Historical Highway Markers

Southwest Virginia Museum

I-2

This museum is located in a mansion built by lawyer and industrialist Rufus Ayers, Virginia attorney general in the 1880s. Janie Slemp Newman and her brother, C. Bascom Slemp, a former U.S. congressman and private secretary to President Calvin Coolidge, assembled the initial collection of artifacts on display. Slemp bequeathed the collection to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946 and the Southwest Virginia Museum opened to the public in 1948. The museum chronicles the development of Southwest Virginia and presents a picture of life in the past.

Department of Historic Resources, 2000

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Southwest Virginia Museum, http://bigstonegap.org/attract/southwes.htm, 13 December 1999; Joe Tennis, “Southwest Virginia Museum Marks 50th Anniversary,” Bristol Herald Courier, 24 May 1998: D1; John T. Kneebone, J. Jefferson Looney, Brent Tarter, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998), 260-262.