“Spirit of Augusta”

A musical drama portraying

the history and heritage of Augusta County, Virginia

An Augusta County Jamestown 2007 Legacy Project

The creation of the Jamestown 2007 Communities Program has allowed individual localities across the state to celebrate their own unique history and cultural heritage as part of the national commemoration. The Augusta County Jamestown 2007 Committee has chosen as one of its legacy projects the production of a musical drama that weaves together the significant history and cultural heritage of Augusta from the Native American presence that existed at the time of exploration into the Valley of Virginia to the twenty-first century. Augusta County, which once stretched to the Mississippi River and included all or parts of seven states, is truly representative of those regions where America’s frontier heritage and cultural blending began.

The script for the play is being written by L. Mack “Mountain Mack” Swift, a professional educator and storyteller, who comes with thirty years’ experience as a high school history and drama teacher, a dozen years as an interpreter at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, and extensive experience as an Appalachian storyteller at regional institutions and festivals. Complementing the narrative will be the music and lyrics written by professional musician Richard Adams. An educator as well as a musician, Adams has performed in a variety of bands and has taught students of all ages in the classroom, through his traveling school programs, and in an individual setting. Within the last few years he wrote Woody, a widely acclaimed musical about Staunton native and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. This was produced successfully in Staunton in 2004 to raise funds for the R.R. Smith Center for History and Art, and was so popular that it was brought back in another season. Adams also recently completed the music for “Shenandoah Moon,” a folksy theater production about the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps camps in western Virginia, the creation of the Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive, and the ensuing cultural conflicts with the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The play was commissioned by the non-profit group currently restoring The Wayne Theater in Waynesboro, Virginia.

Spirit of Augusta will be told as a story through the eyes of a narrator who will take the audience on a journey into the history and heritage of the county. And that journey is a storied one, starting with native peoples of Siouxan ancestry who hunted and fished in the Valley and left behind burial mounds and the remains of encampments and through their traditional practice of burning the land helped turn the Valley into a grassland prairie. Those peoples lived in small villages and used the trail, known today as U.S. Rt. 11, as the route for trading and hunting with native peoples in other parts of the country. Very little is known about the native peoples of the Valley, but what is known will be woven into the story through the characters in the play.

At the time of European settlement in the early eighteenth century, the ancient trail became part of the Great Wagon Road that drew pioneers, seeking land, into the area from Pennsylvania to settle a new frontier. Those Ulster Scots, mostly Presbyterian, and the German speaking settlers, mostly Reformed, Lutheran, and Anabaptist, brought with them unique cultural practices and folkways that were blended with those folk practices carried across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the east by the English. Adding to this rich mixture were the traditions of the African-Americans who came mostly against their will and in bondage, but nonetheless introduced some significant elements to the Augusta County culture particularly in the areas of food, crafts, and music.

The cultural markers of each group are readily apparent even today on the Augusta County landscape and within the culture itself from the songs and musical instruments to agricultural practices and the types of houses that were built. Banjos and dulcimers, apple butter and plain old butter, root cellars and central chimneys remain as cultural markers absorbed in that blending of folkways. Even the language, filled with words like Shenandoah (Native American), panhaus (German), draft (English/Scotch-Irish), and muley (Celtic), reminds us of the blending of cultures that became a unique Augusta County heritage. That rich tapestry of interwoven cultures affected the way the drama of local, regional, and national history such as the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression, played out here. In the twenty-first century, the blending is still taking place as people from Hispanic cultures have started to make the county their home.

The script will contain approximately a dozen characters, each chosen to represent a specific time period and culture in Augusta County history. The characters will be developed using the folkways of that person’s culture as well as the historical details of Augusta County history. Among potential characters are: a Native American before the point of European contact, an early Scots-Irish pioneer; a German weaver; an African-American slave; a shape note instructor; a wheat farmer; an African-American blacksmith; a farmer’s wife during the Civil War; an Irish laborer working on the railroad; an Italian stonecutter; a circuit riding minister; an evangelical African Methodist Episcopal preacher; a youth jouster competing in a tournament at Natural Chimneys and then attending a ball; a mountain person during the Great Depression, and, perhaps, a Hispanic laborer in the 21st century who has found a new home in Augusta County.

The writers are studying research files and other interpretive information at the Frontier Culture Museum, Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, and the Cyrus McCormick Farm. In addition to visits to those museums, they will be given reading lists from the consulting scholars, including extensive and unpublished Augusta County oral traditions that have been gathered by consulting scholar John Heatwole. The stories and words from those oral histories will be incorporated into the script through the lines of particular characters in the play. Many of the activities, crafts, food experiences, etc. that give the characters a richness will be drawn from the oral histories.

The foundation for the drama’s music will come from research into the musical traditions and instruments of the cultures associated with the Valley society. It is expected that both Swift and Adams will spend a great deal of time in the previously untapped resource of the Ruth McNeil Folksong Collection, housed at the Kevin Barry Perdue Archive of Traditional Culture at the University of Virginia. [Dr. Ruth McNeil, professor of music at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, during the 1940s, assisted Lloyd G. Carr, professor of biology at Staunton Military Academy, in collecting folksongs and ballads in the Staunton area. McNeil retired in May of 1972 with the intention of working on the song materials for possible publication but she died in May 1981 with that intention unfulfilled. The collection of over 200 songs and ballads was deposited in the Archive in 1981.]