Sweet Virginia

On a road trip from Richmond into the Blue Ridge Mountains, TESS TAYLOR explores the places where the state’s complicated past meets its dynamic present.

When I was a child, my family travelled often from our home in California to visit relatives in Virginia, where my father has roots that go back more than three centuries. There were great-aunts, ham biscuits, whole afternoons spent on the back porch absorbing family stories. Back then, the state felt like a place crowded with deft politenesses, historic-house museums, and ancestral ghosts. But on recent trips, I’ve noticed that Virginia has become less ye-olde, more global. Its capital, Richmond, which once languidly muffled the merest ripple of the new, has embraced the current artisanal mood, as if recasting the state’s Jeffersonian-farmer roots for the 21st century. “In some ways, it’s hipper than Oakland,” Kristen Green, a writer I know from Richmond, told me.

Kristen was one of several friends and family members who would join me for stretches of a lazy loop from Richmond to Charlottesville by way of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then back to Richmond. While much of this trip would be through places I have been visiting since childhood, I’d been wanting to absorb the changing Virginia. The Commonwealth—where Thomas Jefferson, of whom I am a distant descendant, helped forge American democracy while owning slaves— has always embodied American paradoxes. Today, it faces American questions: How to merge old and new? How to reconcile the rural with the cosmopolitan? And how to remember its complex past?

DAY 1 RICHMOND

From the vantage of the interstate, it can appear as if Richmond paved over its Civil War wounds with on-ramps and parking lots. But off the freeway, the city’s neighbourhoods—settled, like Rome, around seven hills—are having a renaissance. The old brick buildings, once run-down, now house shops bursting with life. Soon to join them is the futuristic Steven Holl–designed Institute for Contemporary Art.