Books by Agnes Evans Gish

The Great Depression left many fractured families in its wake. In 1932, a five-year-old girl walked down a country road with a suitcase in one hand and her favorite doll in the other: her journey from the bustle of 1932 New York City to her rural Virginia immigrant grand-parent's hundred-acre farm.

Dr. Agnes E. Gish spent more than twenty years traveling the Old Buckingham Road seeking the original sites of the taverns and ordinaries that once dotted its roadside every four to twelve miles and studying the lives of those who dispensed hospitality-for-a-profit to its travelers. These public and private houses of entertainment are presented here in brief vignettes that contain both historical and genealogical information. The information has been gathered from public documents such as land patents, court order books, deeds, wills, personal property and land tax books, pension petitions, census enumerations, marriage bonds and minister's returns, records of the Board of Public Works, and the Mutual Assurance Society's fire insurance policies. The many newspaper notices of this period add a personal touch to the facts found in these public documents.