Clarke County, decade by decade

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1688 A proprietary boundary nobody could locate

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1728-06-13 The colony grants 26,000 acres near the forks of the Shenandoah

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1730-09-22 Robert Carter grants the proprietary's Valley land to his own family
• 1734 Fairfax formalizes two settlement policies at once

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1740 The Carter grant is divided among eight heirs
• 1748 Mann Page's tract passes to Ralph Wormeley

The claims placed in this decade come from 3 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Why Battletown?A spring, a tavern, an estate — and a name the town could not shake.
• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.
• Why Clarke? The county's name and the man it honorsIn 1836 the legislature named the new county for George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War general born near Charlottesville. The papers spelled it both ways.

Events on the timeline

• 1750 West of the Opequon is taken up; east of it lies deserted

The claims placed in this decade come from 2 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1770 The quarter comes to east Frederick

The claims placed in this decade come from 2 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1789 Old Chapel is reorganized as the Episcopal church

Events on the timeline

• 1798 Berryville is incorporated

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Daniel Morgan 1800

Stories

• Why Battletown?A spring, a tavern, an estate — and a name the town could not shake.

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.

Events on the timeline

• 1810 The Sarah Stribling House is built
• 1817 Published Paulding prints Tuckahoe and Cohee, and draws the line at the Blue Ridge

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.

• Hofstra reads the county's separation as the outcome of a divergence laid down with the earliest settlement of the Valley, writing that it was "not simply an increase in population or just the proximity of the courthouse" that prompted the petition. That is an interpretation reaching past the practical arguments the 1834 sources record, and the chapter in which he makes it was not among the pages available to this project.
• In the session of 1835 and 1836 printed remonstrances opposed "every division of the county, but most earnestly and emphatically" the Battletown division, arguing that the wealth of Frederick lay "in that corner of it where its population is not" and that if the plan were dropped, "our friends of the Battletown vicinity will be restored to a full participation in all the honors of the county."

The claims placed in this decade come from 14 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• John O’Connor 1832

Stories

• Before the county: two land offices and a line at the OpequonHow an undefined proprietary boundary produced two land offices with opposite terms, and what grew up on either side of the Opequon in the century before the county existed.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• How Clarke left Frederick: the petitions and the newspapers, 1833 to 1836Three petitions, two defeats in Richmond and a tied vote that the Speaker broke, from the petitions themselves and the newspapers of the day.
• Why Clarke? The county's name and the man it honorsIn 1836 the legislature named the new county for George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War general born near Charlottesville. The papers spelled it both ways.
• More than half enslaved: Clarke County in the census of 1840The first federal census of the new county counted 3,325 enslaved people. This is who held them, line by line and family by family, as the census records it.
• Free in a slave county: Clarke's free Black people, 1836 to 1862About one person in forty in Clarke was free and Black. The county taxed them on lists of their own, and the law watched them closely.

Events on the timeline

• 1830 Treadwell Smith buys the house and keeps an ordinary
• 1833-12-30 A petition to divide Frederick County reaches the House of Delegates
• 1834-03-29 Published The division is argued in print, and the taunts of poverty are attested
• 1836-03-08 Clarke County is formed from Frederick County, with Berryville as its seat

The claims placed in this decade come from 7 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• More than half enslaved: Clarke County in the census of 1840The first federal census of the new county counted 3,325 enslaved people. This is who held them, line by line and family by family, as the census records it.
• Free in a slave county: Clarke's free Black people, 1836 to 1862About one person in forty in Clarke was free and Black. The county taxed them on lists of their own, and the law watched them closely.

The claims placed in this decade come from 9 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Daniel Morgan 1856

Stories

• Why Battletown?A spring, a tavern, an estate — and a name the town could not shake.
• The reported 1854 drowning near Parker's LandingSix men drowned in the Shenandoah in September 1854. Two newspapers named the people said to own or hire them, and named none of the six.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• The Clarke Rifles: Berryville's company, 1859 to 1920How the men of Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry, were remembered: a 1948 local history, and the letters and notices the Clarke Courier printed as they died.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.
• Consumption, croup and cholera infantum: how Clarke died, 1853 to 1896What the county's death register records of how people died, by period and by race, counted from the entries on this site's deaths collection.
• Free in a slave county: Clarke's free Black people, 1836 to 1862About one person in forty in Clarke was free and Black. The county taxed them on lists of their own, and the law watched them closely.

