Preserving the past

Shirley Bridgeforth grew up in Lyndhurst and thought of Waynesboro as the city.

“We’d come in for the groceries we needed and for my mother to sell her milk and cream to the Early Dawn Dairy,” she said.

They didn’t need to buy much on their shopping trips.

“Almost everything we needed came from our land,” Bridgeforth said. The milk came from Nancy and Esther, the family’s two dairy cows and there were also chickens and a pony, she said. Her mother, Alene Lunsford, now 95, had two huge gardens and it fell to Shirley and her sister to weed and gather vegetables during the growing season.

“We couldn’t even use a hoe to weed,” she said. Her mother knew that her inexperienced helpers might chop through a stalk or uproot a young plant.
With the help of her two daughters and two sons, Alene Lunsford made sure there were enough cans of vegetables to get the family through the winter.
“The rule of thumb was 52 cans of everything,” Bridgeforth said, “Some we canned at home and some we took to the cannery at Stuarts Draft.”

It wasn’t all work.

“There was a lot going on in Back Creek,” Bridgeforth remembers. “We knew where the swimming holes were and we played softball and baseball. The trouble was, we could only swim once a day — after our chores were done — and I was jealous of the neighbor children, who were always wet in the summer.

Sometimes they’d come in the garden to help so we could get away sooner.” Bridgeforth got blisters on her ears from all the hand weeding in the summer sun, but she developed a love of gardening that continues to this day.

Bridgeforth played basketball at Woodrow Wilson Memorial High School, and dabbled in whatever sport was in season. After graduating from Blue Ridge Community College, she married Frank Bridgeforth, a Back Creek neighbor, and moved to Waynesboro. They have two grown children, Patti and Brian.

Bridgeforth serves as the president of the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation Inc., which oversees both the Waynesboro Heritage Museum and the Plumb House Museum, and she works as an attendant in the Heritage Museum.

History is an interest she developed as an adult, Bridgeforth said.

“I hadn’t learned anything about local history in school, and I wasn’t in town enough to pick up any information.” When she retired in 1997 from her job in brain injury services at Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center, she began to work as a volunteer docent at Waynesboro’s new Heritage Museum. It soon became a passion.

“I’ve always loved stories,” she said, “and I like to know the background information. So the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.” She began to ask questions and do research on her own. She asked questions at reenactments and spoke with the actors who had made a study of the everyday lives of soldiers and townspeople.

Retired businessman Gene Meadows, who has known Bridgeforth for a long time, believes her commitment to local history has been a plus for Waynesboro.

“She has been very conscientious in keeping Waynesboro’s story alive,” Meadows said. “We’re fortunate to have her.”

“I love to entertain and be entertained,” Bridgeforth said. She’s often in costume at the Plumb House Museum events, dressed as Mary Plumb, a middle-class woman of the Civil-War era, and she recalls one incident where she was stopped for speeding by a Waynesboro policeman while in full 19th-century regalia.

“We were hosting a dinner for city officials at the Plumb House Museum and I’d forgotten a dish,” she said. She drove back in a hurry, still in costume, to get it and attracted the attention of a police officer.

“I asked him to just quickly write a ticket so I could get back to the dinner,” she said, but she ended up with a warning.

Bridgeforth loves interaction with people, and the museum serves as a center for people to share memories or drop off artifacts that may be of interest.

“A lot of people who have been away for a while come by here when they return for a visit,” she said. The museum presently has a special exhibit on local banking: the next exhibit planned is of the World War II era in Waynesboro.

Waynesboro City Councilwoman Lori Smith said Bridgeforth’s dedication to Waynesboro’s history and the Foundation has been steadfast.

“She’s persisted through difficult times, while managing to have a positive attitude,” Smith said. “We could all learn a thing or two from Shirley.”

The Heritage Foundation now has its own Web site, http://www.waynesboroheritagemuseum.com; and Bridgeforth has ideas for expanding the living history events available locally.

“People love the Battle of Waynesboro events,” she said. “I look forward to the day when we can expand them to include a staged battle, with horses and soldiers.”

Bridgeforth believes there are clues to the future in our history that make it important for everyone to learn.

“We all need to know what came before,” she said.