SUMMARY
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was the most popular of United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, even winning the endorsement of Virginia’s conservative U.S. senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (While Byrd was a fellow Democrat, he advocated a small federal government that did not spend ahead of means or interfere in state affairs.) Designed to alleviate the widespread unemployment caused by the Great Depression, the CCC recruited unmarried, unemployed young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to spend six months in camps doing conservation work, primarily in the nation’s forests. They were paid $1 a day, most of which was sent to their parents in $25 monthly allotments. The War Department ran most of the camps on a military basis, providing supervision and discipline. Although some critics saw a fascist-like militarism in such circumstances, the CCC had the positive, although unintended consequence of preparing men for service
Here is a list of five women whose lives touched the history of the Tidewater.
1. Clementina Rind: (Williamsburg) Following the death of her husband in 1773, Rind is considered the first female American newspaper printer and publisher.
Statue of Grace Sherwood, The Witch of Pungo (WYDaily/ Nancy Sheppard)
2. Grace Sherwood, The Witch of Pungo: (Virginia Beach) Famous for her 1706 witchcraft trial in Princess Anne County, subsequent witch ducking, and final trial in Williamsburg, Sherwood was a 46-year-old Princess Anne County native who made history as the last woman in Virginia to be convicted of witchcraft. She was eventually released and her good name cleared in 2006.
SUMMARY
Grace Sherwood was the defendant in colonial Virginia‘s most notorious witch trial, which took place in Princess Anne County in 1706. Sherwood was rumored to be a witch as early as 1698, when she and her husband sued their neighbors for defamation and slander. They lost their cases, and in 1705 another neighbor pressed criminal charges of witchcraft against Grace Sherwood. She was subjected to a water test in which the accused is bound, thrown into a body of water (in this case, the Lynnhaven River), and found guilty if he or she floats. Sherwood floated, but instead of sentencing her to death, the justices jailed her and ordered a re-trial. Whether a second trial occurred is not known. By 1714, Sherwood had been released from prison and returned to her home in Pungo, where she died in 1740.
Hodges was born in May 1819 in Princess Anne County and was the son of Charles Augustus Hodges and his second wife, Julia Nelson Willis Hodges, both free African Americans of mixed-race ancestry. His middle name may have been Edward. The Hodges family was one of the more prosperous of the numerous free black families in Princess Anne County (later the city of Virginia Beach). Hodges’s father purchased three farms and his own father’s freedom, and he also arranged for private tutors to teach his children how to read and write. Hodges’s older brother Willis A. Hodges served in the Convention of 1867–1868, his nephew John Q. Hodges served in the House of Delegates, and his older brother William Johnson Hodges had a long career in New York as an antislavery activist and a short career in Virginia as an African American political leader after the Civil War.