Happy Holidays
| All of us at HSWP would like to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2025. We are very thankful for all of your support during 2024 and we look forward to an even greater year with many exciting happenings. May your holidays be happy, safe and blessed. |
HSWP 2025 Budget
| During the December meeting of the board of directors of HSWP, the budget for 2025 was adopted. Our budget for the year will be $38,120. All of our funding for operations comes from annual dues (please renew now), item sales and especially donations. We greatly appreciate your past financial support and hope that you will continue to support us. |
We have a number of projects at HSWP and at our museum where we could use volunteers, to include data entry, rearranging artifacts, moving items, etc. Please contact us if you would like to help for one hour or many hours. It can be fun and rewarding. We also have an opening on our Board of Directors. If you love our town and its history and would like to get involved, please let us know. We think (we know) we have a great group of folks on our Board and would make you welcome.
Social Media
| HSWP is active on social media. Our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/westpointheritage has 1500 followers and we try to post something once or twice a week. It might be about West Point history or activities of HSWP. Our You Tube channel “Historical Society of West Point Virginia” has 29 videos including lots of interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@WestPointVAHistory. We also keep adding information to our web site. https://hswpva.org/. Follow us and let us know if there is other information you would like to see. |
History Tidbit
Marlborne Plantation is located in nearby Hanover on the Pamunkey River. It was owned by Edmund Ruffin who was a very strong advocate for secession. Ruffin fired one of the first shots against Fort Sumter to start the Civil War. Abner Doubleday (yes the same man who it is wrongly said invented baseball) fired the first shot for the North from Fort Sumter.
Odds and Ends
We will soon be placing another order for memorial bricks. This is a great way to honor a loved one. https://hswpva.org/memorial-bricks/. We are working on two projects for 2025. One project is the addition of historical markers around our town and the other is the offering of HSWP plaques for homes in our historic district. Stay tuned for more information on both of these projects. We will also continue sending out additional chapters to Bill Palmer’s book of Untold Tales of Old West Point.
Museum for Youngsters
We have tried to make our museum more interesting for our younger visitors. We started an internal scavenger hunt in 2024 and will be refreshing that for 2025. We have also added some “hands-on” display items. We are also working on a child friendly steamship project. Please stop by our museum and bring the youngsters. We think they will have fun and will hopefully learn some West Point history.
Expansion Plans 2025
We are well under way with our major fundraising campaign in order to turn the “shed” behind our museum into exhibit space. Our plans are to refurbish and expand the current shed so that it will hold and display the old West Point fire pumper, the antique Model T truck from the Chelsea plantation, and several other large items that we now have in storage. We have currently raised about $140,000 towards our goal of $200,000 for the project. Please, PLEASE consider helping us out with a financial donation for this major project. When donating, please mention that your donation is for construction. Thank you.
| Follow our Facebook page and visit our web site to keep up to date on what is happening at HSWP. Also visit our You Tube Channel. |