K. Carmichael

Blog

  • Bristow Bethel Baptist Church

    Clarke County, Virginia (gone)

    Abandoned, July 2006

    I photographed this church in 2006. At the time, I had no idea what kind of church it had been, or how long it had been vacant.

    My photos, taken with my first digital SLR, weren’t the best. I had plans to someday go back and take better photos. Unfortunately, I never got the chance.

    According to a February 14, 2017 article in The Winchester Star, the area where the church stood was home to an African American community that was started in 1869 with the purchase of land by a black man, Brister Holmes. The community was known by variations of his name: Brister, Bristoe, and Bristow Station. A school was built in 1883 (which is gone), and this particular church was built in vernacular Gothic Revival style in the 1920s (NRHP). The Bristow Community is part of the Long Marsh Run Historic District, recognized in 1996, which includes several hundred historic structures and three other African American communities.

    Bethel Baptist Church

    In 2016, according to the Star, the developer who owned the property offered to give it to anyone who was interested and could move it. No one took him up on the offer, and the church was torn down in January of 2017. A 2018 article in the Star reported that the windows and other pieces of the church were salvaged by a local shop, and one of the windows was purchased by a couple who bought one of the subdivided lots on the land where the church once stood. They planned to install the window in their new home, and lead an effort to get a historical marker installed to commemorate the church and community.

    Bethel Baptist Church

    People who lived in Bristow survived the horror of slavery, went on to own property, built schools and churches, and against all the huge challenges they faced in post-slavery rural Virginia, created a community.

    I drove by where the church was today. There is no marker. There is only a swath of green lawn (and a modern house up the hill), with nothing whatsoever to mark where a community that was once an important part of Clarke County history stood.

    AWESOME update! September 2020

    The historical marker for Bristow has been approved, according to the Winchester Star! After efforts by the new landowners and the local architectural historian, about half the money for the marker has been raised as of August 31.

    AWESOME update 2!

    Enough donations were made to cover the cost of the marker and the non-profit that accepted donations actually had to return some because the cost was already covered! The marker will be installed sometime in 2021.

  • Willa Cather’s Birthplace

    Although she is known for her “pioneer literature,” and made her home in Nebraska, author Willa Cather was born in Frederick County, Virginia, and spent the first nine years of her life here.

    She spent most of those years at Willow Shade, a pretty, stately brick home that is well maintained today and is privately owned (so no tours are available, although they seem to allow special groups to tour the property occasionally).

    Willa was born in the house of her grandmother, Rachel Boak. Her birthplace is a few miles up the road from Willow Shade. I’ve always been a fan of her writing, and knew that she was born in Frederick County, so I’d looked once for the home (and didn’t find it). I set out recently, determined that I’d find it, and ended up driving by it a couple of times before I saw it behind the trees and brush that separate it from the busy highway.

    Willa Cather Birthplace

    Sadly, the site is in really bad shape. The marker is not visible from the road (hence my trouble in finding it) and the house is literally falling apart.

    Door

    During my visit, I was creeped out by a rather long snakeskin (thankfully, without occupant) hanging in some brush in front of the house. This is not a place you want to linger, and not a place you can imagine a treasured author or her family inhabiting.

    The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and at that time, it was reported that it was maintained by its owner. I couldn’t find any record that it had been sold since then, but clearly it is no longer receiving even minimum maintenance. The former front door was ajar and black plastic was peeking out.

    Historic Landmark Plaque

    I poked around a little online for information, and there don’t seem to be any plans to try to purchase and restore (or even just minimize future damage) to the home. I’m not sure what entity could purchase it – I guess I was thinking perhaps the Willa Cather Foundation – but they seem to be focused on her life in Nebraska.

    Yes, there are greater world problems, and many worthy causes competing for money and time and resources, but it makes me sad to see this historic place just…rot away.

    Photos: Pentax KM, Acros 100 (expired), 50mm f2 lens

  • Film Photo a Day Project

    I’ve tried (and failed) at Photo a Day projects before. But ever since I saw this article on that photographer’s film Photo a Day project, I’ve really wanted to do one myself. I originally shared that link to Facebook back in January, and what I said then still holds true, so I’ll repost it here.

    There’s something about the way film captures a memory that is different than digital. The images aren’t as “perfect,” but they bring something with them that is lacking in photos taken with a phone or a digital camera. They feel more emotional, more like they are capturing how you remember something rather than just how you saw it. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but it’s just different. Better, a lot of the time. I miss shooting film.

    In the spirit of “better late than never,” I’m going to be starting my own “film photo a day” project, from September 2019 to September 2020.

    One photo, each day, one year, with one camera, and one film.

    Let’s see how it goes.

    360 exposures for a 366-day year; guess I’ll have to pick up one more roll towards the end to finish up. I’m thinking positively!

