Robin Stocks is 69 and lives in Midlothian but grew up in Cumberland County. A Black Army veteran, she said her life wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for the Pine Grove School she was allowed to attend during the era of Jim Crow segregation.
“Everything about the school molded us for the rest of our lives,” Stocks said. “We took care of ourselves. We cut wood. We went and got water from the spring at my uncle’s house. We had an outside toilet.”
Of course, there were also plays the kids put on, and “everything was there like in a normal big school,” when it came to learning, Stocks said, except that there was one teacher for the seven grades attending the school.
“I’m in the third grade, I could hear everything they’re talking about. So I had to focus on my work,” Stocks recalled. “I told the story once, there was no such thing as ADHD at Pine Grove. You had to concentrate.”
That school’s history — as well as that of the other schools, churches and homes the African American community relied on in the central Virginia rural community — is what several community members are pushing to preserve as an economic driver in the region instead of a proposed landfill: historical tourism.
“There’s so much,” said Muriel Branch, president emeritus of AMMD Pine Grove Project, a group working to preserve the school and turn it into a museum and cultural center.
She’s promoting a “tourism not trash” campaign that can build off the natural, agricultural landscape comprising the county that also includes Bear Creek State Park along the James River, the state’s largest river, flowing from the western hills of the Shenandoah Valley east to the Chesapeake Bay.
“With a little imagination … I just think it’s workable,” Branch said. “Because the sites are there already.”
In total, there are over 80 churches, homes and road resources with African American historical significance within a state-recognized Pine Grove Rural Historic District designation in the county. The group has cataloged those resources as part of a preliminary information form compiled to apply for the designation with the National Register of Historic Places.
But along with needing a $60,000 cultural resource survey to complete its application, the group is concerned with a proposal from GFL Environmental to build the Green Ridge landfill next to the school and several homes where descendants of the community still live.
“I want Cumberland to be a place that generations to come want to call home,” said Justin Reid, a cultural organizer and cofounder of Griffin Blvd Archives who is on the board of the Virginia Tourism Corporation. “Not this place that we’re fleeing.”
GFL has downsized its initial proposal to no longer move Pine Grove Road, which Black students walked down to get to the school, amid community pushback and difficulties with obtaining a U.S. Army Corps permit to mitigate harms to wetlands.
The company offered AMMD Pine Grove $100,000 to help renovate the school, Branch said, but those offers were turned down out of fear the money would come with stipulations to no longer oppose the project. The company has since maintained it “will not inhibit any future plans that may be planned for the area,” according to a project spokesperson.
Preservation Virginia, a historic preservation group, has spoken up against the landfill project, citing the need to preserve the area that has “important historic value” for the state, particularly as the country nears its 250th anniversary next year.
“It’s an important chapter in American civil rights,” said CEO Will Glasco.
The state’s Department of Historic Resources, while not commenting on the project, noted that “Black history is, of course, incredibly significant in Cumberland County and in the Commonwealth.
“DHR is committed to fostering the stewardship of important resources, like the Pine Grove School and the historical marker for John Robinson that was unveiled in February, so that residents and visitors alike can gain a deeper understanding of the county’s history and its role in the history of Virginia,” an agency spokesperson said.
Cumberland County Administrator Derek Stamey said the county created a New Business Task Force under the Economic Development Authority as part of a broader grant-funded economic development strategic plan looking to be wrapped up in about two months.
“A lot of these efforts have a lot of synergy,” Stamey said. “It’s definitely something that we are looking at hard and we’re embracing long-term for the county.”
Asked how the landfill proposal may conflict with economic development goals, “we don’t know what that impact would be. … I’d have to see some studies and some figures as it relates to that.”
A rich history
The events that happened throughout the years of Cumberland’s existence are as rich as the soil in the county that has produced its agricultural industry.
The original inhabitants of the region can be dated back to the Monacan Indian tribes, who descended from the Siouan Indians living in the central Piedmont region of the state.
Flash forward to when Colonists arrived. Cumberland County was founded in 1749 and became known as the place for the “First Call for Independence”: Outside the Effingham Tavern on April 22, 1776, Carter Henry Harrison read resolutions and was instructed “Positively to Declare of an Independency” at the Virginia Convention, making such a first call for independence from Great Britain.
There’s also Cartersville, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with its 18th-century to early 1900s architecture. And Lucyville, another community founded by a freed slave.
The preservation of that Black history, which includes enslaved boatmen who used bateaus on the James River delivering goods to and from Richmond, is a focus of community members. The Black community came to be after slaves, mostly men, honed their craft and tobacco yields to buy their freedom, said Lakshmi Fjord, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia and board member for AMMD Pine Grove. Some slaves were freed following the Confederacy’s Civil War surrender in Appomattox, just west of the region beyond Buckingham.
“It’s really a fascinating tale of the earliest days of emancipation,” said Fjord. “Not the Emancipation Proclamation, but of forced emancipation by Union soldiers at the plantations themselves.”
The community grew around churches, of which there are 16 still active in Cumberland County, Branch said. Within the historical district area are four, under the Baptist denomination — Bethlehem, built in 1861; New Hope, built in 1868; Mt. Calvary, founded in 1905; and Rising Zion Baptist Church, founded in 1911 — that stand out to Fjord.
