A historic marker installation ceremony will be held on Saturday, May 23, at First Baptist Church, 9654 Buckley Hall Road, Mathews, marking the unveiling by the NAACP Mathews Branch and the black descendants of Gwynn’s Island of what is believed to be the first highway marker in Virginia to commemorate a black community that was alleged to have been driven from its land by racial threats and violence. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources marker tells the story of the black community of Gwynn’s Island, whose presence on the island dates to the 1600s. By 1910, Gwynn’s Island was home to 135 black residents—7 percent of the population—many of them landowners who had built a church, a school, and a way of life across generations. Within a decade, they were gone. The exodus is believed to have been set in motion on Christmas Eve 1915, when a fight at a local store led to the arrest and conviction of James Henry Smith, a 48-year-old black man and father of eight who witnesses said w...