Woody intern Page ‘26 makes history at Surry’s Smith Fort
Faith Page ‘26 is on a mission to uncover local African American histories that have remained hidden—until now. Page, a history major with a minor in English, spent last summer developing a groundbreaking new tour at Surry’s Smith Fort, a historic site located across the James River from Jamestown that Preservation Virginia operates as a museum.
Page was one of ten students awarded a highly competitive Woody Internship in Museum Studies last summer. The Charles Center program, supported by Dr. Carol Clayman Woody '71 and Robert Woody and now in its 11th year, connects student researchers with museum mentors through 10 weeks of hands-on experience in the field.
For Page, designing her own historical tours featuring African American history at Smith’s Fort has been a fulfilling way of immersing herself in history – and a dream come true.
“I made the decision to work in museums in high school,” she said. “So going into college, and then going into William & Mary, because I'm a transfer student, I knew I wanted to get as much experience in museums as I could as an undergrad. Then a master's degree in museum studies, and a PhD in history.”
Grappling with unknowns
Driven to apply for the Woody internship by her long-held passion for museum studies, Page said, she knew it would be a perfect fit. “Not everyone knows immediately what their day-to-day is going to look like and what their project is,” Page said. “And I did pretty much immediately.”
Initially Page’s internship meant grappling with the unknown. Her days were spent poring over 19th-century land deeds and researching the complex and interconnected lives of the four African Americans who came to own Smith’s Fort, a site where their stories—or African American history, more generally—had not been featured previously. Though the property is often colloquially referred to as “Pocahontas’ house,” the site dates from 1765 and became home to Robertson Simmons, Bolling Morris Sr., Bolling Morris Jr., and John Hardy in 1886.
“I set off wanting to understand how these four African American families inhabited the space; why they chose to purchase this historical home. How did they interact with each other? How did one specific man, Robertson Simmons, know the other three?” Page said. “I'd like to know what they were thinking. I'd like to know why they have the court case in 1913 where the Hardys leave, and they sue each other.”
Page delivered her tour for Preservation Virginia throughout the fall semester to growing interest from local community members.
Little rooms, big stories 
On one sunny Saturday last December, a Charles Center photographer and I joined Page’s final tour, to experience how her summer research internship led to new understandings of the past.
Page guides us to the house, where we and more than a dozen others squeeze into a room whose broad floorboards creak quietly in the background.
From the start, it is clear that the tour is more than a history lesson—it is a journey through particular family histories and, at the same time, a larger, complicated American past shared by us all.
Using the home’s various passages to bring individual stories to life, Page explains how the occupants’ lives serve as microcosms for larger historical forces shaping Virginia through time.
For example, we learn that one of the house’s residents, Bolling Morris Jr., was drafted into World War I while the four families fought to hold onto their property in an increasingly repressive Jim Crow-era Virginia.
“The impact of African Americans on Surry Virginia, as well as the nation as a whole,” can be traced in the story of these four families, Page said. “Smith's Fort serves as a metaphor for the rest of the country.”
Though the families later lost their property, they left an indelible mark.
As the tour arrives in the cramped dining room, Page points to a gentle drip on a cabinet shelf that never dries, no matter how many years and paint layers pass, because of an old butter dish that was used by the family. Just as the house serves as a physical testimony to the historical presence of these four families, Page remains dedicated to honoring the living histories and hidden figures of African American history through such details that tell big stories.
Though Page acknowledges her research was rocky at times, forcing her to piece together fragments of facts on countless trips to the Surry County courthouse to survey land deeds, court inventories, and other records typically examined by historians, her support system was crucial in supporting her research and connecting her with enriching opportunities.
Page expresses her appreciation for the community members who were instrumental in connecting her with local historians and resources–Peighton Young (a W&M graduate student), Rev. James Harrison, Tom Forehand, and Elyse Werling, curator of collections with Preservation Virginia and Page’s internship supervisor.
In addition to previous genealogists and historians whose shoulders she stood upon in her research, the tours themselves would be nothing, Page says, without the support from those who have been its engaged participants–these are the people she “enjoys having conversations with,” and whose feedback she treasures.
As Page’s tour concludes, the audience lingers, reflecting upon her closing remarks and discussing her charge.
“There's always history beneath the surface. Unfortunately, African American history is sometimes intentionally kept beneath the surface,” Page says, but “when you really look, you see that there's a plantation, and there's hundreds of people, or maybe it's dozens of people, that are keeping that afloat, and their stories matter too–when talking about those specific sites, but also when talking about American history.”
Taking research on the road
Following her Woody internship last summer, Page received a Gilder Lehrman Institute College Fellowship to explore the role of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches as important sites of local resistance for African American communities in post-Civil War Philadelphia.
This semester Page embarks on senior honors thesis research with the mentorship of Associate Professor of History Adrienne Petty. Page plans to explore the role of American Girl doll Addy Walker as an instrument of public history, and the American Girl doll store as a kind of museum and site for elementary education.
The Addy Walker doll, launched by Mattel in the 1990s to acknowledge the history of enslavement in the American south, works as a unique “tool for public history, because she is not a curriculum and not enforced in the way of a library program,” Page said. “As a doll and a book collection, as well as her cookbooks, and her costumes, and things like that, she can affect the way Black girls see themselves and the way people are educated about enslavement.”
In her initial discovery process, Page shared that it has been fun connecting with many others in the museum space that have personal connections to American Girl Doll, and she has found that it is the personal connections to generational histories that leave a mark on people.
Continuing her work to question how popular histories are framed, and how this impacts the stories we tell, Page hopes to join the tradition of public historians who uplift the histories of African American communities.
“Ultimately, I want to work in public history. I want to have a job in museums, either in curation or exhibit design or research. But I also want to affect curriculum, and I think one of the most important things we can do to make sure that African American history is part of the narrative is tackling the textbooks and the curriculum in schools,” Page said. “I would like to change the way we learn about African American history. I want it to be a guaranteed part of public school education, because it is so essential to understanding the country as a whole.”
For Page, historical detective work is a lifelong endeavor, and one she hopes she will share with the next generation of scholars as she continues her work beyond W&M.
