Larry Spurgeon and Cinder Stanton present their Rockbridge Historical Society program on “Free Blacks in Rockbridge before the Civil War” at Manly Memorial Baptist Church on May 3. Projected behind them, a newly discovered photograph (believed to be the first of a Black resident of Rockbridge who was free before
1865) of Joseph Cooper: born in Lexington in 1816, and died in 1907, as the oldest resident of Marysville, Md. (photo by Eric Wilson)
