18. Buchanan

Along the Blue Ridge portion of the Bikecentennial ‘76 route, visitors find themselves in the small town of Buchanan, the hometown of suffragist Mary Johnston. Born in 1870, Johnston grew up in Buchanan, and then her family moved around the east coast of the United States. She became famous in the early twentieth century for her fictional novels and short stories. Once she had established her reputation as a novelist, she began to write essays, letters, and speeches advocating for women’s right to vote. As a white southern upper class woman, Mary Johnston lived a complex life that highlighted the connections between race, class, and gender in the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Johnston’s life thus provides a  lens for understanding the broader issues that shaped the lives of Americans in the important transitional period in US history. This episode is connected to the town of Buchanan, located just over 300 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and about 250 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound rides enter Virginia.