The claims placed in this decade come from 22 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Thomas D. Gold (Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry) 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866
• Alec Cary 1869
• Pinkey Blakely 1869
• R. O. Allen 1861, 1863, 1864
• William Moore 1861, 1863, 1865
• Mary F. Lewis 1864
• Edmund Pendleton 1862, 1864
• James L. Ashby 1864
• Pius Francis Topper 1864
• Philip J. Afflick 1866
• Walter T. Bennett 1866
• Roger P. Annan 1867
• William B. Atkins 1867

Stories

• Alec Cary: a killing on the turnpikeA killing on the road between Millwood and Berryville, reported a week later from what the inquest heard.
• Mary F. Lewis’s Civil War property claimA Clarke County claim for supplies taken in 1864, followed from petition to court to Congress.
• A reported reunion after Libby PrisonA scene the Clarke Courier printed in 1886, about a prison commissary and a man who got away.
• Mosby's last negotiations at MillwoodTwo Confederate memoirs describe how Colonel John S. Mosby’s command met Federal officers at Millwood in April 1865 — and left without the surrender General Hancock expected.
• Before the Training SchoolGlimpses of Black schooling in Clarke County, 1868 to 1888, as a 2000 nomination reports them
• The Clarke Rifles: Berryville's company, 1859 to 1920How the men of Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry, were remembered: a 1948 local history, and the letters and notices the Clarke Courier printed as they died.
• Held in the North: Clarke men in Union prisonsFort Delaware, Elmira, Point Lookout and Washington: what the Clarke Courier's notices remembered of the county's Confederate prisoners, and of the Union soldier whose nursing set one of them free.
• Boys in the ranks: Clarke men who went to war youngFive Clarke Confederates, remembered at their deaths as having gone to war at sixteen or seventeen, "in his 'teens," or "scarcely more than a boy."
• Brandy Station, June 9, 1863: Lieutenant Allen and Sergeant MooreGold’s 1914 history tells how Lieut. R. O. Allen of the Clarke Cavalry shot Col. B. F. Davis at Brandy Station. Allen’s service record, and William Moore’s, show what the day cost them.
• Wounded: five Clarke soldiers and what they carried homeManassas, Kernstown, Brandy Station and Gettysburg, as the Clarke Courier's death notices of 1899 to 1914 remembered them.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.

Events on the timeline

• 1867-11 Document dated Josephine sells a shirt to her former enslavers

The claims placed in this decade come from 7 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Benjamin F. Alexander 1872
• Robert E. Allder 1875
• James Barber 1877
• Julius Karr Bartlett 1877
• Cyrus D. Baughman 1878
• Elijah Addison 1878
• William Baxter 1879

Stories

• The Little brothers' 1873 killing and trialsA killing inside one Clarke County family in 1873, followed through two years of trials.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• Before the Training SchoolGlimpses of Black schooling in Clarke County, 1868 to 1888, as a 2000 nomination reports them

Events on the timeline

• 1870 Twenty-four formerly enslaved people buy the 31 acres that become Josephine City
• 1870-09 Document dated Josephine buys Lots 1 and 2 on the plat
• 1871-05 Document dated Josephine and Phillip Williams are party to a Lot 1 sale
• 1879 The railroad reaches Berryville

• The 2003 Boyce Historic District nomination says the Boyce Colored School was constructed in 1885, reflecting the growing African-American population in the immediate area, and records it at 35 South Greenway Avenue as Virginia Department of Historic Resources number 172-0001-0033, a one-story gable-end frame building then vacant.

The claims placed in this decade come from 20 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Mary F. Lewis 1888
• Frederick Adams 1881
• John Banks 1881
• Thomas Bayles 1881
• James W. Bennett 1882
• Daniel Morgan 1883
• Milton A. Baughman 1884
• Welby H. Baldwin 1884
• William Banks 1884
• Edward Allen 1885
• Mamie R. Sprint 1886
• Silas F. Baughman 1886

Stories

• Why Battletown?A spring, a tavern, an estate — and a name the town could not shake.
• Human remains found at Berryville's bank site in 1881Human remains under a bank foundation in 1881, and a guess that grew firmer every time it was retold.
• Mary F. Lewis’s Civil War property claimA Clarke County claim for supplies taken in 1864, followed from petition to court to Congress.
• A reported reunion after Libby PrisonA scene the Clarke Courier printed in 1886, about a prison commissary and a man who got away.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• Before the Training SchoolGlimpses of Black schooling in Clarke County, 1868 to 1888, as a 2000 nomination reports them
• Stars on the flags: Clarke's churches in the World WarService flags, a rector gone to France, a tablet for the first man to die and an altar of thanksgiving: the First World War in the churches of Berryville and Millwood, 1918 to 1921.
• The last roll call: the Clarke Cavalry, 1884 to 1918How the survivors of Co. D, 6th Virginia Cavalry, met each summer for thirty-four years, raised a monument to their dead and brought a comrade home, until four were left to answer the roll.
• Boys in the ranks: Clarke men who went to war youngFive Clarke Confederates, remembered at their deaths as having gone to war at sixteen or seventeen, "in his 'teens," or "scarcely more than a boy."
• Capt. Lloyd W. Williams of the Marines, 1917 to 1921The Clarke Courier called him the first son of Clarke killed in France. Its reports give three dates for his death, several accounts of how he died, and his famous reply in three wordings.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.
• Consumption, croup and cholera infantum: how Clarke died, 1853 to 1896What the county's death register records of how people died, by period and by race, counted from the entries on this site's deaths collection.

Events on the timeline

• 1881 Winston Hall built, by the Legion's account
• 1882 The Josephine City School is built with local labor and money
• 1887 Dr. Alfred Tucker rents the Hawthorne building for his office and a small hospital

The claims placed in this decade come from 7 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Mary F. Lewis 1890, 1891, 1899
• G. L. D. Harris 1899 (record date)

Stories

• Everyday life in Josephine CityWhat one Black newspaper recorded about ordinary life in Josephine City between 1910 and 1927.
• Mary F. Lewis’s Civil War property claimA Clarke County claim for supplies taken in 1864, followed from petition to court to Congress.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• The last roll call: the Clarke Cavalry, 1884 to 1918How the survivors of Co. D, 6th Virginia Cavalry, met each summer for thirty-four years, raised a monument to their dead and brought a comrade home, until four were left to answer the roll.
• Wounded: five Clarke soldiers and what they carried homeManassas, Kernstown, Brandy Station and Gettysburg, as the Clarke Courier's death notices of 1899 to 1914 remembered them.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.
• Consumption, croup and cholera infantum: how Clarke died, 1853 to 1896What the county's death register records of how people died, by period and by race, counted from the entries on this site's deaths collection.

The claims placed in this decade come from 8 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Mamie R. Sprint 1902

Stories

• Berryville's depot and the window guard it becameBuilt in 1910, vacant by 1987, demolished in 1990, and back on Main Street in pieces in 2024.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Who the Old Chapel remembersA 1906 cemetery record names the estate families of Old Chapel in exhaustive detail, and the people who served them in a few borrowed words.
• Bells and flowers: Armistice and Memorial Day in Clarke, 1903 to 1946How the Clarke Courier reported the days the county set aside for its soldiers, from Decoration Day at Old Chapel to the first Memorial Day after the Second World War.
• The Clarke Rifles: Berryville's company, 1859 to 1920How the men of Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry, were remembered: a 1948 local history, and the letters and notices the Clarke Courier printed as they died.
• The last roll call: the Clarke Cavalry, 1884 to 1918How the survivors of Co. D, 6th Virginia Cavalry, met each summer for thirty-four years, raised a monument to their dead and brought a comrade home, until four were left to answer the roll.
• Held in the North: Clarke men in Union prisonsFort Delaware, Elmira, Point Lookout and Washington: what the Clarke Courier's notices remembered of the county's Confederate prisoners, and of the Union soldier whose nursing set one of them free.
• Wounded: five Clarke soldiers and what they carried homeManassas, Kernstown, Brandy Station and Gettysburg, as the Clarke Courier's death notices of 1899 to 1914 remembered them.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.

Events on the timeline

• 1905 Upton Boyce's orchards at Tuleyries reach eighty-three acres
• 1909-11-03 Published A depot promised, not yet started

• Every named individual living in Clarke in 1900 and 1910 — The 1900 and 1910 manuscript census schedules — the household-by-household enumerator books that name every man, woman and child, their age, race, occupation, birthplace and household composition. Without them, the decade's residents are almost absent from the released record.
• Who picked, packed and shipped Clarke's apples between 1900 and 1910 — The Byrd family's apple operations were consolidating in Berryville during this decade and the Tuleyries orchards were reaching maturity. Nowhere in the released corpus does a named worker, contract, packing-shed operator or shipping-agent appear for those operations before 1927.
• What schools existed in Clarke for Black children before the Rosenwald era — Josephine City School's construction, around 1882, is in the released record, but little else about the county's schools for Black children in this decade is: who taught, how many pupils attended, and how the schools were paid for.

Full silences page for 1900s →

The claims placed in this decade come from 8 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Lloyd W. Williams 1917, 1918, 1919
• Thomas D. Gold (Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry) 1915
• Lucy Franklin 1912 (record date), 1913
• John R. Castleman, Jr. 1918
• Robert Edgar Russell 1918, 1919
• George Cooper 1910
• S. W. Brown 1910 (record date)
• R. O. Allen 1914

