Lexington
Starting this weekend, The Rockbridge Historical Society is partnering with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and Rockbridge-VA250 to host the traveling exhibit, “Give Me Liberty: Virginia and the Forging of a Nation.”
The free month-long show can be seen on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, noon to 4 p.m. through Oct. 26, at the RHS Museum at 101 E. Washington St., Lexington.
By narrowing a traditional continental focus to more local and regional dimensions, displays will explore the unique and essential Virginia people, events, and sites that helped bring liberty and democracy to an emerging country at large.
Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – and 250 years of “American Evolution” that have followed the American Revolution – this exhibition will highlight the complex and diverse histories of Virginia that profoundly shaped the United States’ creation and continued growth.
“Give Me Liberty” will provide important and sometimes overlooked contexts for the coming of rebellion and armed revolt. Its lavishly illustrated narrative and associated digital content bring visitors into the early core of political, economic, and cultural resistance from 1774 through 1776.
As with local and national commemorations of VA250 through the coming years, they highlight how Virginians’ diverse roles in the Revolutionary War staged an evershifting contest of ideas and institutions: well beyond the eight-year global battles between British, American, French, and indigenous armies.
The Rockbridge Historical Society will supplement the exhibit with new interpretation, historic maps, and artifacts loaned by local collectors and drawn from its own permanent collections that spotlight related 18th-century developments in Lexington and Rockbridge County. Importantly, both were strategically established by the state’s General Assembly in 1778, as a wartime measure to help secure the Valley frontier.
As RHS’ Executive Director Eric Wilson said, “Our county and county seat weren’t just born halfway through the war, but because of that war. And while local experiences haven’t been emphasized as much as grounding settlements here in the mid-18th century, or the revolutionary changes that swept through our region and nation in the 1860s, those foundational histories help us understand those national and cultural changes from fresh perspectives.”
Thanks to RHS’ leadership as one of the state’s 10 advisory partners for VMHC’s “Our Commonwealth” initiative, this is the first of three successive exhibits that will rotate through the museum in 2025-2026.
Just in time for Veterans Day, “Virginia and the Vietnam War” and its complementary oral history kiosk will build to a special “Vietnam Roundtable and Open Mic” in December, organized to kaleidoscope different wartime experiences in the field and on the homefront, while also advancing an RHS’ project recording relevant local interviews.
From February into May, a series of RHS and Rockbridge-VA250-tied programs will complement a third show at its Campbell House headquarters, “Un/Bound: Free Black Virginians, 1619-1865.”
For more about these exhibits, statewide programming from VMHC and VA250, as well as K-12 activities and volunteer opportunities being developed by RHS, see RockbridgeHistory.org and featured content on its Instagram and Facebook pages.
