The week in review

Best news for preservationists: The keeper of the National Register of Historic Places determines that the Jesse Scott Sammons family house and cemetery is eligible for inclusion in the registry, Sean Tubbs reports in Charlottesville Tomorrow. Sammons was a prominent African-American educator in the Hydraulic Mills area in the post-Civil War era; the property lies in the path of the Western U.S. 29 bypass.

Best get for Charlottesville schools: The Boyd C. Tinsley Fund donates $75,000 to help needy students play musical instruments and tennis, and for individual tutoring. The DMB violinist is a 1982 grad of CHS' orchestra program.

Hastiest retreat: Albemarle school division's ill-advised plan to "rebrand" Walton Middle School  has been dropped, although two companies submitted bids for marketing strategies. J. Reynolds Hutchins has the story in the Progress.

Worst people to try to mug: Johnny Calderon, 19, and Gerald William Allen, 18, appear beaten to a pulp after allegedly attempting to rob two men on Fontaine Avenue August 27. They're detained by the would-be victims until police arrive.

Worst deja-vu: Michael Lee Saylor, 58, is arrested for aggravated sexual battery of a child under 13, NBC29 reports. Saylor was arrested on the same charge and went to trial in February 2012. The case ended in a mistrial.

Biggest pile-up on Afton Mountain: Six cars crash in a chain reaction on westbound I-64 around 6pm August 29 when a Ford F-150 pickup fails to slow and hits the vehicle in front of it, pushing that into another one, and three cars behind the truck plow into it, according to Virginia State Police. There's only one minor injury, and Maria Del Carmen, 30, is charged with following too closely and failing to have a valid driver’s license.

Biggest reminder of the 2011 Louisa quake: A temblor measuring 2.3 on the Richter scale is recorded August 30, two years after the 5.8 August 23 earthquake that did extensive damage in Louisa.

Biggest bust: Investigators confiscate 190 marijuana plants from a home in the 3000 block of Dunnes Shop Road in Quinque in Greene County. According to the Progress, someone ratted out the indoor grower, and police obtained electrical bills indicating high usage.

Loss of a Jefferson Scholar: Second-year Shelley Goldsmith from Abingdon dies August 31 after collapsing in a club while visiting Washington, D.C. with friends, according to NBC4 in Washington. An autopsy has been scheduled.

Loss of a scion: Dexter Drake Coffin III, 64, dies unexpectedly in West Palm Beach August 11. Coffin, whose family founded the oldest publicly traded company, The Dexter Corporation, in 1767, was jailed in Charlottesville in the '80s after impersonating doctors and lawyers to get the prescription drugs he was addicted to. He escaped while returning from a psychiatric session with his wife and two guards, sneaking out of a roadside restaurant and speeding away in his wife's Lincoln Continental, according to a Fortune magazine account.

Latest on the Trump golf course: Albemarle will not process its application for an 18-hole course on the former Patricia Kluge-owned estate because the Virginia Outdoors Foundation has not ruled that the course is consistent with the property's conservation easement, Brian Wheeler reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow.

Coolest map: The racial dot map— "one dot per person in the United States"— is created by the Weldon Cooper Center's Dustin Cable and contains nearly 309 million dots, one for each person at the location where they were counted during the 2010 census.

Most monumental idea: DP columnist Bryan McKenzie suggests the statue of Stonewall Jackson at Courthouse Square should be paired with one of civil rights legend Eugene Williams, who was instrumental in breaking down the Jim Crow barriers in Charlottesville in the 1950s and '60s. 

Best account of boozing it up before graduation: The Washington Post magazine story, "Schools try new strategies to battle college drinking," opens at 7am in Corner bars as cap-and-gowned students down drinks before walking the Lawn, and details other UVA traditions that help its ranking as a top party school.

 

5 comments

"Best news for preservationists: The keeper of the National Register of Historic Places determines that the Jesse Scott Sammons family house and cemetery is eligible for inclusion in the registry, Sean Tubbs reports in Charlottesville Tomorrow. Sammons was a prominent African-American educator in the Hydraulic Mills area in the post-Civil War era; the property lies in the path of the Western U.S. 29 bypass."

Another cynical ploy by the anti-bypass Luddites to gin up a phony historic landmark to use as a "spike strip" to throw in the path of a needed road.

(Re-) Reject the Bypass: Vote Democrat / Diantha McKeel!

Anything that slows down that ridiculous waste of a bypass is great news!

Give Nobel Peace prizes and keys to the city to the two uva students who beat the thieving thugs.

But more important, The Hook slouches off into the mists of history, absorbed by C'ville Weekly.
There's your news of the week folks..