Monacan Indians and their way of life are depicted on the Crozet Bridge Mural. Can you guess what the woman with the basket is doing?
My son poses with the Monacans.
Here we are inspecting our work in November of 1993. Photo by Tom Loach
This week began with a mad push to deliver an architectural model to Charlottesville. On the way home, my helper and I decided to have lunch at the Crozet Dairy Queen. We lived in Crozet for sixteen years before moving to the Valley and one of the more enjoyable things we did as a community was the Bridge Mural. The Crozet Community Association asked me to come up with a concept. We enlisted the help of students from Western Albemarle High School's art program and set out on a mission.
Crozet is known for the Central Virginia Railroad and that had to be part of the mural, but there was also the Big Survey Settlement [settlers migrated into the area from the Valley through Jarman's Gap, then known as Wood's Gap]. There was also the relatively recent discovery of Monacan settlement along Lickinghole Creek. In the end all three periods were included in the design of the mural.
We funded the paint in a novel manner. Everybody in town paid $5.00 to have their name painted into the painting. For $10.00 you got your whole family mentioned. We did some thinking to avoid it looking like Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, hiding names in the foliage and using them to enrich the background.
Crozet has really grown in the past ten years. We sat in the Dairy Queen for twenty minutes and then walked around under the bridge... I didn't see a soul I recognized. On the way out of town my cell phone rang. It was a Crozet number so I answered eagerly. It was Lady Keller from Field School who had no idea I was actually in town... just needed to ask me a question. I teach an art unit for them every year and this year I think we'll get the boys down to look at the mural.
2 comments:
OK, I'll bite. What is the woman doing with the basket? Is she catching fish?
Good guess Joy, the Monacans who lived primarily to the East of the Blue Ridge Mountains, built fish weirs in the small streams like Lickinghole Creek. Women did the fishing and used long baskets like this to catch the fish as they swam through a small channel created by the weir.
Laney Riley was the first correct guess. She guessed it right yesterday.
Our kids and I built a fish weir in a stream near Crozet and it was fun to watch the big trout swim through the little opening. Not being a Native American it would have been highly illegal for us to actually use the basket and catch fish. Still, it was fun to see that the concept actually worked!
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