‘Women’s Work” could not be a more apt title for the jewel of an exhibition at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s Library.
While traditionally women’s work is unpaid or paid less than men’s work—for much of the 20th century, the U.S. census counted women working on a family farm as unemployed, while the men of the family were considered farmers—during the years from 1935 through 1940, a different script was written in Petersburg.
At the time, the typical Works Progress Administration (WPA) worker was a white man, 38 years old and the head of a household. The Lee Memorial Park Wildflower and Bird Sanctuary project was intended to create jobs, preserve native flora and fauna, beautify a community park and develop an outdoor classroom for learning about native plants and birds. What’s surprising is that for the arduous work of clearing paths, building trails, gathering specimens and transplanting flowers, shrubs and trees, women were hired to do the back-breaking work.
“Women’s Work: The Lee Park Collection” tells the story of the Memorial Park Wildflower and Bird Sanctuary project, which was funded by the WPA, and includes photographs from the time, preserved herbarium specimens and botanical watercolor illustrations of native plants from the park. Particularly unusual is that the park was created out of whole cloth. Workers gathered plants from surrounding municipal lands and transplanted them to the new preserve, using no scientific plan or method.
Supervising the project was Mary Donald Claiborne Holden, an avid horticulturist and member of the Petersburg Garden Club. It was under her guidance that unemployed women, mainly Black women, were given jobs to build more than 10 miles of paths, clear ravines and plant more than 1 million honeysuckle roots to control erosion. These women moved downed trees, cleared underbrush, built structures, bridges and benches, but also labeled 500 different kinds of plants with both the common and botanical names. Holden, meanwhile, collected, pressed and dried plant specimens for educational purposes.
Although the main form of WPA women’s work was sewing, in the South, WPA administrators often denied Black women sewing jobs and instead sent them to do landscaping and field work. The exhibit includes a quote from a South Carolina observer to her bosses in Washington, telling them: “The Negro women of the beautification project have been treated disgraceful. They have been compelled to use picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. They are also expected to dig holes from 3 to 4 feet deep and set out water oaks in the streets. They also load trucks with dirt.” Safe to say that Mary Donald Claiborne Holden did not lead by example.
A photograph in the exhibit shows about two dozen women working in a ravine, undoubtedly during colder weather since all of them have overcoats on over their dresses. Because in the ‘30s, a woman would have worn a dress to work, even if she was using a pick or shovel, as these women were.
One of the women who worked on erosion control, Mary Bell Focie, recalled that when they began the project, there was nothing but dirt as far as the eye could see. She’s quoted as saying, “The honeysuckle planting was particularly strenuous and sometimes it got very cold. For many years afterward, I didn’t want to hear the name Lee’s Park because it reminded me of freezing with a shovel in our hands.”
The exhibit’s botanical illustrations were done by Bessie Niemeyer Marshall, a mother of nine with no formal art training. Producing botanical art as a reference tool for the community tied in with the philosophy of “art for the millions,” a key tenet of the WPA’s Federal Art Project begun in 1935 to democratize the visual arts.
Despite a lack of training, the illustrations in the exhibit are both lovely to look at and accurate enough to help with plant identification. Many were life-sized with minute detail. All the usual Virginia suspects are there; orange daylily, red columbine, flowering dogwood- but also some lesser known, such as Pink Fuzzybean, Himalayan berry and skunk cabbage. Marshall was an enthusiastic gardener, often collecting the specimens she painted herself.
In 2020, Lee Park was renamed Petersburg Legends Historic Park and Nature Sanctuary and is now managed by the nonprofit Willcox Watershed Conservancy, which is dedicated to restoring and reserving over 300 acres of woods, water, parklands and fields in Lee Memorial Park. Their goal is to reopen long-closed trails, first laid out in the ‘30s, while restoring, protecting and interpreting habitat areas within the park.
Telling the complete story of the important, but relatively unknown, women’s work that resulted in the park’s creation in the first place is high on their priority list. In the meantime, “Women’s Work: The Lee Park Collection” offers a fascinating glimpse of how a group of mostly Black women turned aces of dirt into a destination park.
And doubtless for far less pay than the 38-year-old white man would have gotten for doing the same job.
“Women’s Work: The Lee Park Collection” Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Oct. 12 at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, 1800 Lakeside Ave. Lewisginter.org