Stories

• Berryville's depot and the window guard it becameBuilt in 1910, vacant by 1987, demolished in 1990, and back on Main Street in pieces in 2024.
• Everyday life in Josephine CityWhat one Black newspaper recorded about ordinary life in Josephine City between 1910 and 1927.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Bells and flowers: Armistice and Memorial Day in Clarke, 1903 to 1946How the Clarke Courier reported the days the county set aside for its soldiers, from Decoration Day at Old Chapel to the first Memorial Day after the Second World War.
• Stars on the flags: Clarke's churches in the World WarService flags, a rector gone to France, a tablet for the first man to die and an altar of thanksgiving: the First World War in the churches of Berryville and Millwood, 1918 to 1921.
• The last roll call: the Clarke Cavalry, 1884 to 1918How the survivors of Co. D, 6th Virginia Cavalry, met each summer for thirty-four years, raised a monument to their dead and brought a comrade home, until four were left to answer the roll.
• Five sons in France: the Lloyd brothers of ClarkeCharles, Grover, Linton, Thomas and Howard Lloyd all went to France in the First World War. Three came home wounded, and the Clarke Courier followed each of them home.
• Brandy Station, June 9, 1863: Lieutenant Allen and Sergeant MooreGold’s 1914 history tells how Lieut. R. O. Allen of the Clarke Cavalry shot Col. B. F. Davis at Brandy Station. Allen’s service record, and William Moore’s, show what the day cost them.
• Capt. Lloyd W. Williams of the Marines, 1917 to 1921The Clarke Courier called him the first son of Clarke killed in France. Its reports give three dates for his death, several accounts of how he died, and his famous reply in three wordings.
• Wounded: five Clarke soldiers and what they carried homeManassas, Kernstown, Brandy Station and Gettysburg, as the Clarke Courier's death notices of 1899 to 1914 remembered them.
• World War I: the county's soldiers, 1917 to 1923What the Clarke Courier printed about the men who went: the roll, the first killed, the wounded, and the honors.
• The Civil War: the county's soldiers, 1861 to 1865What the Clarke Courier and the county's histories recorded of its companies: in battle, in prison, and as survivors.

Events on the timeline

• 1910 The passenger depot is built
• 1910-01-05 Published The board approves the depot
• 1910-03-02 Published Work starts on the passenger depot
• 1910-08-10 Published The agent expects to move in
• 1914 Published The Battletown name is traced to tavern fighting
• 1919 The Sign of the Motor Car Inn opens in the house
• 1919 Cummins buys the building and opens a clinic

• Every named individual living in Clarke in 1910 and 1920 — The 1910 and 1920 manuscript census schedules. The 1910 schedule would tell us who was working in the Byrd apple operations at their consolidation; the 1920 schedule would name every household in Josephine City on the eve of the first People's Journal issues.
• The men from Clarke who registered for the World War I draft — Every American male aged 18–45 in June 1917 through September 1918 was required to fill out a Selective Service draft card giving name, address, birth date and place, next of kin, current employer, and race. Clarke County's cards survive as a complete set. NONE are in the released corpus.
• The 1918 influenza pandemic in Clarke County — Nothing in the released corpus names a Clarke death, a school closure, a church cancellation, a household quarantine or a hospital admission attributable to the pandemic of 1918–19.
• The People's Journal's early years and the gaps between its surviving issues — The paper's masthead gives its founding as 1895, and G. L. D. Harris is its editor and proprietor in the earliest surviving issue, of 1899. Only four issues survive from the 1910s, dated 1910, 1912, 1913 and 1914. How the paper began, who else edited or wrote for it, and what it reported between those issues is not in the corpus.

Full silences page for 1910s →

• The Census Bureau counted 7,167 people in Clarke County, Virginia, on April 1, 1930, and 7,165 on January 1, 1920 -- a difference of 2 persons, which is 0.03 per cent of the 1920 count (7,167 - 7,165 = 2; 2 / 7,165 x 100 = 0.0279 per cent). The county's population was nearly unchanged between the two enumerations.
• Clarke County returned 27 foreign-born white residents in 1930 and 40 in 1920, out of county populations of 7,167 and 7,165.

The claims placed in this decade come from 12 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Rev. E. T. Johnson 1924, 1925 (record date)
• D. G. Cooley 1925
• Leslie D. Kline 1925
• Frank B. Whiting 1925
• J. Ashby Sprint 1925, 1928 (record date), 1929 (record date)
• W. T. Lewis 1925
• Winter Royston 1925
• G. L. D. Harris 1921, 1925
• Isaac Bowman 1921, 1923
• Robert Edgar Russell 1921
• James Frank Moore 1922
• Fannie Jenkins 1924 (record date)
• Florine Johnson 1924 (record date)
• Alma B. Layton 1925
• Frances Wolfe 1925

488 more people are named in this decade’s claims; the 15 named most often are listed.

