It was probably mass produced as a souvenir of the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Jamestown colony’s establishment in 1607, held on a 367-acre site at Norfolk’s Sewells Point.
SUMMARY Giles B. Jackson, although born enslaved, became an attorney, entrepreneur, real estate developer, newspaper publisher, and civil rights activist in the conservative mold of his mentor, Booker T. Washington. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), he served as a body servant to his master, a Confederate cavalry colonel. After the war, Jackson worked for the Stewart family in Richmond, where he learned to read and write. Subsequently, he was employed in the law offices of William H. Beveridge, who tutored Jackson in the law. In 1887, Jackson became the first African American attorney certified to argue before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. The next year, he helped found a bank associated with the United Order of True Reformers, and in 1900 became an aide to Washington, who had just founded the National Negro Business League in Boston. Jackson organized and promoted the Jamestown Negro Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 in the face of crit
Times suggested that visitors postpone their excursions until construction was finished. (On August 8, the
Washington Post could report only that the exhibitions were “practically” in place.) The
Times also bemoaned Norfolk’s limited and expensive lodgings and its poor transportation services. There were other problems, too. Organizers had originally intended to focus on Virginia history, but in pursuit of a more national and international audience, they changed the program, causing more confusion and missed deadlines.
A Virginia building featured presidential art and there was a re-enactment of the Battle of Hampton Roads (1862) between the ironclads CSS
Monitor. The state of Kentucky, however, also built a $40,000 replica of Daniel Boone’s first fort, and Georgia reproduced Bulloch Hall, the home of Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s mother. In addition, the Dominican Republic sponsored a building, and the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Bol