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<p>Throughout Virginia’s history, women have played important, but often overlooked, roles as educators, entrepreneurs, health care providers, religious leaders, farmers, artists, writers, reformers, pioneers, laborers, and community builders. This walking tour by the Library of Virginia utilizes Clio's ability to create walking tours and heritage trails in a single entry by placing biographical sketches of Virginia women at the location where they once lived and worked. This heritage trail celebrates women’s accomplishments and honors women of the past and present who developed new approaches to old problems, strove for excellence based on the courage of their convictions, and initiated changes in their communities, state, and nation.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>

This heritage trail showcases the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History honorees from the eastern portion of the state including the Eastern Shore. The Virginia Foundation for Women started the Virginia Women in History educational program in 2000. In 2006, the foundation transferred the program to the Library of Virginia. In addition to heritage trails in Clio, resource materials for Virginia Women in History are available online and teachers may also request materials from the Library of Virginia.



Caroline Bradby Cook (born ca. 1839), a resident of the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County, was widowed in 1861, a few months after giving birth to her only child, George Major Cook. She and most of the other Pamunkey remained loyal to the United States during the Civil War, and her brothers and other relatives guided United States Army units in eastern Virginia and served as river pilots. When the Union army encamped at the Indian town, she cooked and washed for the soldiers even as they systematically dismantled her house and fences and burned the wood in their campfires. &nbsp;After the war Cook went to the county court in order to take out letters of administration on the estate of her husband, Major Cook. Pamunkey Indians did not own the real estate on the reservation land, but as a widow she inherited the house and fence that the soldiers had destroyed. Cook filed a claim with the Southern Claims Commission for compensation from the United States government for her ruined property. In rebuilding her house and fence, she carefully counted the posts and pickets in order to apply for compensation for no more than she was entitled to. Cook received $100 in 1879. <br><br>She was a founding member of the Pamunkey Baptist Church, organized in April 1865. Her son, whom she raised with the help of her relatives, served as chief of the Pamunkey from 1902 until his death in 1930. He championed the rights of Virginia's Indians when their cultural heritage and even legal existence were being challenged. The last known reference to Caroline Bradby Cook in public records is the 1910 census, which recorded that she was then living in the house of her son the chief.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br>

A Unionist during the Civil War, Caroline Bradby Cook protected, preserved, and passed on the Pamunkey heritage, and in 1865 helped establish the Pamunkey Indian Baptist Church, located on Lay Landing Road on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation.

Photograph of Caroline Bradby Cook, Oct. 1899, created by De Lancey W. Gill, NAA INV 06196100 OPPS NEG 00880, Glass Negatives of Indians (Collected by Bureau of American Ethnology), National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Caroline Bradby Cook

<div>Mollie Wade Holmes Adams (October 8, 1881–December 14, 1973) grew up in King William County in the Adamstown (later the Upper Mattaponi) Indian community. She faced the same hardships as her neighbors, including poverty, difficulty in attaining education, and the racism of outsiders. In 1900 she married Jasper Lewis Adams, who served as chief of the Upper Mattaponi from 1923 to 1973. Mollie Adams joined her husband as a leader of the tribe as he facilitated the purchase and construction of the Sharon Indian School in 1919 and the Indian View Baptist Church in 1942.</div><div><br></div><div>Raising her twelve children, Adams faced the bigotry of Walter A. Plecker's management of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics. Plecker systematically worked to reclassify all Virginia Indians as "negro" or "colored" and therefore relegate them to the same racist laws to which African Americans were subject. In a counter move to Plecker's claims against the Indians, several white men signed a statement certifying Adams's Indian ancestry. Despite this adversity, Adams was a tribal elder and passed on the almost-lost skill of feather weaving. She aided anthropologists by allowing her picture to be published in one study and by explaining her herbal remedies to researchers. Adams built a strong base for the modern Upper Mattaponi through her church and tribal activism. Her son Andrew Washington Adams was chief of the Upper Mattaponi from 1974 to 1985, and her grandson, Kenneth Adams, is the current chief.</div><div><br></div><div><i>Nominated by Arlene Milner, Keysville.<br><br></i><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><i><br></i></div>

Mollie Holmes Adams helped preserve the Upper Mattaponi heritage by passing on the almost-lost art of feather weaving and recording her herbal remedies, and in 1919 she helped facilitate the establishment of the Sharon Indian School.

Photograph of Mollie Holmes Adams,courtesy of the Library of Virginia

Mollie Holmes Adams

<div>G. Anne Nelson Richardson (b. 1956)&nbsp;became chief of the Rappahannock in 1998, when she succeeded her father, Captain O. Nelson. As a child her Indian name was Princess Little Fawn. She grew up on Indian Neck, in King and Queen County. At age eighteen she was elected assistant chief. Her work on a study to establish the historical predecessors of the eight modern Virginia tribes helped the Rappahannock win official state recognition in February 1983.</div><div><br></div><div>In 1991 Richardson became executive director of Mattaponi- Pamunkey-Monacan, Inc., a consortium providing training and employment services for Virginia Indians. In January 1998 she was elected to her first five-year term as chief of the Rappahannock, the first woman to hold the position since early in the eighteenth century. Of the three hundred Rappahannock, about half live on or near tribal lands in Caroline, Essex, and King and Queen Counties. Richardson has diligently worked for cultural, economic, and social revitalization, including completing a cultural center and planning for housing and future tribal development.</div><div><br></div><div>Richardson became chair of the Native American Employment and Training Council in 2005. She campaigns for federal recognition of Virginia’s documented tribes and lobbies at both state and federal levels to ensure their rights. She seeks to educate the public by dispelling stereotypes. When asked in 2000 the single thing she wanted the public to know about the Rappahannock, Richardson replied, “That my people still exist and will continue to exist. I think most people, when they think about the history of Virginia and the Indians in particular, . . . think about these things like the dinosaurs that existed and died and now we’re writing about them and learning about them. But that’s not the case with the tribes. They have vibrant communities that have been preserved for thousands of years.”<br><br><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

The Rappahannock Tribe Cultural Center opened shortly before the tribe elected G. Anne Nelson Richardson its first female chief since the 1700s. As chief, Richardson works to revitalize her community and win federal recognition for Virginia’s Indians.