Stories

• The Battletown Inn: one name, two sitesThe Battletown Inn moved into a house older than its name, and left it again.
• Everyday life in Josephine CityWhat one Black newspaper recorded about ordinary life in Josephine City between 1910 and 1927.
• Clarke's Black school league and the proposed eighth schoolTwo Clarke County newspapers, one Black and one white, describing the same county-wide school organization from opposite sides of 1925.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The basket factory by the tracksThe Berryville Basket Company, 1921 to 1938: fruit containers made from gum logs beside the Norfolk & Western, and the people the Clarke Courier named.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Clarke County Training School: a dollar a yearHow Black families in Clarke County built, paid for and filled the Clarke County Training School, 1930–1940
• Bells and flowers: Armistice and Memorial Day in Clarke, 1903 to 1946How the Clarke Courier reported the days the county set aside for its soldiers, from Decoration Day at Old Chapel to the first Memorial Day after the Second World War.
• The Clarke Rifles: Berryville's company, 1859 to 1920How the men of Co. I, 2nd Virginia Infantry, were remembered: a 1948 local history, and the letters and notices the Clarke Courier printed as they died.
• Stars on the flags: Clarke's churches in the World WarService flags, a rector gone to France, a tablet for the first man to die and an altar of thanksgiving: the First World War in the churches of Berryville and Millwood, 1918 to 1921.
• Held in the North: Clarke men in Union prisonsFort Delaware, Elmira, Point Lookout and Washington: what the Clarke Courier's notices remembered of the county's Confederate prisoners, and of the Union soldier whose nursing set one of them free.
• Five sons in France: the Lloyd brothers of ClarkeCharles, Grover, Linton, Thomas and Howard Lloyd all went to France in the First World War. Three came home wounded, and the Clarke Courier followed each of them home.
• Boys in the ranks: Clarke men who went to war youngFive Clarke Confederates, remembered at their deaths as having gone to war at sixteen or seventeen, "in his 'teens," or "scarcely more than a boy."
• Capt. Lloyd W. Williams of the Marines, 1917 to 1921The Clarke Courier called him the first son of Clarke killed in France. Its reports give three dates for his death, several accounts of how he died, and his famous reply in three wordings.
• World War I: the county's soldiers, 1917 to 1923What the Clarke Courier printed about the men who went: the roll, the first killed, the wounded, and the honors.

Events on the timeline

• 1920 Post 41 meets at Winston Hall
• 1925-06-04 Published The Sign of the Motor Car and the Battletown Inn are separate establishments
• 1926 Graham Blandy's will leaves 712 acres to the University of Virginia as the Blandy Experimental Farm
• 1927 Blandy's first full season costs $8,000 to run against a $4,000 apple crop
• 1929 Archibald Cummins opens the Hawthorne Library in the building with his own books

• Every named individual living in Clarke in 1920 and 1930 — The census's own manuscript schedules — the household-by-household enumerator books that name every man, woman and child, their age, race, occupation, birthplace, parents' birthplaces, and household composition.
• The county's Black community after August 1927 — The People's Journal, edited by G. L. D. Harris, is the only Black-community-controlled record source for Clarke in the corpus. The latest issue of it the project has found is from August 1927. After that, the project has no source that the county's Black community controlled.
• The 1,354 Clarke residents who worked in agriculture in 1930 — 1,323 male and 31 female agricultural workers in the 1930 census. The printed table counts them without names, and no released record connects a named person to that count.
• The 180 women who worked in other domestic and personal service in 1930 — 180 women counted by the census as employed in 'other domestic and personal service' — the census's category for care, household work, and cleaning outside the fields. More women were in this category than in any other single industry that year.
• Land ownership in the county 1920–1929 — Every deed, every mortgage, every partition suit, every distress sale, every WWI-veteran land purchase during the decade. No deed book, mortgage record or chancery file from the decade has been read into the corpus.
• Every birth, marriage, and death in Clarke 1920–1929 — Every 1920s Clarke vital record. The project holds no birth or death registration from the decade, and no marriage record after 1925.
• Every named individual in a Clarke congregation 1920–1929 — Baptisms, marriages, funerals, disciplinary actions, membership additions, membership departures from every active congregation in the county — Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic. No church-book entry from any Clarke congregation is in the corpus.
• Every Clarke resident who registered for the WWI draft 1917–1918 — Every Clarke man between 18 and 45 registered under the Selective Service Act. Each card records name, address, date of birth, race, citizenship, occupation, employer, nearest relative, and physical description. The project holds none of the cards.
• What the Clarke Courier printed each week 1920–1929 — The Clarke Courier is the county's continuously-published weekly paper. Across the decade that is about 520 issues. The project holds machine-read text of 506 of them. Released claims draw mostly on issues from 1921 through 1925. Only a handful of items from 1927–1929 have been released, and nothing from 1920 or 1926.
• What Clarke County looked like in the 1920s — No photograph, film frame or postcard from the decade is shown on the site. Downtown Berryville, Josephine City, the schools, the Fall Meet at Boyce, individual named residents — no visual record for any of them.
• The 1926–1930 Byrd governorship as it played out from Berryville — Harry F. Byrd Sr. was elected governor of Virginia in 1925 while running his apple business at Rosemont in Berryville. He served 1926–1930. The county's most nationally-consequential 1920s resident appears on the site only in passing.
• The likely reason Clarke's 1920s illiteracy rate halved — Clarke County's Bureau of the Census-reported illiteracy rate fell from 9.7 per cent in 1920 to 4.8 per cent in 1930, against a population that held level. No document in the corpus explains why.

