C-ville Wrap

Our two-week stay here in the appropriately-named Misty Mountain Camp “Resort” in the foothills of Blue Ridge Mountains has come to an end and we will be moving down the road tomorrow to a state park outside of Richmond where we will stay for a week before heading to North Carolina to begin our six-week volunteer gig at Moores Creek National Battlefield.

First of all here is a link to a video of a protest rally at the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville that I shot on our first full day in town but forgot to post earlier. The city has been debating removing several statues of confederate “heroes” and there has been a lot of push back to the idea, most prominently from a group led by white nationalist (and UVA grad) Richard Spencer.

The episode in the video takes place beside the statue of Stonewall Jackson on the courthouse lawn (the statue is mostly hidden from view in the trees). It had the feel of a Klan rally but it was the images from the torch-lit rally later that night at the Robert E. Lee statue in a local park that made national news. I’m not sure exactly what is taking place in the video clip but I think there is another group that favors removal of the statues that is out of sight but chanting “all black lives matter”. In response the Spencer-led group that you can see in the video would respond with a chant of “white lives matter” that I did not catch on video (and we were not inclined to investigate further).

On a much happier note, here are some photos from graduation day that I did not have available when I posted on this topic a few days ago.

Rachel's older sister Nora joined parents Mark and Mary the grads and us for a "new fam" photo.

Proud dad, relieved grad.

Since graduation, in addition to making a concerted effort to stop at as many watering holes as possible along the “Brew Ridge Trail”, we found time to visit the homes of James Monroe and James Madison (we also stopped at Jefferson’s Monticello but did not tour the house which we have done on previous trips).

 

Monroe was more of a towering figure than we thought! Apparently not a lot has changed in Venezuela because the country commissioned this statue of Madison to honor him for his famous "doctrine" but did not pay the bill. Consequently, the statue sat around in New York for decades before mysteriously making its way to Monroe's plantation home near Charlottesville in 1932.

James Madison lived his entire life and is buried here at Montpelier about 30 miles northeast of Charlottesville. The duPont family bought the property in 1901 and Marion duPont donated it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation after her death in 1984. The Trust created a foundation which has done a fantastic job of preserving and curating the 2,700-acre site.

Madison looked out those three windows from his second-floor study in the mid-1780s as he drafted what would become the framework of the U.S. Constitution.

Madison's "house slaves" lived in the shadow of the mansion in structures like these. The quarters for the "field slaves" were not as "lavish" and kept further from the house. The Montpelier Foundation is making a concerted effort to accurately recreate those structures and to include accurate representations of the lives led by the 100 or so (at any one time) enslaved people that Madison owned.

 

Jimmy, listen to me man. I'm serious. You can get the entire thing, including the amendments, right here on this little device. Yes, the Federalist Papers too. We've got a lot of stuff to catch up on dude. Did you know that corporations are people? Have you ever seen a cat video?

 Also, speaking of the Constitution and law school, there is an interesting update on something I mentioned in a previous post related to forum shopping by patent trolls that resulted in 40 percent of all patent cases in the U.S. being filed in an otherwise obscure district court in Marshall, Texas.

This week, in a unanimous decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court ruled that lower courts had (for 60 years) been misinterpreting a law intended to require that patent cases be filed in the home state of defendant corporation. The ruling is expected to sharply increase the patent lawsuit filings in Delaware, New York and California; and make Marshall, Texas sleepier than ever.