By Nina Wilder
When Lewis Longenecker’s students at Cumberland Middle School began researching Lucyville, they weren’t looking for a story anyone had told them to find.
They were digging through census records, old maps, and archival documents — the raw stuff of history — and what they unearthed was a Black community founded around 1879 by Reverend Reuben T. Coleman, a man born into slavery who went on to build a hotel, a bank, a newspaper, and a post office on land named for his daughter. As the surrounding land was logged and absorbed into Cumberland State Forest, Lucyville’s story faded until Longenecker’s students brought it back.
The Lucyville marker, unveiled in April 2024, drew more than 100 descendants to Cumberland County — many meeting one another for the first time — and students led tours of the site, sharing what they had found. Julie Langan, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, put it plainly at the ceremony: “There’s no other school in the state that we’ve worked with so frequently on anything. Cumberland Middle School — you really stand out.”
That marker was the fourth of five Longenecker and his students have carried through the state approval process. The others honor a Korean independence leader who studied at Roanoke College in the early 1900s, the first Asian American graduate of William & Mary, a Black businessman born into slavery who later served in the House of Delegates, and a free Black businessman who twice survived violent attacks in 1864 and later helped write Virginia’s postwar constitution. Each began as a student’s question, pursued through primary sources, and brought all the way to a roadside sign.
“There’s no other school in the state that we’ve worked with so frequently on anything. Cumberland Middle School — you really stand out.”
Julie Langan
Longenecker has spent more than two decades teaching history in Cumberland County, developing curricula for the Library of Virginia, New American History, and the AMMD Pine Grove Project, with an emphasis on Indigenous history, the Civil War, Reconstruction, responses to Jim Crow, and early public education in Virginia. In 2025, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History named him Virginia History Teacher of the Year and one of 53 national finalists for the award.
That same year, we recognized him as a Humanities Hero and welcomed him into his second K-12 Educator Fellowship cohort. The fellowship connects Virginia teachers with professional historians and a community of peers — a place to go deeper, to bring new frameworks back to the classroom, and to keep asking what else might be waiting in the archive. For Longenecker, who already has two dozen more marker nominations in the pipeline, that question has no shortage of answers.
