Why Create a Website About the Virginia Frontier?
Ellen Apperson Brown, a free-lance historian, has been learning about her ancestors for many years, and is especially interested in the stories of those who migrated into Virginia in the eighteenth century.
The Virginia Frontier is a digital archive designed as a resource for teachers, researchers, family historians, and the general public. The archives (Archives) include primary source documents (letters, journals, and photographs), starting with many of the items in Brown’s personal collection; samples of creative writing and historical narratives (Family Portraits), and essays and scholarly papers written during her graduate studies at UNC-Asheville and Virginia Tech (Teaching Materials).
A cooperative venture, we invite teachers to give assignments to their students, asking them to learn about the Virginia Frontier, and then have the fun of writing narratives, perhaps with illustrations. We’d be delighted to publish some of their work here!
Artists, please consider submitting drawings or paintings that depict the frontier, or make arrangement to illustrate existing narratives. The website can only grow and take on significance, however, if other historians and researchers join in and participate. This could be a great way to market your talents!
a little background information about the author…
Ellen Apperson Brown has always been conscious of the rich cultural inheritance passed down through her family tree. Her 6th-great grandmother (Mary Draper Ingles) walked 800+ miles through the wilderness in 1755. Her great grandfather (John S. Apperson) served as a steward and medic throughout the Civil War and left a remarkable 7 volume diary. His son (another John Apperson) became a pioneer preservationist in New York’s Adirondack Forest Preserve – all while working as an engineer at GE in Schenectady.Born in Schenectady, NY, where her father worked for GE, Ellen moved with her family to Erie, PA and then Charlotte, NC. Ever since going off to college, at Sweet Briar, she has pursued many interests, studying music in Austria, getting an MAT in German from the University of Virginia, working as a teacher and administrator in schools, founding a free clinic, supporting a spouse through seminary, and then starting life over again, at fifty, with a new determination to become an historian. Currently armed with two additional MA degrees (from UNC-Asheville and Virginia Tech), she hopes to share her education and skills with others through this innovative new approach to teaching history.
Convinced that many others would like to try and become historians, but knowing that few can actually drop everything and enroll in graduate school, she hopes this history exchange will develop into an effective way to teach history to the masses… eventually creating volunteers trained as Community Historians.
Please enjoy the fruits of her labor, become a member, and offer your advice and encouragement!