan Confederacy in the Tidewater area of Virginia, who are much more famous thanks to Disney movies.
So it probably didn't take much for the Powhatan to team up with the English to venture into enemy territory and start setting up shop here. Once that was all settled and the Monacan had dispersed -- mostly being absorbed into other tribes, which bought them a few years at least -- the English were perfectly content to backstab their erstwhile allies.
Meanwhile, though, they'd established trade routes across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley, which had mostly been settled from the north, by people of German descent (think Pennsylvania "Dutch.")
It was one one of these trade routes (called Three Notch'd Road) that, at some point, Europeans started living around here. A lot of that early history is quite vague; my personal feeling is that someone set up a brewpub, and after a long day's travel from Richmond (a trip that now takes about an hour), it must have been very inviting to stop in, have a few, pass out, and then continue on across the mountain pass the following day. But I may be biased.
I should point out here that the Wikipedia page for Charlottesville includes a whole section devoted to our current breweries. No, I didn't edit that part in. I was just pleased to see one of our greatest features so prominently displayed on the webpage.
The thing about Charlottesville's history, though, is that we don't really have any other excuse. There are no significant natural resources around (apart from good agricultural and timber land, which isn't exactly sparse in Virginia); no navigable waterway extends this far up the drainage basin (though the James River is partially navigable, it's about 30 miles from here); and it took a while for any real industry to develop in the area.
So... we don't really have a founder, not like other cities. The "Charlotte" in the Ville's name was King George III's queen. You may remember King George III as the guy who got his ass handed to him by a bunch of Indian-trained colonists, and who had a bit part in Hamilton. I don't think she ever set foot around here. So the town's not named after its founder. No, in 1762, before the Hand-George's-Ass-To-Him War, the city was chartered to serve as the county seat of Albemarle -- which, of course, implies that there was already a fairly significant settlement here, and probably more than one brewpub. (It's still technically the county seat, even though it's a separate political entity. Don't ask; it's a Virginia thing.)
Therefore, the closest thing we have to a founder is Thomas Jefferson, who you might also remember from Hamilton.
Among the many other hats he wore, Jefferson was a land surveyor. As part of my job, I used to have to dig through City and county records to determine the history of a piece of land my clients were destroyingdeveloping. Inevitably, if I searched back far enough, I'd find surveys signed in Jefferson's distinctive fuck-you-George handwriting.
Problem is, some of those surveys were dated during the time Jefferson was in France doinking French women. My personal theory is he had a slave who did all the work and then forged his signature. Typical.
Really, while the town has a really flimsy excuse for existing, it was Jefferson who gave it a purpose by building the University of Virginia here. While there was certainly more traditional "industry" around -- the Woolen Mills come to mind -- Charlottesville got its boost as a college town. UVA is still the biggest game in town, though technically most of it isn't in the City.
The next most important historical event was when I moved here in 1983 from Powhatan territory to attend the university. And I do what I can to keep the local brewpubs in business. |
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