Lake Culpeper, it is.
The Culpeper Town Council voted 5-4 Tuesday night remove the name of a Confederate artillery officer as the label for its main reservoir, Lake Pelham.
Alabama artillery officer John Pelham, one of the Confederacy’s martyrs, died in Culpeper at age 24 after being wounded in 1863’s Battle of Kelly’s Ford, fought on St. Patrick’s Day. The council’s decision to do away with his name for the lake ends a 20-month debate in the community, coming down on the side of removing a symbol of white supremacy from a prominent public space.
Adopting the name Lake Culpeper would be “a great compromise,” Town Councilwoman Jamie Clancey said during Tuesday’s meeting.
“It’s very representative of Culpeper as a whole,” Clancey said of the new name, which was proposed last year by Vice Mayor Billy Yowell. “Let’s meet in the middle.”
People are also reading…
Yowell supported the new name again Tuesday night with his vote, but did not publicly comment. Also supporting the name change were Clancey, council members Travis Brown and Meaghan Taylor and Mayor Frank Reaves Jr.
Voting to keep it Lake Pelham were council members Erick Kalenga, Janie Schmidt, Joe Short and former mayor Mike Olinger.
Clancey, a licensed clinical social worker who has lived in Culpeper for 15 years, and Mayor Reaves, a Culpeper native retired from law enforcement, have been primary voices in the fight for the name change. The thorny issue lay dormant for most of this year after the Town Council approved changing the name, with another split vote, in February 2021.
Reaves, Culpeper’s first Black mayor, did not comment Tuesday on the issue, but voted to remove Pelham’s name.
The town will not change street or housing-development names with the Pelham moniker, said Clancey, who is serving her second term on the council. No one’s address will change, and Pelham will still be recalled in Culpeper, she said.
“There are other things in Culpeper representing Confederate soldiers and Civil War history,” Clancey said. “It doesn’t take that away.”
Numerous historic markers in the town and county, including two on Main Street across from the County Administration Building, tell of the exploits of the “gallant” and handsome Pelham.
A classmate of Union cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer, Pelham left West Point a few weeks before his graduation in 1861 to join the Confederacy. Pelham was known for his marksmanship and way with the ladies. Upon his death, thousands mourned the young Alabaman as he lay in state in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.
The Town Council last year voted to remove his name from the reservoir, Clancey noted Tuesday.
That difficult process is one playing out across America as communities reconsider their Confederate references and symbols.
In 2020, after public controversy, the Confederate battle flag was removed from flying over a Civil War history display at the county’s Lenn Park near Stevensburg.
Nationwide, 168 Confederate references were stricken in 2020, virtually all of them after the Memorial Day murder of George Floyd, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala.
Locally, the name Lake Culpeper is something that all of Culpeper can share, Clancey said.
The change will send a positive message to a large segment of the community that town leaders want to move forward in an inclusive and diverse way, she said Tuesday night.
“We heard how painful it was for people in the community who know who Pelham was … to be reminded of it,” Clancey said.
Culpeper is replete with Confederate remembrances, signs, symbols and status. The Civil War’s opposing armies occupied and battled for the town and county repeatedly for much of the nation’s deadliest conflict, which experts estimate killed more than 700,000 Americans.
In the county, Virginia plans to open Culpeper Battlefields State Park in 2024, building on acreage preserved at Brandy Station, Cedar Mountain and Hansbrough’s Ridge near Stevensburg by the nonprofit American Battlefield Trust.
Lake Pelham was so named in a 1975 contest sponsored by the town and Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District, which oversaw development of the municipal lake system. The Culpeper Star-Exponent reported that Mrs. Paul Hounshell submitted the name Pelham. She was the wife of the Culpeper County schools superintendent, who served during 20 years of Virginia’s racially segregated schools until Culpeper integrated its educational system in the late 1960s.
Nearly 50 years later, striking Pelham from the lake’s name prompted months of votes and re-votes on the Town Council.
There were failed votes and changed votes, and an election in between. Pelham became a campaign issue in the highly contested November contest that put four new faces on the Town Council and shed two incumbents.
One of the new councilmen, Short, voted with the minority Tuesday on the issue. He acknowledged the sensitive topic. Short said an elephant in the room is that when a white person like himself disagrees with such a proposal, he is labeled a racist.
He said he received such feedback when he ran for council last year, and supported keeping the Lake Pelham name. Short, an Army veteran, campaigned as a Republican for his first elected office.
He called the racist moniker over the Confederate naming issue “unfair and offensive.” Short said he wants to represent the people who contacted him who still oppose renaming the lake.
Short said he and others did not know who Pelham was until the naming issue surfaced in 2020.
That’s when Culpeper philanthropist Joe Daniel, a prominent businessman, started urging elected officials to remove Confederate references, including Lake Pelham, from public places as well as the county courthouse’s Confederate soldier statue, which still stands.
Asked Wednesday to comment, Daniel said Lake Culpeper is an excellent name for the town lake. But he criticized the Town Council for not taking unanimous action.
Daniel called Pelham a “despicable” slaveowner who came to Culpeper to kill Americans to preserve slavery.
Many Americans were taught propaganda about the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” including himself in younger days, he said.
“The Civil War was fought to preserve slavery, and the Confederates were traitors to the United States of America,” said Daniel, a Madison County native. “These traitors deserve no honor.”
In recent months, the Virginian has been sharing a recent book, “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” by West Point history professor emeritus Ty Seidule, with local friends and associates. Seidule, a retired Army colonel who grew up in a Virginia family that revered Lee, writes of how his views changed over time and he now challenges myths of the Confederate legacy.
Councilman Short said he taught his son to fish on Lake Pelham. “It’s part of our family history and the town’s history,” he said Tuesday.
The division, Short added, is not over changing the lake’s name, which he said would not change racism. It’s about achieving racial reconciliation, acknowledging that the Pelham discussion has opened up “a courageous conversation,” he said.
“We as a town need to see our way through this,” the councilman said.
Councilman Kalenga, appointed in December, shared why he agreed with Short. Kalenga recalled growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, during the apartheid era.
Kalenga, a minister, recalled civil rights leader Nelson Mandela being released from prison after 27 years behind bars. South Africa was completely run by white people, who were in the minority, he noted. When Mandela became president, he had the power to push them all out, the pastor said at Tuesday’s council meeting.
Instead, Mandela decided he would “bring everybody to the table to have a discussion,” Kalenga said. “He saved South Africa” because of that, he said.
When people “start pushing things” and bringing up “sensitive topics,” it’s not going to work well in the long run, Kalenga said.
“There will always be one more thing … (it’s) just a matter of time once you start down this road.”
Kalenga said he knows what racism feels like. “We have to be very wise in how we start changing, reshaping our community and our story—how we want to tell it,” he said.
It will cost the town about $9,000 to change reservoir signs from Lake Pelham to Lake Culpeper, Town Manager Chris Hively said. Signs at Lake Pelham Adventures, a watercraft rental business next to Ole Country Store that just closed for the season, will also be changed.
“We have until next spring,” Hively said. “We will do our best to get the signs down and changed before the new season.”
There will be additional costs for changing the name on Culpeper’s website, geographic information system and town documents, he said.