RHS Project Seeks Community Involvement
Editor’s note: The following story was written by Eric Wilson, executive director of the Rockbridge Historical Society.
This Saturday, Sept. 27, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Rockbridge Historical Society is extending its hours for a free community open house featuring its 2025 exhibit, “Rockbridge at Play: Toys, Games & Histories.” Children, friends, and teams are especially welcome – along with their parents and more senior “kids of all ages” – as are toys of all eras.
It doesn’t take a viewing of Pixar’s “Toy Story” to appreciate that toys are engines of pleasure at one stage in their life cycle, vehicles of nostalgia in another. Of neglect, no less, in the fading arcs of time. This community-wide event provides an occasion to locate well-remembered if often half-lost toys, as well as photographs representing other activities like childhood sports and scouting; trips to the circus or cinema; sewing, crafting and drawing.
Gathering with friends and family or other new neighbors, the daylong open house invites visitors to discuss their objects’ features and associated memories with RHS staff, volunteers, and local collectors. This is not a more formal curatorial assessment or appraisal, like “Antiques Roadshow.” However, these more patient comparisons and conversations can prove vital assets, themselves, for the Society’s research, and communally shared understandings of the important stories that mark different aspects of childhood, within our area, and eras beyond.
In that collective spirit, RHS board members have al ready loaned a range of their own keepsakes to seed the show: Fisher Price and Star Wars figu- rines from the 1970s; a pine box derby car made for a Cub Scout competition in the 1990s; a homemade wooden tricycle that’s been enjoyed across three generations of one family, still used and enjoyed a quarter of the way into the 21st century; “Uncle Wiggly” books and other classic children’s literature from the first decades of the 20th century.
Your own adolescent trophies and team uniforms, yearbook photos and memorabilia as fans of current and bygone area high schools … all provide an excellent complement to those already summoned already in the Remsburg Gallery.
The social event may also prove an opportunity to display and narrate your object for others, through one of three routes. First, and most simply: uploading photographs of your objects (or historic photos, themselves) to RHS’ social media gallery, accompanied by short narratives or anecdotes that contextualize the object, and its personal or social significance.
Second, if your choices appear to complement standing displays – or supplement felt absences – you might temporarily loan them for the months ahead, having already enlisted several others when curating the show. With the exhibition running through December, we’d love to rotate in other locally sourced objects and stories that Rockbridge residents would like to feature more publicly. These additions will extend both the social and chronological range of our installations, supplying varied prompts to memory, while cueing themes that speak to different people, with different affinities.
Finally, for toys with local provenance that are looking for a trusted home (something saved from Grandma’s attic, perhaps, but with no young or adult children now having space or interest to keep them, ahead), we can discuss donations to the Society’s permanent collections.
With an echo from “The Sound of Music,” “a few of [your] favorite things” – if well-tied to the evolving histories of Buena Vista, Lexington, and Rockbridge County – will expand RHS’ stewardship mission. Already a favorite point of focus for this summer’s visitors has been one of the grainy, metal, car-side speakers that Hull’s Drive-In donated this summer to RHS’ century-old archive.
Beyond things newly carried in, visitors can try their hand at old board games, or try to deduce and. re-construct now elusive rules or traditions. “Just Games” will bring games to play onsite – a chance to compare past classics with current novelties – with the store loaning its collectors’ edition of “LEXINGTON MONOPOLY” for the rest of the year.
You can also bring your own handcrafted ephemera and demonstrate their construction. On the very first day the doors opened, a local nonagenarian arrived to donate a wood-whittled “Gee-Haw Whimmy-Diddle,” showing how it was made as a Boy Scout during the Depression. Even handheld video games, or phone-borne apps and viral trends, can spur singular or joint competition. Watching how people play with one another brings its own insights to these recreational terms, beyond the imaginative tools, themselves.
During the first half of the Museum’s open house, the Jackson House will also be hosting its annual Apple Day festivities from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., closing East Washington Street to encourage fuller and more leisurely pedestrian traffic and streetside activities. While across the street, families can also fittingly participate in the range of kid-friendly activities that Jackson House has arranged: Shenandoah Valley dance traditions; timeless games like bobbing for apples, pin-the-tail on Little Sorrel; or period and seasonal crafts like decorating scarecrows. Opportunities there to stuff and sew fabric dolls with historic techniques provide their own creative complement, and keepsake takeaways, to those rare 19th and 20th century assemblies of personally stitched dolls and clothing held in RHS collections.
To discuss your toys in advance, or to helpfully share photos to set the stage, contact me, Eric Wilson, at Director@ RockbridgeHistory. org. You can also chime in with others on RHS’ Facebook and Instagram pages.
THE “ROCKBRIDGE at Play” exhibit’s entry display fronts a gallery of early 20th century photos of children dressed up with their favorite dolls and toys, as captured by Michael Miley in his Lexington studio. On the mantle are classic children’s books from the era and a “Gee-Haw Whimmy-Diddle” hand-whittled and donated by a 90-year-old former Boy Scout on the exhibit’s opening day.