G. Anne Nelson Richardson, photograph courtesy of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

G. Anne Nelson Richardson

<div>Growing up in Caroline County, Mildred Jeter Loving (July 22, 1939–May 2, 2008) fell in love with Richard P. Loving. In 1958 they married in Washington, D.C., because he was white and she had African American and Native American ancestry. A few weeks afterward, the couple was arrested at their home for violating Virginia's law against interracial marriage. They were each sentenced to one year in jail, with the sentence suspended so long as they lived outside the state and did not return together.</div><div><br></div><div>The Lovings moved to Washington and had three children, but Mildred Loving did not like living away from her home. In 1963 she wrote to the U.S. attorney general for help. At his suggestion, she contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a motion in the county court to vacate the sentence and allow the Lovings to live in Virginia as husband and wife. The local judge refused and the ACLU filed subsequent unsuccessful suits in state and federal courts. The United States Supreme Court heard their case, and its unanimous ruling on June 12, 1967, overturned Virginia's law, stating that the freedom to marry a person of another race was an individual civil right that a state could not deny.</div><div><br></div><div>Loving and her family returned to Caroline County, where they lived quietly in the home they built together. She often demurred that "all we ever wanted was to get married, because we loved each other," but Loving's courage ensured that interracial couples no longer faced legal discrimination against marriage.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br></div>

As a plaintiff in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, Mildred Jeter Loving helped legalize interracial marriage in Virginia and the United States. She and her husband lived in Central Point and are buried at St. Stephens Baptist Church's cemetery there.

Photograph of Mildred Loving, courtesy of the Estate of Grey Villet.

Mildred Delores Jeter Loving

<div>A lifelong resident of Tangier Island, Elizabeth Inez Parks Pruitt (b. 1962) serves the community as its primary medical officer. Under the tutelage of Dr. David Nichols, the island’s primary care physician who commuted to Tangier once a week, she ultimately became a physician assistant and now operates the local health clinic.</div><div><br></div><div>Known for its distinctive dialect, Tangier Island is isolated in the northern reaches of the Chesapeake Bay and can be reached only by aircraft or boat. It is home to a dwindling community of watermen; providing immediate medical care has always been a challenge. Pruitt—who can trace her lineage on the island back several generations—became intrigued by the medical profession early in life when a doctor stayed with her family during his occasional visits to Tangier from the Eastern Shore. She entered the medical field as a dental assistant in 1984, and in 1987 began her long relationship with Nichols as his assistant. In 2001 Pruitt entered the physician assistant program at the University of Maryland–Eastern Shore, at first commuting almost daily by boat. She received her diploma in 2006.</div><div><br></div><div>Beginning in 2004, Pruitt worked with fellow residents, Nichols, and many supporters to replace the island’s ramshackle clinic with a new $1.7 million complex. After Nichols’s death in 2010, Pruitt became the primary health care provider to Tangier’s roughly 500 residents. “I enjoy making a difference in the lives of others. The world should be a better place because a person has lived.”</div><div><br></div><div><i>Nominated by the 2011–2012 Tenth-Grade class of Duane Crockett, Tangier Combined School, Tangier.<br><br></i><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

Physician Assistant Elizabeth Inez Pruitt fills a vital need in the isolated community of Tangier by serving as its primary health care provider at the island's David B. Nichols Health Center.

Photograph of Inez Pruitt, courtesy of Laura Emery/Cooperative Living Magazine.

Elizabeth Inez Parks Pruitt

<div>A native of Pungoteague, in Accomack County, Susie May Ames (January 10, 1888–July 30, 1969) became an influential historian. After graduating from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1908 with a major in English and a minor in Latin, she taught in public schools in Virginia, Maryland, Indiana, and Kentucky until 1923, when she joined the Randolph-Macon Woman's College faculty. Like many other professional women of her generation, she never married. Ames continued her education while she worked. She received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1926 and a doctorate in history in 1940 with a published dissertation entitled<i> Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century</i>.</div><div><br></div><div>One of only a small number of women with a doctorate in history at that time, Ames taught at Randolph-Macon Woman's College until she retired in 1955. She published one of the first scholarly studies of the Eastern Shore during the Civil War, but her work concentrated on Virginia's early colonial period and its people. Ames edited and published two volumes of seventeenth-century Eastern Shore county court records, the first of them in 1954 in the prestigious American Legal Records series that the American Historical Association sponsored. Ames's five books and her scholarly articles in professional journals made major contributions to understanding the social and cultural life of men, women, and children in seventeenth-century Virginia.</div><div><br></div><div>Ames was a founder of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Historical Society and in 1964 received a certificate of commendation from the American Association for State and Local History.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br></div>

A native of Pungoteague, Susie May Ames was an influential historian of Virginia's Eastern Shore. In the 1950s she helped establish the Eastern Shore of Virginia Historical Society, headquartered at Ker Place in Onancock.

Photograph of Susie May Ames, courtesy of the Library of Virginia. 

Susie May Ames

Honorees were selected by the Library of Virginia

Entries on This Tour

Virginia Women in History Heritage Trail - Eastern Virginia and Eastern Shore

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