When you walk through the Montgomery Museum of Art and History, there’s a rare Maxwell car from 1920. Deeper inside the museum, stored in the archives, is a brown, leather-bound book that may hold the key to some of the untold stories from this community.
Museum curator Sherry Wyatt turns the pages of a store ledger that dates from 1822-25, which chronicles the daily transactions of a general store that once stood in downtown Christiansburg.
“All the people that were living in Montgomery County were interacting with the store in some way,” Wyatt said.
She said this includes Black men and women who were sometimes sent to the store to purchase items on behalf of their owners. On one of the pages, for example, is an entry that reads, “For Robert Craig. 20 pounds of nails, per boy.” The “boy” doesn’t refer to a child— he was an enslaved man. And though his name wasn’t recorded in the ledger, it may be possible to learn his name by studying other records from the household where he was enslaved.
The Montgomery museum was just awarded a grant by the Virginia Museum of History and Culture to digitize and study information recorded in this store ledger. They’ll use it to create an interactive exhibit, which will focus on the lives of Black people in Southwest Virginia.
“One of the things that the store ledger does is provide a window into daily life in a community like Christiansburg,” said Daniel Thorp, an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech who’s been researching the history of Black men and women across Southwest Virginia from the 1800s. He says for years, most historians have ignored these stories.
“Daily life would have been a mixture of black and whites working together eating together, going to church together,” Thorp said. “Not as equals, but side by side. And that’s something that’s been forgotten, I think.”
Thorp isn’t directly involved with the Kyle Ledger grant, but he says it can help bringing more of the untold stories of Black history to light.
The Montgomery Museum plans to open an interactive exhibit by this winter, highlighting the store ledger and the history of enslaved people in Montgomery County. They’ll also be launching a new education lab, which will be available to anyone interested in researching local history.
The Montgomery Museum of Art and History, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, is open Tuesday-Friday 10:30-4:30, Saturday 1:00-4:00.
