Story by Chris Graham
It was an event six years in the making – but George Hawke took it in stride.
“I don’t need to read it. I know what it says,” said Hawke, holding a copy of his new historical volume, The History of Waynesboro, Virginia: 1900 to 1976, which was hot off the presses and in stock at the Waynesboro Heritage Museum this morning.
The book is the second in a series of books on Waynesboro history by Hawke, whose first volume, The History of Waynesboro to 1900, was published in 1997.
The nearly 600-page volume two has been the focus of efforts by a committee of the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation, which has been working itself for the past two years to bring Hawke’s manuscript into print.
“It’s absolutely a thrill,” said Dave Segars, the chairman of the committee.
“I totally underestimated how much time and effort would have to go into this. We didn’t consider ourselves to be the editors. We just wanted to publish the thing. And yet when we got into it, we realized we needed some pictures and some illustrations, and I wanted to see us get some maps in there – and that was a huge effort in itself. And we’re still not quite satisfied. I don’t know you’re ever 100 percent satisfied – but if you wait until it’s perfect, you wait forever,” Segars told The Augusta Free Press.
The book breaks up Waynesboro history into decade-by-decade slices – with photos, maps and quotes from each appropriate time period helping to set the stage for the individual stories that follow.
The book is for sale at the Waynesboro Heritage Museum at the corner of Main Street and Wayne Avenue in Downtown Waynesboro for $39.95 a copy.
For more information on the book, call the museum at 540.943.3943.
Chris Graham is the executive editor of The Augusta Free Press.
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