Tag Archives: oregon hill

Celebrating Oregon Hill Bees

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OHNA President Todd Woodson posted this today:

So proud of our great Open High students. Our neighborhood association partnered with Open, Richmond Parks and with a generous grant from Dominion Energy, we established a pollinator curriculum with a working hive area that the students maintain. The Mentor checked the hives today and said he’d never seen hives flourish like this with lots of honey already produced. This is the first initiative of its kind in the area. Would love to see it grow and flourish as well! We love our bees and our great students!!

Dangerous Summer

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The band Dangerous Summer is releasing a new album called Mother Nature on Hopeless Records. They are playing the Canal Club on June 15. One of their songs off the new record is called “Virginia”. Lyrics go like this and namecheck the neighborhood…

You woke me up, I didn’t know I’d fallen back to sleep
‘Cause you were alive inside my dreams
You were a freebird in the blue skies ahead
We should walk instead of driving, we we can talk and give our minds up
Watch the city line turn to gold

Take me to Oregon Hill
Take me to The James River
Take me to the ocean floor
Throw me in the water

Can you let me know you’re holding on?
Let me know you’re holding on
Let me know you’re holding on for one more day

End the night entangled in your arms on LSD
Finding the art in everything
Even blue skies pray for thunder and rain
If I could live inside your heart, and somewhere safe next to your garden
Watch the colors burn to gold

You pick me up when I lose self-control
You gave me everything I needed to find the best of myself
The light of the opening door
Crash
Fall all around me, it’s calm now
You give me a reason to stay, I don’t want to live far away
I wish on the morning that’s outside after the moments of clarity
Yeah, after the moments with you
I’d spend every morning with you

Pirate History

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“Arriving at the gallows, which were at the north side of the State Penitentiary on the western outskirts of Richmond, a massive crowd estimated at 7,000 gathered on a nearby hill called “Oregon,” then ogled and strained to watch the hapless prisoners ascend the platform. A Priest and a Protestant Minister prayed with them through an interpreter. The three requested in Spanish that the people pray for their souls and their bodies be properly buried.
After the ropes around their necks were fastened to the heavy oak crossbeam, an officer pulled the cord that dropped the platform.
But things did not go as planned.”

So reads a portion of a new Medium piece by local writer Dale Brumfield, entitled “Frankenstein and the Three Spaniards”. Brumfield, a Throttle magazine alumnus, has a knack for finding juicy Virginia history- he wrote a book on Oregon Hill’s former neighbor, the Virginia State Penitentiary. He also has a new novel out called “Naked Savages”. While the pirate story has been written about before, Brumfield’s account adds the tantalizing detail that the executed pirates were reinterred in a single unmarked grave in Oregon Hill, where they have remained undisturbed. There’s more history to be uncovered…