The Historic Hopewell Foundation Inc. is sponsoring a community celebration of the 220th anniversary of Weston Plantation, one of the most important historic sites in the Hopewell community. The event is free and will take place April 18 from 1-4 p.m. at Weston Plantation. “We hope the community will come to see the house and dependencies, enjoy the children’s activities and help us celebrate the history of one of Hopewell’s treasures,“ says Shirley Belkowitz, director of museums for the Historic Hopewell Foundation. “And of course there will be birthday cake.“

The March 1 editorial on bringing the Slavery Museum to Shockoe Bottom, the Feb. 27 editorial on old and historic neighborhood guidelines as mere “aesthetic” considerations, and Michael Paul Williams’ excellent column on the intervening day—which laid out the practical possibilities for a Slavery Museum—all draw our attention to that proverbial Richmond subject: history.

Event organizers are seeking exhibitors for the 13th annual Southside Virginia Heritage Days in Dinwiddie County. The event will be April 4-5 and features 19th-century living-history demonstrations, as well as tours of the 1803 plantation house Fork Inn. Heritage Days commemorates the anniversary of the Civil War Battle of Sutherland Station that took place at Fork Inn April 2, 1865. The free, family-oriented, educational event was started 13 years ago by Darrell Olgers, owner and resident of Fork Inn. It includes a variety of civilian and military living-history demonstrations and displays celebrating and educating the public about life in Southside Virginia in the early and mid-1800s.

Words that recur in Dayle Taliaferro Dunn’s biography include community, children, family and learning. “She was one of the most gregarious, outgoing, people-loving people you would ever meet,“ said her husband, Richard W. Dunn. “She took great pleasure in other people’s successes.“ Mrs. Dunn, community-affairs director and director of cause-related marketing at WTVR-Channel 6 and a longtime Richmond-area member of the boards of community and charitable organizations, died Sunday. She was 61.

Dayle Taliaferro Dunn, director of community affairs and cause-based marketing at WTVR-Channel 6, died Sunday. She was 61. A Richmond education and black-history advocate, Mrs. Dunn was serving her second term on the board of Leadership Metro Richmond. She had been on the steering committee of Community Learning Week, held each January in conjunction with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, from 1994 to 1997.

The final and largest exhibit mounted by the Virginia Historical Society while Stuart G. “Punky” Christian Jr. was president of its board of trustees was, fittingly, a 50th-anniversary retrospective about life on the home front during World War II. Mr. Christian missed some of that life, going ashore at Normandy the day after D-Day as a communications sergeant with the 329th Regimental Combat Team.

Adele Litwak knew the Nazi invasion had started because she could see the line of wounded people waiting to get into the Jewish hospital up the street. On a Friday morning in September 1941, the invaders had reached her hometown, Lwow, Poland. Soon anything of value had been taken by soldiers who piled belongings in the middle of the floor in front of their owners as if the residents of Lwow were nothing, she would say later.

In December 2001, Richard L. Adams Jr., a Fairfax County Internet pioneer, paid a rare-book dealer in London $475,000 for a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Several years later, the state of Maine claimed it was a public record belonging to the town of Wiscasset, where it was read from a pulpit by the Rev. Thomas Moore and then delivered to the local clerk on Oct. 19, 1776.

When William B. Crawley began teaching there in 1970, Mary Washington College was a school in transition. It had been only two years since students had won the right to wear slacks to class and given up their May Day spectacle.

An occasional look back at what Richmond’s newspapers were saying a quarter-century ago.

With young black men used as bait, dogs were trained to track and pursue runaway slaves in the cobblestone courtyard of a Richmond slave jail. Hidden for more than a century, the courtyard of round, gray stones and other remnants of Lumpkin’s Slave Jail lay exposed yesterday in the corner of a Shockoe Bottom parking lot. Archaeologists have spent the past four months digging 8 to 15 feet down to uncover “an amazingly intact urban complex,“ which included brick foundation walls, said Matthew R. Laird, principal investigator with the James River Institute for Archaeology in Williamsburg.

A group of historians will explore the state of the country on the eve of the Civil War in a conference April 29 at the University of Richmond. Sponsored by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, the conference will be the first event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war. UR President Edward L. Ayers will moderate as Civil War historians discuss events of 1859 that foreshadowed the war that would begin two years later.

In January 1942, Maj. Clay Dan Albright Jr. of the United States Army Air Corps was assigned to Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama to teach twin-engine flying to African-American pilots who had passed basic flight training in single-engine planes. The success of the basic flight training program had encouraged the Army Air Corps to plan to put black pilots in larger, multi-engine bombers, according to a 1998 report by the U.S. National Park Service.

A performance of “The Parsons’ Cause: Prelude to Revolution” will be presented Saturday at 11 a.m. at historic Hanover Courthouse on U.S. 301 and Hanover Courthouse Road.