Full silences page for 1920s →

The claims placed in this decade come from 15 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• J. Ashby Sprint 1930, 1932 (record date), 1933, 1936, 1937
• Mamie R. Sprint 1935, 1936, 1937
• Bob Creel 1937
• Doug Carter 1937
• Harry Lee Boxwell 1937

Stories

• Hawthorne Hall: a house with many usesA corner house that was a tavern, a hospital, a clinic, the county's only library, a bus shelter and a home.
• Clarke's Black school league and the proposed eighth schoolTwo Clarke County newspapers, one Black and one white, describing the same county-wide school organization from opposite sides of 1925.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The basket factory by the tracksThe Berryville Basket Company, 1921 to 1938: fruit containers made from gum logs beside the Norfolk & Western, and the people the Clarke Courier named.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Clarke County Training School: a dollar a yearHow Black families in Clarke County built, paid for and filled the Clarke County Training School, 1930–1940
• Clarke County Training School: opening day and the debt that followedThe dedication of the Clarke County Training School in September 1930, and what its Black patrons went on paying, 1930–1945
• Bells and flowers: Armistice and Memorial Day in Clarke, 1903 to 1946How the Clarke Courier reported the days the county set aside for its soldiers, from Decoration Day at Old Chapel to the first Memorial Day after the Second World War.

Events on the timeline

• 1930 The original Josephine City school is moved and becomes a home economics building
• 1931-06-11 Published A children's tonsil and adenoid clinic is announced for the Hawthorne Building
• 1934-04-12 Published The Little Shop advertises the Hawthorne Building as its headquarters
• 1935 Orchards around the Quarters give way to the arboretum
• 1935-11-21 Published The Hawthorne Library turns five with 2,000 books and thirteen thousand loans
• 1939-02-16 Published A bazaar in the library and the Tappan apartments

• Every named individual living in Clarke in 1930 and 1940 — The 1930 and 1940 manuscript census schedules. The 1930 schedule would name every person the released 1930 US Census claims are counting. The 1940 schedule would name every worker in the New Deal WPA and CCC programs the county participated in.
• How Clarke experienced the Great Depression year by year — The released record does not describe the Depression in Clarke as such. Nothing released reports a bank failure, a relief roll or a count of the unemployed in Clarke between 1929 and 1939, and no released item ties the county's hard times to the national collapse. The 1930 census predates the worst of the collapse and reports employment as if the crisis had not begun.
• The county's Black community across the entire decade — The latest People's Journal issue the project has found is from August 1927. If the paper continued into the 1930s, no such issue has been found. If it stopped, no account of that closure is in the corpus either. The 1930 census counts Black Clarke residents but names none.
• The New Deal in Clarke County — The Civilian Conservation Corps had a camp near Front Royal that included Clarke County boys; the Works Progress Administration built roads, schools and civic buildings across Virginia; the Farm Security Administration relocated families. NONE of these appears in the released corpus for Clarke.

Full silences page for 1930s →

• In an unsigned editorial headed "Spotting Airplanes," the Clarke Courier of January 21, 1943 said that, in a population of over 1,200 people, the Air Warning Service was having trouble finding volunteers to take over certain shifts at the air spotter post at Berryville, when only sixty or seventy people were needed. It asked people to volunteer three hours a week: "just three hours out of every 168."

The claims placed in this decade come from 6 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Fred H. Shackleford 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948
• J. Ashby Sprint 1944
• Janey Lee Pope 1944
• Mamie R. Sprint 1944
• Martha W. Levi 1947
• Mrs. Mason Osborne 1947

Stories

• Hawthorne Hall: a house with many usesA corner house that was a tavern, a hospital, a clinic, the county's only library, a bus shelter and a home.
• Bellview and the SprintsA Millwood hotel, a phosphate business at Boyce, a farm west of Boyce left to Mamie R. Sprint for life, and her son Ashby's years in the apple trade.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Clarke County Training School: a dollar a yearHow Black families in Clarke County built, paid for and filled the Clarke County Training School, 1930–1940
• Clarke's home front: watching the sky and making doClarke's home front, 1941 to 1944: aircraft spotters, a tire board and schoolhouse ration offices, as the Clarke Courier reported them.
• Clarke County Training School: opening day and the debt that followedThe dedication of the Clarke County Training School in September 1930, and what its Black patrons went on paying, 1930–1945
• Dear Dan: Clarke's home front, 1943–1945Spotters short of hours, a harvest short of hands, a family waiting on a prisoner of war, and two victory days, as the Clarke Courier reported them.
• Bells and flowers: Armistice and Memorial Day in Clarke, 1903 to 1946How the Clarke Courier reported the days the county set aside for its soldiers, from Decoration Day at Old Chapel to the first Memorial Day after the Second World War.
• Pvt. Fred H. Shackleford, 1944: in action, or by accidentThe Clarke Courier first reported him killed, presumably in action, in France. A week later it reported him accidentally shot, and for four years its pages gave both.
• World War II: the county's soldiers, 1941 to 1946What the Clarke Courier printed of the men who went and the county they left: the home front, one family's four sons, a death in France, and victory.

