Music was her first commandment

At age six, Carleton Cunningham stood on a stool next to a piano in a church in Georgia and sang. At eleven, she was sitting at the piano playing for the church. Read more

Town’s most successful job training program

If you want to see what life was like in the 1950s, you don’t to go farther than the Dairy Freeze in Blackstone. While modem fast food restaurants compete by faster food processing and assembly line service, the old Dairy Freeze still makes fresh hamburger patties by hand and mixes its milkshakes like the old drug store soda fountains did. Read more

98-years-old and still in love with the earth

One mile deep into the Fitzgerald farm off Route 646 in Nottoway County table level fields of grain wave in the cool May breeze. The same current moves the honeysuckle as it begins another season of growth over abandoned farm equipment and buildings. Mrs. Petronella Turpin Fitzgerald, 98, stands among her rows of boxwood and shakes her head. “This was a pretty farm once. It doesn’t look it now…It misses Peter Harris.” Her voice cracked and softened to a whisper.

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The Hurts of Blackstone

From Courier-Record archives: by Ed Conley

The home of Dr. Jethro Meriwether Hurt has long since disappeared in the pines and weeds along route 46 south of Blackstone. Only a picture remains of Auburn in which his wife and one of his daughters, Molly, stand in faded blacks and white. Read more

Lunenburg’s WWI vet survives century without a scratch

So many fat acorns crunched on the frozen ground, I had to look up to their source when I visited C.J. Hurt, Lunenburg’s most recent centenarian. Read more

If cancer doesn’t kill you, the hospital bills will

The American health care system reminds Delores Bishop of a giant trap. You get cancer, and the magic cheese saves you. Then the spring snaps, and you are caught like a rat.

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