VAVirginia Famous People

Eight presidents, and four of the first five

No state has sent more men to the White House, and the early run was almost a monopoly. George Washington was born at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County in 1732 and served from 1789 to 1797. Thomas Jefferson was born at Shadwell in Albemarle County in 1743 and served from 1801 to 1809. James Madison arrived at Port Conway in King George County in 1751 and served from 1809 to 1817. James Monroe, born in Westmoreland County in 1758, served from 1817 to 1825, which means four of the first five presidents grew up within a long day's ride of each other. The rest came later and stranger. William Henry Harrison was born at Berkeley Plantation in Charles City County in 1773 and died 31 days into his term in 1841. John Tyler was born at Greenway in that same small county in 1790, finished the term and served to 1845, so one stretch of the James River produced both halves of a single ticket. Zachary Taylor was born in Orange County in 1784, carried to Kentucky as an infant, and served from 1849 until he died the next summer. Woodrow Wilson was born in a Presbyterian manse in Staunton in 1856 and served from 1913 to 1921. Nobody born in Virginia has been elected since.

Farmville, Central Point, and the cases that carry their names

Barbara Johns was sixteen in April 1951 when she lured the teachers out of Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville with a forged note and led 450 students out on strike over the tar paper shacks they were taught in. The lawsuit that followed, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, was the only one of the five cases bundled into Brown v. Board of Education that students themselves began. Her statue now represents Virginia in the United States Capitol, standing where Robert E. Lee stood for more than a century. Richard and Mildred Loving drove to Washington to marry in 1958 because Caroline County would not have it, and were arrested in their own bedroom before dawn; the Supreme Court threw out the ban in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Booker T. Washington was born enslaved near Hale's Ford in Franklin County in 1856 and founded the Tuskegee Institute at 25. Maggie L. Walker, born in Richmond in 1864 to a woman who had been enslaved, opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903 and was the first Black woman to charter a bank in the country. Mary Jackson of Hampton, born 1921, went to work down the road at the Langley laboratory and in 1958 became the first Black woman NASA employed as an engineer.

Hampton Roads ran American pop for a decade

Three producers who rebuilt the sound of radio grew up within a few miles of the same tidewater. Timbaland was born in Norfolk in 1972, Missy Elliott in Portsmouth in 1971, and Pharrell Williams in Virginia Beach in 1973. Pharrell met Chad Hugo at a seventh grade summer band camp, and the two of them worked as the Neptunes. Chris Brown came from Tappahannock, a Rappahannock River town of about 2,000 people. Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News in 1917 and taken north to Yonkers as a small child. Two hundred miles west in the mountains, the Carter Family sang out of Maces Spring in Scott County and recorded at the Bristol sessions in 1927; June Carter was born there in 1929. Ralph Stanley came out of Dickenson County in 1927 with a clawhammer banjo and the old modal tunings.

Names that catch people out

Willa Cather, whose novels made the Nebraska prairie into literature, was born in Back Creek Valley near Winchester in 1873 and did not see Nebraska until she was nine. Meriwether Lewis of Albemarle County, born 1774, and William Clark of Caroline County, born 1770, were Virginians long before they were westerners. Shirley MacLaine and her younger brother Warren Beatty were both born in Richmond, in 1934 and 1937. Sandra Bullock was born in Arlington in 1964, Rob Lowe in Charlottesville the same year, Wanda Sykes in Portsmouth, and Tom Wolfe in Richmond in 1930. Edgar Allan Poe is the reverse case: born in Boston in 1809, he was taken in by a Richmond merchant family after his mother died on tour, which is why the city keeps a museum for a writer it did not produce. Dave Grohl was born in Ohio and raised in Springfield, in the northern suburbs, playing in Washington-area punk bands while still at school.

A segregated playground, a high school leap, and 82 wins

Arthur Ashe learned tennis on the Brook Field playground in Richmond where his father was the caretaker, because the city's good courts were closed to him. He won the US Open in 1968 and Wimbledon in 1975, the only Black man to take either title, and in 1996 Richmond put his statue on Monument Avenue among the Confederate generals. It is the one still standing. Moses Malone went from Petersburg High School straight into the professional ranks in 1974 without a single college game, the first modern American player to try it. Allen Iverson was born in Hampton in 1975 and was a state champion quarterback before basketball took him. Sam Snead grew up near Hot Springs in Bath County, caddied at the Homestead, and won 82 PGA Tour events, a total nobody matched until 2019. The state's most famous native is arguably not a person at all: Secretariat was foaled at Meadow Stable in Caroline County in 1970.

Notable people from bordering states

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