A Conversation with Ted Pulliam, Author of True Tales of Old Alexandria
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Ted Pulliam is a well-known figure in Alexandria’s history community. As you’ll read below, after a few forays into fiction and poetry, he found his calling as a researcher and writer about the place he has called home since 1980.
We volunteer together on the Alexandria Archaeological Commission. He has served on numerous other history-related boards and committees. Most recently, he was a member of a committee that created the African American Heritage Trail, a walking route with an online StoryMap and physical signage.
In September 2023, The History Press published his book True Tales of Old Alexandria. It is a series of unconnected chapters that begin with the story of an indentured British boy who was traded to the Powhatan tribe (one of my favorite chapters for new and incredible information) and ends with the history and recent discoveries at Robinson Landing near the Potomac River.
I asked Ted about the book and his other research and writing projects.
Q: How did True Tales come to be?
A: The book consists of eleven articles that I wrote over several years going back to the mid-1990s. I gathered the articles together in mid-summer 2022 after the class notes editor for my college’s alumni magazine called me, as he had called other members of my class, to find out what I had been doing lately. In our class notes in the next issue, he wrote that he had googled my name, found my articles, and recommended that others google me also.
Surprised, I also googled my name and found several of my articles scattered about the web. I decided to assemble some of them into a book. I knew Michael Lee Pope, a writer for the Gazette Packet, had done much the same thing for The History Press. I sent them a query letter and later a manuscript. In late September of this year, they published the book.
Q: You make it sound easy. Given all you have written, how did you decide which chapters/topics to include?
A: I generally looked for the articles that told stories I thought would be the most interesting to the most people in Alexandria. I rejected a couple that seemed to be too narrowly focused and maybe too technical, such as one on the names and types of all the ships that transported General Edward Braddock’s troops from Great Britain to Alexandria at the beginning of the French and Indian War.
I choose subjects based on various things, such as timeliness and my interests. For example, the chapter on the British looting of Alexandria in 1814 during the War of 1812 consists of several short articles that were published in the Alexandria Gazette Packet in 2014, the 200th anniversary of the event. The chapter on the slavery-era Black Codes, about a 14-year-old free black girl arrested in 1837 while walking down a street in Washington without her freedom papers, was based on research I found while looking for something else. The chapter on the history of the U.S. horse cavalry between World War I and World War II is centered around 40 VMI cadets who, in 1930, were training at Fort Myer. One of those cadets was my father.
Q: If you could be a “fly on the wall” to learn more about one story in your book, which would it be?
A: It would be an episode in the story about the day the Civil War came to Alexandria, the day after Virginia seceded on May 23, 1861. [NOTE: Chapter 7 in the book]. It is not, however, the usual story about Col. Elmer Ellsworth taking down the Confederate flag from the top of the Marshall House hotel. Another Union army contingent came to Alexandria that day. They ended up at 1315 Duke Street, the headquarters of a dealer in enslaved people [NOTE: currently operating as Freedom House, a city museum].
The leader of that contingent, Col. Orlando Wilcox, later related that his Michigan soldiers said that they had found three enslaved people imprisoned there: a man, a girl, and a boy. According to Wilcox, “a well-dressed gentleman came to ‘claim his property,’ the negro man whom he grabbed by the collar and attempted to take with.” Instead, the Michigan soldiers threw out the “gentleman” and freed the three people. Although Wilcox tells something about what happened to the man, I would like to know more about who the Alexandria “gentleman” was, who the three prisoners were, what became of all of them, and what the Michigan soldiers thought about what they found and what they did.
Q: How do you organize your research when it spans so many different periods and events?
A: I keep research files in hardcopy in looseleaf binders labeled by general subject. I also have binders for subheadings if needed. My basement is full of these binders. I generally don’t take notes by hand becuase my handwriting is such that I have trouble reading it after much time has passed. Instead, I print out the pages of a document or book I found on the Internet that are of interest. If the information is at a library, I use the library’s copier or occasionally photograph pages with a cell phone. Then I place the pages in a subject binder and highlight the parts of the pages I want to quote or look at again when writing.
