A full day and evening to commemorate the bicentennial of the Marquis de Lafayette’s Farewell Tour visit in 1824 as The Nation’s Guest. Start your day at Petersburg Public Library to see the Friends of Lafayette exhibit and pick up the driving tour brochure, Revolution Petersburg. Tour Historic Battersea, Blandford Church, Centre Hill, Farmers Bank and the McIlwaine House and see costumed interpreters. Returning to the Library, enjoy wonderful speakers: 1 pm – Elizabeth Reese presents Liberty Now Has a Country: the 1824-’25 Tour of the Marquis de Lafayette; 2 pm – Dr. Gaila Sims will present The Marquis de Lafayette, a True Friend of the Cause; 3pm – Culinary Historian & Cookbook Author Damon Lee Fowler will discuss Foodways as a prelude to the evening’s historically themed dinner Revolutionary Cooking – Feeding the Founding Fathers or Fueling a Rebellion.
4 pm – The Marquis de Lafayette (Charles Wissinger) and James Armistead Lafayette (Stephen Seals), an enslaved African American who served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War under Lafayette, and who later received a legislative emancipation, present their narratives in the first person.
