WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

As the Virginia Guide passed into print, the staff of the Virginia Writers’ Project found an odd alloy in its pleasure — thinking less of what had gone into the book than of all that had to be left out. Compressing the story of the country’s oldest commonwealth between two covers was a painful task, the preface admits, and fell hardest on the State Supervisor, whose duty it became to delete more words than she allowed to remain. As first written the Guide was perhaps four times its final length; through amputations gradually and torturously performed it was cut to meet the publishers’ practical demands, with the reserved passages promised to other books rather than abandoned.

The book was begun in April 1937 and finished three years later, and it is frankly the work of many hands. Field workers gathered data that were sent to the Richmond office and there checked and amplified in the State Library; the parts of the essay section came partly from outside specialists, but the city and highway sections are wholly the product of the project’s own staff. In its final form, the preface notes, the writing represents the craftsmanship of five writers working under the State Supervisor as coordinator — a collaboration meant to fit together, like a mosaic, into an accurate picture of the State’s yesterday and today.

Eudora Ramsay Richardson, the State Supervisor, signed the preface and the note to the second printing alike. An advisory committee appointed by the sponsor, Governor James H. Price, read the manuscript in sections; the State Library, the Conservation Commission, the National Park Service, and local historians everywhere opened their files. The writers tried, they said, to record without bias a Virginia that worked for democracy through the colonial years and whose statesmen led the fight for a republic — and they promised the traveler their spoonbread, Smithfield ham, and Brunswick stew if he would but listen to the tales they liked to tell.

The volume follows the series pattern in three parts. Part I, Virginia’s Background, opens with Douglas Southall Freeman’s essay “The Spirit of Virginia” and continues through the natural setting, Indians, history, transportation, agriculture, industry, education, folklore and music, art, literature, the theater, and architecture. Part II describes the cities, from Alexandria, Fredericksburg, and Williamsburg to Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke. Part III lays out twenty-four numbered tours with their lettered branches — the Tidewater, the Piedmont, the Valley, and the Skyline Drive among them — and Part IV adds appendices of 1940 census figures, radio stations, and highway changes, with an index. Sponsored by Governor Price and first published in 1940, it appeared from Oxford University Press.