Events on the timeline

• 1942 John U. Miller Jr. sells watermelons at Route 7 and Chilly Hollow Road at age six
• 1947-03-27 Published The Hawthorne Library is free to read or borrow

The claims placed in this decade all come from one source family.

Stories

• The Berryville Coffee ClubFor the better part of five decades, a loose group of Berryville men met every weekday morning for coffee — no officers, no dues, and a venue that kept changing while the gathering itself did not.

Events on the timeline

• 1950 The wagon becomes a fruit and vegetable stand supplied by the family's greenhouses
• 1952 The Battletown name moves to 102 W. Main
• 1954 The newly formed Ruritan Club sponsors the county fair for the first time
• 1954 The library's books move to the new high school
• 1957-02 The Bank of Clarke County buys Winston Hall, then known as the Morris building

The claims placed in this decade come from 4 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Philip Cunningham 1965
• Buford Homer Shupe 1965
• Edith W. Rodgers 1965
• Frances Hudson 1965
• James Clarence Powell 1965
• Kenneth Lloyd Presgraves 1965
• Mary Matilda Shupe 1965
• R. L. Bruce 1965

Stories

• A pencil at Lanham's: the Boyce bank robbery of 1965A customer's search for a pencil, a trooper's radio and a Rambler station wagon, from the Winchester Evening Star's reporting on the April 1, 1965 robbery of the Boyce branch of the Bank of Clarke County.
• The Berryville Coffee ClubFor the better part of five decades, a loose group of Berryville men met every weekday morning for coffee — no officers, no dues, and a venue that kept changing while the gathering itself did not.

Events on the timeline

• 1960 The Ruritan Club buys the 30-acre horse-show grounds and renames them the Clarke County Ruritan Fairgrounds
• 1962 The bank demolishes Winston Hall for expansion and parking

The claims placed in this decade come from 2 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• The Berryville Coffee ClubFor the better part of five decades, a loose group of Berryville men met every weekday morning for coffee — no officers, no dues, and a venue that kept changing while the gathering itself did not.

Events on the timeline

• 1976 Farming for profit ends; farming continues by lease

Events on the timeline

• 1984-02 The Bank of Clarke County holds a retirement dinner at the Ruritan Fairgrounds
• 1986 Blandy Experimental Farm is designated the State Arboretum of Virginia
• 1987 Document dated The passenger depot stands vacant

The claims placed in this decade come from 2 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Events on the timeline

• 1990-07-02 Norfolk Southern demolishes the passenger depot
• 1998-10-10 The Rotary Club of Clarke County holds its Charter Night at the Battletown Inn

• The Clarke Courier's own week-by-week record, 1990–1999 — Ten years of a weekly county newspaper. Approximately 520 issues, each carrying school-board and supervisor meeting reports, business openings and closings, obituaries, sports, weddings, church news, and letters to the editor. NONE of it is in the released corpus.
• Manuscript census schedules for 1990 and 2000 — Both are still under the seventy-two-year federal privacy rule. 1990 releases in 2062; 2000 releases in 2072.
• What the Clarke County Board of Supervisors decided, 1990–1999 — Ten years of monthly Board of Supervisors minutes, School Board minutes, Planning Commission minutes, and Board of Zoning Appeals decisions. NONE of it is in the released corpus.
• The county's Black community across the 1990s — Josephine School Community Museum did not open until 2003. The community's own institutional memory in the 1990s ran through churches, family, and social organizations rather than through a Black-community-controlled newspaper (the latest People's Journal issue the project has found is from 1927). None of that oral or institutional record from the 1990s is in the corpus.

Full silences page for 1990s →

The claims placed in this decade come from 3 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Human remains found at Berryville's bank site in 1881Human remains under a bank foundation in 1881, and a guess that grew firmer every time it was retold.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• The Berryville Coffee ClubFor the better part of five decades, a loose group of Berryville men met every weekday morning for coffee — no officers, no dues, and a venue that kept changing while the gathering itself did not.

