By Heather Michon
Correspondent
Over 100 people gathered in Wilmington on Sunday afternoon (Nov. 3) to mark the bicentennial of the visit of Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, to Fluvanna County.
Speakers, including Supervisor Mike Sheridan (Columbia), Fluvanna Historical Society president Marvin Moss, and Lafayette Trail representative Julien Icher, gave remarks before unveiling a new historical marker at the junction of Courthouse Road (Rt. 601) and Rising Sun Road (Rt. 608) in Wilmington.
Two hundred years to the day earlier, an equal number of Fluvannians had gathered at Currin’s Tavern to greet the 67-year-old French nobleman as he made his way to visit Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.
Lafayette last visited Fluvanna more than 40 years earlier as a young major general in the Continental Army during the last push of the British toward their final defeat at Yorktown.
The United States invited Lafayette to visit America in for the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. He arrived in New York in July 1824 and spent the next 14 months on a tour that took him to 24 states,
During an emotional visit to the Yorktown battlefield in mid-October, he was invited by General John Hartwell Cocke to visit Fluvanna enroute to Monticello. Fluvanna residents, including Revolutionary War veterans, enthusiastically greeted him during his early November stops at Columbia and Wilmington. Both towns held elaborate dinners in his honor.
Icher told the audience that Lafayette understood the culture of the new country, and the “honesty, simplicity, and humility” of the American people better than any of his European contemporaries.
That faith in the emerging nation not only led him to risk his life on the battlefield and to convince his government to support the American cause, it became the “political gospel” he preached in Europe for the rest of his long life.
“His name was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette,” said Icher. “That was his full name. That doesn’t exactly carry the idea of simplicity.”
Still, Lafayette went on to help author the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, which remains a cornerstone of French political philosophy today.
The Lafayette Trail has unveiled over 165 historical markers commemorating the 1824 tour in 25 states. Icher thanked the county and Wayne Corry, current owner of Currin’s Tavern, for supporting the placement of the Wilmington marker.
Once the festivities were over, “this marker will stay here to tell the story of this great man and his faith in the American Revolution, and more importantly, in the American people.”
After the unveiling, the crowd assembled at nearby Lyle Baptist Church for a program that included music, dancing, and food that might have been offered back in 1824. Lafayette, portrayed by local actor George Gaige, arrived by horse-drawn carriage to give some remarks.
Several people in the audience read some of the toasts offered that exciting day two centuries past, including Lafayette’s own:
“To the county of Fluvanna and Mechunk Creek – where upper and lower Virginians rendezvoused to show the enemy the road to Yorktown!”
