Shenandoah County debates whether to restore Confederate names to schools

Shenandoah County is debating whether to change the names of two schools — by changing them back to Confederate names that were retired in 2020.

That would certainly put Shenandoah County in a unique category: Lots of places have taken the names of Confederate figures off of public buildings, but I’m hard pressed to find any who have then turned around and restored those names.

In Shenandoah County’s case, Stonewall Jackson High School became Mountain View High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary became Honey Run Elementary. A vote in 2022 to restore the original names failed on a 3-3 vote. However, the three school board members who wanted to keep the new names are now gone, and the three who wanted the Confederate names are still there — so the issue is live again. Should Shenandoah County restore those Confederate names, I can make one easy prediction: It will generate lots of stories in the national media, because Shenandoah County is, on a good day, less than two hours’ drive from Washington, D.C., which makes this an easy story to tell. I will also safely predict that those stories will be unflattering.

Perhaps Shenandoah County is willing to endure that for the sake of tradition, although it is an ironic place to be concerned about original names being stripped in the name of “political correctness.” Shenandoah County was originally named Dunmore County, after Virginia Gov. John Murray, the 4 ^th Earl of Dunmore, better known as Lord Dunmore. The Scottish peer quickly made himself unpopular as the push for American independence gained momentum and was chased out of the state in 1776. Two years later, Virginia decided that Dunmore County would be better renamed Shenandoah County. Someday you’ll be able to read more about Lord Dunmore in our Cardinal News 250 project about Virginia’s role in the lead-up to the American Revolution.

Today, though, is not that day.

Instead, I’m curious about some of the homegrown historical figures that Shenandoah County is overlooking as it debates whether to keep two geographically based names, or restore the names of Confederate generals who weren’t from the county.

It turns out that Shenandoah County has quite a rich history of native sons and daughters who are worthy of being honored somehow — and not just in the county. Strangely, though, none of them appear to have received any special recognition in Virginia. Let’s have a look.

Col. Florence Aby Blanchfield: Led military nurses during World War II

She wasn’t born in Virginia — she was born in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (“down the valley,” as we say based on how the water flows). But she grew up in Shenandoah County, and that ought to count for something. She came from a medical family — her mother was a nurse, her two sisters became nurses, and two male relatives were doctors. Blanchfield became a nurse as well, but had a much different career than many of that generation. She supervised an operating room at a hospital in Pittsburgh, and ran a training school there, too. By 1913, she was down in the Canal Zone in Panama, working as a nurse and an anesthetist. I’ve not found anything to explain how she got there, but Blanchfield was apparently adventurous. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, she enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps and worked at military hospitals in France.

According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia , Blanchfield returned to civilian work after the war, but not for long. She went back into the military and “served at army hospitals in the United States and abroad, and in the surgeon general’s office.” This included stints in the Philippines and China. In 1943, Blanchfield was promoted to colonel and named superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps. “She oversaw expansion of the corps from 1,000 to 57,000 nurses, the largest group ever to serve on active duty,” Encyclopedia West Virginia says. According to the Army Nurse Corps Association , “her assistants confided that Blanchfield could ‘keep her mind on eight things at once … she has the memory of a super Quiz Kid’ for facts and figures.” Another account credited Blanchfield with being a “good scrapper.” It related that Blanchfield “can fight with bulldog tenacity to obtain or revise regulations that will benefit her Corps.”

Evidence of that came after the war when Blanchfield worked with Rep. Frances Payne Bolton, R-Ohio, to secure passage of the Army-Navy Nurses Act, which permitted female nurses to hold rank the way male medical personnel did. Blanchfield was one of the beneficiaries: She became the first woman to receive a military commission in the regular Army. When she died, she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

The hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, is named for Blanchfield. The Army Nurse Corps Association says this the only instance where a military hospital is named after an Army nurse. but Blanchfield apparently goes unrecognized in the county — and state — where she grew up.

Leslie Coffelt: Slain protecting President Truman

In 1950, President Harry Truman was living in Blair House while the White House across the street was being renovated. On the afternoon of Nov. 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists showed up and tried to kill him in the name of Puerto Rican independence. The assassination attempt failed, but one of the attackers and one law enforcement officer were killed. That law enforcement officer was Leslie Coffelt, a White House police officer, which was then a branch of the Secret Service. He had grown up in the same part of Shenandoah County that Blanchfield did, a little place north of Strasburg called Oranda.

Coffelt, described as an expert marksman, joined the Washington, D.C., police force and eventually joined the White House police force. A tribute in the Congressional Record , starting on page 508, describes the attack this way: Would-be assassins Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola approached Blair House about 2 p.m. while Coffelt was stationed outside. “Without warning, Torresola drew an automatic and fired three shots point-blank into Coffelt’s stomach. He then turned and shot another White House policeman, Joseph Downs, who was near a basement entrance of the house. On the point of collapsing and in the last vestiges of consciousness, Coffelt drew his service revolver and shot Torresola through the head, killing him instantly. Then Coffelt sank to the ground. He was rushed to the hospital, but died without regaining consciousness.”

Truman was napping at the time. Awakened by the sound of gunfire, he looked out the window, only to have the Secret Service frantically wave him away. He later said he was frightened because he had served in World War I and had been “shot at by professionals.”

Like Blanchfield, Coffelt is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His sacrifice is remembered in two ways in Washington — through a plaque at Blair House, and a room used by the Secret Service that’s named after him. Shouldn’t his home county — and home state — honor him as well?

The Coffelt story doesn’t end there, either. The next year, Coffelt’s widow, Cressie, visited Puerto Rico.

According to her hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania, Truman asked her to go as a way to ease tensions with the island. “She delivered a speech that was meant to absolve the people of the island of any blame for the attack,” the Herald-Standard in Uniontown reported. “While there, she was given a heartfelt gift from the school children of Puerto Rico — $4,816.57 in pennies.”

Sen. Harrison Riddleberger: Helped make funding possible for Virginia’s first public school system

Riddleberger, who was born in Edinburg and lived most of his life in Woodstock, was a colorful and consequential figure of the post-Civil War era in Virginia, one of our most tumultuous and least understood periods.

The colorful part is easy to explain: He was a newspaper publisher who twice engaged in duels with Rep. George Wise of Richmond, a fellow newspaperman. The first duel failed for lack of blasting caps; the second because all the shots missed, intentionally or otherwise. Encyclopedia Virginia says of Riddleberger: “Prone to depression and excessive drinking, he held a reputation as an eccentric and even engaged in two duels on the same day.”

The consequential part takes a little more space to explain: Riddleberger was a Confederate officer who broke with the Confederate establishment and became one of the Readjusters, a biracial party that existed briefly after Reconstruction and had the potential to set Virginia on a more progressive path. Before the Civil War, Virginia had issued a lot of bonds to fund road, railroad and canal construction in the western part of the state — a part of the state that after the war was now in West Virginia. True to their name, the Readjusters’ main platform was to “readjust” the state’s debt and only pay part of it — thus freeing up money for the new public school system. The opposition, a conservative Democratic Party aligned with bondholders, insisted that every penny be paid.

In 1881, the Readjusters briefly won control of both the General Assembly and the governorship. The legislature passed, and the governor signed, what became known as the Riddleberger Debt Act; it reduced the state debt and set the stage for more public school funding and the creation of what is today Virginia State University. Here’s how controversial that was then: During the legislative debate on the bill, state Sen. John Daniel of Lynchburg declared that it would be “better to burn the schools … than sustain them on money taken by force” by bondholders. Curiously, Daniel has both a statue and a historical marker today, but Riddleberger doesn’t — which may tell us something about who Virginia has chosen to honor.

The General Assembly then elected Del. Riddleberger to the U.S. Senate, where he first aligned with Republicans but then switched to become a Democrat. In those days, serving in the Senate wasn’t a full-time job, so Riddleberger continued his legal practice in Shenandoah County. Encyclopedia Virginia says of him: “His personal conduct often attracted attention. In 1887 when one of his clients was declared insane in the Shenandoah County Court, Riddleberger objected so strenuously that the judge had him arrested and jailed for contempt of court. Friends freed him during the night, but he returned to jail on his own.”

OK, maybe Riddleberger’s not exactly the role model that a school should be named after, but his debt readjustment bill did help make a public school system possible in the late 19 ^th century. As for Blanchfield and Coffelt, what will Shenandoah County — and Virginia at large — do to honor them?

In this week’s newsletter:

I write a free weekly political newsletter that goes out at 3 p.m. on Friday. You can sign up for that or any or our six newsletters on our newsletter page. Here’s what’s coming in today’s installment.

• Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, visits Israel.
• Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, served as impeachment manager for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, while the impeachment lasted.
• State Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, visits Roanoke Democratic gathering; testing a statewide bid?
• Campaign finance reports for city council candidates in Lynchburg and Roanoke. Two Roanoke council candidates have more money than the best-funded candidate for mayor.
• The unusual advice that Del. Kelly Convirs-Fowler, D-Virginia Beach, gave this week to Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

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