Lynchburg College junior Ashley Schmidt is one of 15 students in the U.S. named a History Scholar for the five-week summer program at the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City.
Schmidt, of Jarrettsville, Md., was one of about 300 students to apply for this prestigious program. About 50 finalists for the program are invited to a one-week program at the institute. Samantha Bryant, a sophomore from Lynchburg, Va., was accepted to the one-week program.
The Gilder Lehrman History Scholars Program, inaugurated in 2003, is a competitive summer scholarship program in American history for outstanding college sophomores and juniors. The program is designed to reward undergraduates who have demonstrated superb research and writing skills in American history and to provide discussions with eminent scholars.
Two Lynchburg College students were finalists in 2007: John Marks of Hillsborough, N.J., and Robert "Bobby" Stephenson of Felton, Del.
"For the past three years, we've been working with our students in history to push them to do more scholarly work, to participate in any and all external opportunities, and to apply for any and all programs, from basic internships to prestigious summer programs such as this one," said Dr. Kirt von Daacke, assistant professor of history. "All that work has paid off."
Students in the five-week History Scholars program have been from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, Washington University, George Washington University, William & Mary, and other top universities.
Schmidt's research involves the status of free blacks in Central Virginia during slavery. She found, for example, in at least two cases in 1850 that black women were listed as property owners. She found that more than 50 percent of free black households were headed by women. It turns out prominent whites were loaning money to free blacks, a piece of history that has largely been obscured by time.
She dug up another interesting case. Thomas Haynes of Bedford County created a will in 1799 which emancipated all of his slaves and "their increase," which included 17 slaves, at the time of his death. By the time he died in 1805, 20 slaves gained their freedom and split a little more than 1,000 acres of his land into 20 lots.
"We can only speculate, but most likely these were his mistress and their children because of the lack of explanation," Schmidt said. "It took two court cases and about 20 years to receive their land and their just dues from the estate. I think they established some sort of free black community. This is most likely going to turn into my senior thesis, which means that I have a great deal of work still left to do."
Schmidt has also been awarded a Schewel Faculty-Student Research Fund grant for fall 2009 for two research trips - one to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and one to the College of William & Mary's special collections, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia.