Recent Additions

The Brockenbrough Archives collection continues to grow through the donation of books, manuscripts, prints, and other paper materials.

Exiled from her family home in Alexandria, Virginia, 21-year-old Eliza Waller Hunter was living in Orange Court House, Virginia, when she began keeping a pocket diary on January 1, 1862. In its pages she chronicled her life as a refugee in Orange and in Richmond. Her final entry on August 8^th—"I feel very badly"—anticipated her death from typhoid a month later.

The diary is a donation from John N. Hackney, Jr., who is a collateral descendant of Eliza Hunter and her brother, Alexander Hunter, a Confederate soldier who wrote the 1905 classic, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.