This daily column features short news items from the 20 localities that make up the greater Richmond area. On Mondays, we run at least one item from each of the localities. If you have a news item, call 649-6990 or e-mail us at Amelia Work has begun on the visitors center at Amelia County’s Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park. The $1.1 million center is expected to be completed next summer.

If you like chocolate and cherries, this cake will hit the spot. It’s called Coal Miner’s Cake, and Anne Mehfoud Rockecharlie of Goochland County has been making it since a friend from Kentucky served it to her last year. Turns out, the friend’s mother had made it for years and “always took the cake to special gatherings,“ Rockecharlie said.

Tommy Richards sets up a net on one of his two grass courts. He also has two squash courts and two clay courts “Do you enjoy racket sports, the country and having fun?“

A man accused of beating a Goochland County woman nearly to death last year was sentenced to 10 years in prison yesterday. Irvin Leroy “Chubby” Martin, 47, was convicted in July for an attack that fractured the skull of former Gum Spring neighbor Missy Riley the morning of Feb. 5, 2007. In a non-jury trial, Circuit Judge Timothy K. Sanner also convicted him of stealing Riley’s van, setting it on fire and stealing another vehicle in an escape that eventually led him out of state as a fugitive for months.

This daily column features short news items from the 20 localities that make up the greater Richmond area. On Mondays, we run at least one item from each of the localities.

A local judge yesterday certified to a grand jury the embezzlement case against a lawyer accused of stealing from the Virginia Farm Bureau while he was working there. Lawrence H. Bidwell, 49, appeared in Goochland County General District Court and agreed to a statement read by the prosecutor saying that he used a $30,000 check to the Farm Bureau to pay an $18,000 personal debt.

Global warming might have beaten her to the punch, but Elli Morris has found a different way to make big blocks of ice interesting and relevant: historical perspective. With a 300-pound chunk of frozen water, Morris has set up shop for the weekend at Field Day of the Past in Goochland County to teach people a little bit about a more recent ice age often overlooked.