Considering History: What a Virginia Highway Can Tell Us About Our History

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

“You should write a column about this,” my older son remarked as we discussed the multiple, meaningful names by which Virginia’s Route 29 is known as it winds between Washington, D.C. and my hometown of Charlottesville. Given that we were driving down 29 on our way to drop him off for his first year of college, given that he will be studying civil engineering to build on a lifetime of interest in roads and maps and what they can tell us about our communities, and given that nothing has inspired me more over the last 18.5 years than my sons, you best believe I’m going to take him up on that thoughtful suggestion.

Route 29 is part of the 180-mile long Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area, a route that runs between Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and Monticello just outside of Charlottesville. The motto of that National Heritage Area is the evocative “Where America Happened.” But of course history isn’t just what happened in the past — it’s also how we remember what happened. And the multiple names by which Route 29 is known can tell us a great deal about the images and stories through which we remember American history and how they’ve evolved.

As you might expect in a state that was the birthplace of four of the first five presidents (among the eight overall who have been born there), Route 29 features a pair of stretches named after those historical icons: In Northern Virginia a portion of the road (overlapping with another state highway, 15) is known as the James Monroe Highway; and for most of their remaining convergent paths across the state this pair of roads is known as the James Madison Highway. Obvious as those historical references might be, they nonetheless have specific origin points: On March 19, 1928, the Virginia State Assembly designated the newly completed Route 15 the James Madison Highway in honor of his central role in drafting the U.S. Constitution; and in 1946, the Virginia Conservation Commission renamed the section in Loudon County nearest to Monroe’s historic home of Oak Hill as the James Monroe Highway.

By the time it received those designations, however, Route 29 was already known by a couple of other names, and each of them echoes more complex and fraught questions of historical memory. For over 100 years, 29 has been part of the Lee Highway, a route connecting southern states to the rest of the nation and named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee. That name and route were first conceived in 1919 by a New Mexico man, the Reverend Samuel Myrtle Johnson, who then proposed the plan to the famous Virginia civil engineer David Carlisle Humphreys. Led by Humphreys, 500 men met in Roanoke, Virginia on December 3, 1919, to form the Lee Highway Association, and over the next decade they pushed for both the completion of this new road and its commemoration of Lee. As Johnson’s daughter, Katherine Johnson Balcomb, later put it, “Promoting a coast-to-coast highway across the southern tier of states as a memorial to General Robert E. Lee was considered by my father as his crowning achievement.”

By 1928, Route 29 was not only part of a coast-to-coast highway with a charged historical moniker; it was likewise linked to a north-south highway with its own complex name. That road, known as the Seminole Trail, stretched from Virginia through the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida, but only Virginia formally designated it as such, with 1928’s Virginia Senate Bill 64. The reason for the naming isn’t clear, and may have been as straightforward and practical as a desire to draw tourists south to Florida in a new era of automotive travel. But of course the presence of Native American names on the American landscape is never solely a simple nor practical one, and this particular name is particularly fraught due to both the overarching southeastern history of the Trail of the Tears and the specific story of the Seminoles being forcibly removed from their Florida homeland.

Over the last few decades, Route 29 has acquired a pair of new names that offer more unifying and inspiring alternatives to the past historical designations. On April 7, 1993, the Virginia General Assembly designated the entirety of 29 as the 29^th Infantry Division Memorial Highway. The 29^th has been part of a number of 20^th and 21^st century military conflicts, but the renaming was in honor of one significant service: the division’s leading role in the June 1944 D-Day invasion. The 29^th’s 116^th Infantry Regiment was one of the first units to land on the beaches in Normandy, and thus suffered extensive casualties, with more than 800 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing. One tiny Virginia town, Bedford (population 3,200), saw more than 19 of its young men (known as the “Bedford Boys”) killed in the assault. Bedford is located only a few miles west of Route 29, one of many Virginia communities linked by this highway’s new commemoration.

While commemorating such shared histories is one goal of re-naming highways, another is reversing more controversial prior designations. In 2021, the northern Virginia city of Arlington offered a model for those efforts, voting to remove the Lee Highway designation from its portion of Route 29 and rename it as Langston Boulevard. The Langston in question is John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), an abolitionist, lawyer, and educator who in 1890 became Virginia’s first African American Congressman. From his youthful work organizing and recruiting for the Civil War’s Black regiments to his service as president of both Howard University and the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, Langston is quite simply one of Virginia’s and America’s most inspiring figures, and renaming Lee Highway for him exemplifies the important historical and cultural work that our highway designations can do — as my son would remind us!