The churches were of a “brush arbor” construct, meaning they had four wooden poles forming a box with a brush roof. Such construction typically led to the building burning down, making the concentration of standing resources “just unheard of,” said Fjord.
“I’ve never heard of a place that has this much cultural history in its standing resources, which is why the idea of a tour came up,” Fjord said.
The places of worship also provided burial grounds and schools in one form or another. Education for Black people eventually came by way of three Rosenwald-built schools: Pine Grove School, New Hope School and Turkey Cock School.
Those schools were built during the Jim Crow era of segregation by Julius Rosenwald, former president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute, to give Black people an education.
AMMD Pine Grove Project has used $290,000 from National Park Service funding to stabilize the school built in 1917 and is planning its next steps to create the community center. Glasco, of Preservation Virginia, noted that only a third of about 380 of the Rosenwald schools in the state are still standing today after two-thirds had been demolished or lost.
“We have three,” Branch said. “Those schools are now nationally recognized.”
Taking advantage of a tourism opportunity
Cumberland could enjoy the fruits of some vision and planning for a tourism industry, Branch said.
Tourism in Virginia is an “integral part” of the state’s economy, according to a Virginia Tourism Corporation report from Tourism Economics, supporting about 5% of all jobs in Virginia in 2023.
In Virginia last August, Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted the $33.3 billion in visitor spending as playing an “essential role” in the economy. The Virginia Tourism Corporation, created by the General Assembly in 1999 “to stimulate the tourism segment of the economy,” in 2019 released its Drive 2.0 plan, a statewide strategic tourism plan last updated in 2013.
Within it, the plan states, “The Commonwealth’s primary lure is history,” while highlighting efforts of community leaders in Farmville of Prince Edward County, just north of Cumberland County, to renovate an old building into Hotel Weyanoke in 2018. The year prior, Sandy River Outdoor Adventures added glamping tipis and cabins.
Prince Edward County saw tourism-related expenditures increase from $17.6 million in 2007 to $25.9 million in 2018, though that was prior to COVID. The spending in 2018 increased by 12.7% from 2017, compared to the statewide increase of 4.4% over the same time period.
“Cumberland County’s rich African American history, including sites such as Pine Grove School and other historic Black schools and churches, presents a compelling opportunity for cultural tourism development,” said Juliana Thomas, director of communications at VTC. “An investment in heritage tourism could offer long-term benefits through increased visitation, community pride, and increased economic activity.”
Reid suggested that tourism could be accomplished with a regional partnership with Buckingham County and Prince Edward County. He pointed to the Alabama Black Belt National Heritage Area, which draws in tourism to tell the story of farming communities that capitalized on slavery and extends all the way into Virginia, as an example. There’s a “long history,” Reid said, of tobacco cultivation in Southside.
“There’s a lot of untapped potential for a regionwide plan,” Reid said. “My biggest fear is that there’s a lack of imagination and we’re preventing ourselves from taking advantage of future opportunities that aren’t even being discussed.”
Additional research from Preservation Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017 points to the economic vitality of historical tourism, leading to an average of tourists staying at least one night in an area spending $458 per household and day-trippers spending about $380. The spending by international travelers increases to $1,134.
“There are a lot of people coming to Virginia to see history like this,” said Glasco. “If it’s destroyed or negatively impacted by industrial development, then we might lose a lot of that tourism industry.” 
Job creation as a goal
Tourism advocates believe that the use of cultural and natural resources in Cumberland can more easily create jobs than constructing a new landfill, which could also lead to irreparable harm, despite the cash windfall for the locality, they say.
GFL said it has environmental protections in place and that it will generate $1.5 million annually for the county through host fees and waste disposal savings for residents. In 2021, the company referenced an economic analysis report stating “ongoing operations and cell expansion construction at Green Ridge will support 34 full-time employees and support 17 jobs through indirect and induced economic activity in Cumberland County.”
It’s not clear just how many jobs could be created through the tourism initiative, but proponents say that workers would likely be needed to drive the buses used to visit perhaps different themes of the county: the schools, the churches, Cartersville, the boatmen, the calls for independence. Workers would be needed for potential reenactments, at the sites to explain the location’s significance and to maintain the facilities.
Currently, Curtis James, 84, who went to Pine Grove School, has done work at the school to remove downed trees and get water out of the ground in the area that relies on wells.
“I put the pump in the well,” James said. “Got that part, got water.”
While data centers are increasingly being proposed in rural areas, Reid said, preserving the natural landscape can be a draw for other industries that could include skilled manufacturers, who seek quality-of-life recreational opportunities in a locality. The tourism effort could fall under the work of economic development and be non-exploitative of the environment or underpaying workers, Reid added.
“It’s hard to imagine what else is coming,” said Reid, “We’re not working to explore what’s possible.”
Stamey, the county administrator, said the idea for the strategic plan is to clearly lay out action steps and a timeline that could help with seeking funding.
“As it relates to tourism, it makes any type of grant application much more attractive and more likely to be awarded,” Stamey said.
______________________
Correction 11 a.m. July 10: Muriel Branch is president emeritus of AMMD Pine Grove Project, which is working to preserve the Pine Grove school and turn it into a museum and cultural center. Will Glasco is CEO of Preservation Virginia.