  • Carson Family Cemetery

    I initially wanted to locate this family cemetery to fulfill some requests, I think. I can’t remember. There was limited information online about it, but I found that one of the most recent graves was that of a woman who had lived in a home on the land where the cemetery lies. Her obituary in 2001 said that she had been restoring the home to serve as a bed and breakfast. The B&B’s website was long gone, but through the power of the wayback machine, I found that it had operated from at least 2001 through about 2008. I had the address of the B&B and, one day with my husband and daughter, set out to see if I could find the cemetery.

    We were able to get pretty close to where I believed it was, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a cemetery–only fields. It was December, so there wasn’t much growing in the fields. We saw some guys working nearby on a tractor, and my husband–who is much more of a “people person” than I am–asked them if they knew where it was. They were super friendly and helpful, and pointed us to the middle of a field. It was pretty muddy, and cold, but we walked across the field and discovered the small graveyard.

    Carson Family Cemetery, near Stephens City, Frederick County, Virginia (2015)

    As family cemeteries go, it was actually fairly accessible and sort of maintained, in that some of the brush had been cut at one point not too long ago).

    Grave markers for some of the Carson family members. The arrangement doesn’t seem to be the original placement of the stones.

    I haven’t done any research about the Carson family, but apparently they were descended from the Hites, a fairly well-known and prominent Frederick County family.

    The site for the B&B, Pleasant Green Gardens (named after the home associated with the cemetery), states that “Simon Carson, Jr. married Martha Williams in the fall of 1791 and settled on a farm given to them by Elisha Williams. They named the farm ‘Pleasant Green.’ Their manor house, built in 1780, of gray stone still stands today.”

    There are grave markers in the cemetery for Simon Carson Jr., and his wife, Martha. There are markers for a few other members of the Carson family, and some markers with no inscriptions or illegible inscriptions. Simon Carson, Jr.’s son James Harvey was apparently a general in the Confederate Army, but I did not see a stone for him.

    Some of the illegible/unmarked stones. The wooden cross in the top right of the photo marks a recent pet burial.

    I hope that someday, some Carson descendants or others will clear out the brush and clean and repair the stones. There seems to be animal activity that has disturbed the ground, so some additional stones or pieces might be located.

  • The Cemetery Project

    I’ve been working on this project for about 8 years, in my available time. One of the “random acts of kindness”-type things I enjoy doing is going to cemeteries and fulfilling requests for pictures that have been submitted through Find a Grave. It melds a lot of my interests: photography, genealogy, and history, and it sometimes intersects my husband’s interests too (in that it involves driving around on back roads and finding forgotten places).

    I took this during one of my first trips to fulfill a local request. (This wasn’t the requested grave – I just liked it.)

    I guess my interest in cemeteries was sparked by my grandfather, who used to traipse around the backwoods of Alabama, locating old family graves, cleaning up forgotten gravesites, and spending time with distant cousins. Not that he took me with him–admittedly, the stories of snakes and other natural threats he encountered probably show that was the right decision to make. Still, I grew up hearing about his adventures, and the visits that we did make to our family members’ graves in manicured, safe, accessible sites sparked my love of cemeteries.

    From my grandparents’ photographs: the old family home in Hatchett Creek, Goodwater, Alabama (ca. 1958). My grandfather did a lot of work to restore the local cemetery and mark graves (sadly, I have no pictures of his work).

    After finding (or often, not finding) a grave of which someone has requested a photo, I upload the photo to the site and usually that’s it: the end of the story. I kept thinking I wanted to do something more, especially with some of these cemeteries that don’t have much information about them, or were hard to find, or seem to have disappeared or become inaccessible over time. I have a historic map of the area that shows hundreds of cemeteries that don’t have any information online about them, for example.

    I’ve already spent some quality time in the local archives, but I foresee a lot more. Also, the writing on this map is tiny and I need better reading glasses.

    My “lofty goal” is to visit and photograph every “historic” cemetery in my area (which includes Frederick County, and maybe parts of Clarke and Warren County, depending on how ambitious I want to get). I’d like to research these places, and maybe highlight some of the people who are interred there, if I can discover their stories. Even in my area of fairly slow development, historic cemeteries are disappearing or being forgotten, and I don’t want history to be lost.

  • Gathering

    I’m starting the process of moving over to my new computer (and website) all of my “stuff” that’s in various places…flickr, google, blogger, my hard drive…. One thing that’s clear is that I’m not very good at “file management.”

    That’s 561 GB of things in my “Photos” folder alone, never mind the videos or some stray photos in other places. Ugh.

    I started my photo file collection with my first digital camera (I think it was an Olympus D-450 Zoom) in the late 1990s–that feat of camera engineering created 1 megapixel photos. I had some film photos developed here and there that led to similarly-sized scans. I upgraded to a later Olympus C-4000 Zoom that had 4 mp-sized photos. Then, in 2006, I got my first digital SLR: an Olympus E-500. I started shooting tons of photos (with resulting 8-mp files) and never looked back. Never organized those files and never deleted them, either!

    Over the years, I’ve added new DSLR cameras, point-and-shoot digitals, film cameras, phone cameras, and scanners to my arsenal. And here we are, 20 years and 560 gigabytes later. This might not be a quick project.