Events on the timeline

• 2000 Blue Ridge Wildlife Center begins, by its own account
• 2001-02 Document dated The IRS issues Blue Ridge Wildlife Center's 501(c)(3) exemption
• 2002 The old schoolhouse renovated for the museum
• 2003-07-12 The Josephine School Community Museum opens its first exhibit
• 2006 The Yorks sell the Hawthorne building to Melinda Kramer, who renovates it

• The Clarke Courier's online archive, 2000–2009 — Ten years of a weekly newspaper for which most or all issues from around 2005 forward are digitally archived and searchable through the paper's own website and through NewsBank / America's News. Zero of it is in the released corpus.
• The Josephine School Community Museum's founding, 2000–2003 — The site records, from the museum's own account, that it opened its first exhibit on July 12, 2003, and, from a 2014 nomination, that the schoolhouse was renovated for it in 2002. The story of HOW that happened — who organized it, what the schoolhouse looked like when they arrived, what was in the first exhibit, who spoke at the opening — is not in the corpus.
• The Blue Ridge Wildlife Center's founding, 2000–2001 — The center's own account dates its start to 2000, as a wildlife assistance hotline, and the IRS issued its 501(c)(3) exemption in February 2001. Who founded it, why it located in Clarke, and what its first years looked like are not in the released corpus.
• County government decisions across the decade — Board of Supervisors, School Board, and Planning Commission minutes for 2000–2009. Nothing in the released corpus. The 2000s were the decade in which the county comprehensive plan was revised, the Northern Virginia commuter growth pressure reached Clarke, and the school system's enrollment shifted.
• Businesses that opened, moved, or closed in Clarke, 2000–2009 — The Virginia SCC lists every business incorporated in the state and its registered agent, formation date, and status. Nothing in the corpus for this decade is drawn from SCC records. The Yorks selling the Hawthorne building to Melinda Kramer in 2006 is the only 2000s business-transaction event in the corpus.
• The Black community across the 2000s, seen through the museum's opening — The museum opening in 2003 is the single most significant institutional event for the county's Black community since the People's Journal era, and the site reflects it with one dated event resting on the museum's own account. The community's own record for the decade around that opening — who organized it, what the community thought of it, what it changed for the community's public presence — is not in the corpus.

Full silences page for 2000s →

The claims placed in this decade come from 10 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Stories

• Three restaurants at 9 East Main StreetWhat archived listings can and cannot say about 9 East Main Street.
• The Battletown Inn: one name, two sitesThe Battletown Inn moved into a house older than its name, and left it again.
• 23 East Main Street: livery, town offices, galleryA building with an old back and a new front, and a name it carries without dates.
• Human remains found at Berryville's bank site in 1881Human remains under a bank foundation in 1881, and a guess that grew firmer every time it was retold.
• Mary F. Lewis’s Civil War property claimA Clarke County claim for supplies taken in 1864, followed from petition to court to Congress.

Events on the timeline

• 2010-01 The Fire House Gallery opens at 23 E. Main
• 2012-02-24 Document dated Berryville Grille listed at 9 East Main
• 2015-06-17 Published The Battletown Inn closes, its door locked and the property for sale
• 2019-09-30 The Fire House Gallery's announced closing date

The claims placed in this decade come from 18 source families. The count shows how widely this decade has been read, not how certain any one claim is.

Years are the dates of the claims that name each person, not birth or death dates. A person named in two decades is not placed in the years between.

• Jack Schutte 2025 (record date)
• Josephine Williams 2025 (record date)

Stories

• Three restaurants at 9 East Main StreetWhat archived listings can and cannot say about 9 East Main Street.
• Berryville's depot and the window guard it becameBuilt in 1910, vacant by 1987, demolished in 1990, and back on Main Street in pieces in 2024.
• 23 East Main Street: livery, town offices, galleryA building with an old back and a new front, and a name it carries without dates.
• Inside Blue Ridge Wildlife CenterA hotline that became an 8,700 square foot wildlife hospital, on a conservation easement outside Boyce.
• Dear Clarke: a year in the life of our county2025, read back through the twelve issues of the county's own monthly paper.
• The ground they kept: Milton Valley CemeteryHow Black families around Berryville bought, paid for, tended and honored a burial ground in Josephine City, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
• Why Clarke? The county's name and the man it honorsIn 1836 the legislature named the new county for George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War general born near Charlottesville. The papers spelled it both ways.

Events on the timeline

• 2024 Patients from 40 counties and 172 species come to Blue Ridge Wildlife Center
• 2024-03 A salvaged depot window guard is installed at Hogan's Alley
• 2024-12-17 Published An eagle arrives with a blood lead level of 49
• 2025 Blue Ridge Wildlife Center takes in 4,005 patients and logs 49,686 hotline calls
• 2025-01 Maria Zimmerman is sworn in as the first woman president of the Enders Fire Company and Rescue Squad
• 2025-02-14 Document dated SueCat's Bistro listed at 9 East Main
• 2025-03 About thirty volunteers clean headstones and clear brush at Milton Valley Cemetery
• 2025-03-29 A rehabilitated eagle announced for release at Banshee Reeks
• 2025-04 Published The Clarke County Education Foundation announces $85,000 in anonymous gifts to the schools
• 2025-06-21 The fourth Juneteenth Celebration is scheduled