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History found in yard-sale chest A 40-pound piece of history has been sitting in a Spotsylvania living room for 26 years Date published: 5/8/2007
BY EMILY BATTLE
For the past 26 years, a mysterious piece of history has tugged at Kay McFadden's curiosity. The 40-pound, 172-year-old edition of "The Devotional Family Bible" entered the McFadden house in the Todds Tavern area of Spotsylvania County by chance. Kay and her husband, Larry, found it in the bottom of a chest of drawers they bought at a yard sale on the road back from Lynchburg. They'd stopped there in the summer of 1981, somewhere along U.S. 29 in Nelson County. When Larry pulled one of the drawers out, he saw the Bible, which lay in two pieces. Kay alerted the seller, but "He said, 'I don't sell Bibles and I don't buy Bibles, you take that with the furniture,'" Larry said. And so began a journey that would lead Kay through history, from the inauguration of America's first president to the world's first trans-Atlantic flight and beyond. It was an exciting discovery for McFadden, who loves the thrill of a treasure hunt, can't resist a yard sale and brims with excitement when she talks about movies like "National Treasure" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Inscribed in calligraphy on the first pages of the Bible are names of the members of the Rollinson family, which had a storied history in New York and New Jersey around the turn of the 20th century. A tattered clipping from the New York Herald Tribune that was in the Bible tells of the death on Oct. 15, 1937, of Charles Rollinson. He was an engraver who had designed the $25,000 check that was awarded to Charles Lindbergh when he completed the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. After visiting the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, Kay learned that Charles Rollinson was likely a descendant of William Rollinson, who designed the buttons that George Washington wore on his inauguration uniform. With an illustrious cast of characters laid out in the Bible's pages, McFadden set out to chip away at their history. One day, she tried to track down one of the family members. Reginald Rollinson's birth on Oct. 7, 1907, is recorded in the Bible, but his death is not. It was the early 1980s, and McFadden figured he might still be alive.
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