Valiant Virginians: Servicemen of World War I will be opening in the Slemp Gallery of the Wampler Library on the campus of Mountain Empire Community College on September 4, 2018.

“Valiant Virginians” has been on exhibit at the Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Virginia, since spring, and was created by UVA Wise intern Dakota Mullins and staff at the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park.

WWI airplane (image source: Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park)

For the MECC exhibit, several items have been added to the story, including a photographic display of historic aircraft and period newspapers. The exhibit will close on October 26, 2018.

November 11, 2018, marks the centennial of the end of the First World War, or the Great War, and its impact can still be felt today. It marked the first uses of aerial and tank combat, saw the expansion of trench warfare, and introduced the horrors of chemical warfare. It is estimated that some 37 million people, both civilian and military, perished from warfare and disease during the four year span of the war. Of this staggering number, thousands were from Virginia, and this exhibit attempts to tell the stories of a few participants through possessions donated to the park’s collection.

Rainville is an anthropologist and director of the Tusculum Institute for Local History and Historic Preservation and has held fellowships at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

In her illustrated lecture, Rainville reveals the crucial roles that Virginians played in the Great War, ranging from drafted soldiers to politicians, and from locally born horses to their ferriers. These patriots also included female stenographers, African American doctors, domestic gardeners, National Guard troops and army chaplains. 

Rainville will conclude her talk with a study of statues erected in Virginia after the war to reveal a more complete story of service and sacrifice during the Great War.

Copies of Rainville’s book will be available for purchase and signing. Light refreshments will be served.

The talk and book signing is free; regular admission prices apply for visitors wishing to tour the museum. The museum is in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, for directions Google map and direction click here.

For more information, contact the park at (276) 523-1322.