As for newspapers, some old newspapers are on free, online sites, such as the Virginia Gazette on the Colonial Williamsburg site. Others are available through subscription sites, such as newspapers.com. The Alexandria Gazette, by its various names, is available on microfilm in the Local History/Special Collections branch of the Alexandria Library. [NOTE: It is also online through the Arlington County library at no cost.]
Q: Your basement must be something else. So when and how did you first get into writing about Alexandria history?
A: I wanted to be a writer, and of course, write a novel. I realized that might be a little ambitious to start with, so I took classes at the Writers Center in Bethesda on short story writing. I quickly learned that I didn’t have enough imagination to do even short stories, much less novels. Also, I didn’t really believe in what I was writing because I knew I had made it up (that should have been a hint that maybe I ought to write history). Then I tried poetry with more classes at Bethesda. Poetry, however, was too introspective, and too hard. Finally, I took a course on feature writing, short pieces for newspapers and magazines.
At that time, in the late 1990s, as I looked for something to write about, I was traveling to work in the District from the Braddock Road Metro station. I knew that a British general named Braddock had been massacred early in the French and Indian War. I also had heard that the road was named after him, but what exactly was his connection with Alexandria? I did some research, wrote up what I found, and submitted it to the Washington Post for a separate section on history and science called “Horizon” the Post had then. I was delighted when the Post accepted it. Before it was published, however, the Post discontinued publication of “Horizon” and thus axed my article. Although that was extremely disappointing, the experience with Braddock began my interest in Alexandria history. I started volunteering at the Alexandria Archaeology Museum and began learning and writing about more of Alexandria’s stories, and some of them were published. The Braddock piece finally was published in American History magazine in 2005.
Q: A good lesson in finding solutions in different ways! How do you see the research and writing about the city’s history has changed since you first got involved?
A: The main change has been that coverage of Alexandria’s African American history has greatly increased. When I began writing about Alexandria history in the late 1990s, the city seemed to concentrate on its colonial and Civil War history.
The Black History Museum and the African American Heritage Park had been established, but they have since been followed by numerous other city sites and activities: establishment of Contrabands and Freedom Cemetery, purchase and renovation of the Freedom House Museum, founding of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project, development of the Alexandria African American Waterfront Heritage Trails, and archaeological exploration of the Fort Ward post-Civil-War Black neighborhood, plus the commemoration of several events in Alexandria’s African American history and the preparation of numerous studies and books on other aspects of the city’s African American history.
Q: What is your favorite historic place to visit in Alexandria or nearby?
A: Probably my favorite historic place is the waterfront block between Duke and Wolfe Streets that now is Robinson Landing. A chapter in the book tells the history of this block. I wrote an early version of that chapter in the summer of 2006. Then-City Archaeologist Pam Cressey had foreseen the city’s development and the need for preparation of the waterfront’s history. That summer she assigned several college interns and me each a block on the waterfront to research. My assignment, the block between Duke and Wolfe, was the site of Robinson Terminal Warehouse Company, where ocean-going ships periodically docked to unload huge rolls of newsprint the size of SUVs for the Washington Post and other papers.
A year later I expanded my research and published a rewritten report in the Alexandria Historical Society’s Alexandria Chronicle. I occasionally revisited the site to watch the ships unload. When the site was being developed, some of my research was used in archaeological and historical reports. The property itself became particularly interesting when the foundations of one of the warehouses I had written about was uncovered, plus the foundations of other buildings and the remains of three old sailing ships.
I still visit the block and see on the pavement the outline of the original point of land that was there before Alexandria existed and the traces of later shorelines. The wharf where the ocean-going ships used to dock is still there, much reconditioned.
Q: I know you are working on another book now. What is that one about and what are the plans for publication?
A: The book is titled Here’s a Letter from Thy Dear Son, taken from a line in one of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems. It is composed of some 200 letters written before, during, and after the Civil War that I edited and annotated. The letters were written by a Georgia farming family of modest means. Th men served in the Confederate army and wrote home about their experiences, while the mother, wives, and sisters recorded their own disruptions and hardships. It is scheduled for publication in January 2024 by Mercer University Press, although it may be delayed because of some issues I had with the index.
You can purchase Tall Tales of Old Alexandria in gift shops of museums and visitors centers in Alexandria, or online. He is also lining up book talks, including one for the Alexandria Historical Society in March 2024.