W&L Joins Four Virginia Institutions in NEH Grant to Preserve Revolutionary-Era Collections The grant will fund conservation and digitization of collections documenting Virginia’s role in the nation’s founding.

By Brian Laubscher
September 15, 2026

Washington and Lee University is one of five Virginia institutions selected to share a $749,939 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to conserve and digitize collections documenting the history of American independence and the formation of Virginia’s early government.

The NEH made the award through its Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition program created in honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The consortium is led by the Library of Virginia and includes the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, William & Mary Libraries and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, along with W&L. Over three years, the grant will support work by all five institutions to conserve approximately 1,700 items and digitize nearly 5,000 pages across 13 historically significant collections of manuscripts, print materials and works of art documenting Revolutionary-era life and early government in Virginia.

“In the 250th birthday year of the United States, the Commonwealth and the Washington and Lee University Library, it is fitting for us to tell stories from our nation’s founding period,” said K.T. Vaughan, Hal F. and Barbra Buckner Higginbotham University Librarian. “Collectively, the five institutions working on the Revolutionary Virginia: Conserving and Digitizing Founding Era Collections grant will be able to ensure that this rich history is available for centuries to come. How lucky are we in Virginia to have such a wealth of history to draw on and so many excellent colleagues with whom to do this work?”

W&L’s share of the award, $73,314.80, will fund the conservation and digitization of two collections from Special Collections and Archives in Leyburn Library: the William and Anne Fleming papers and the 14 oaths of allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia drawn from the Reid family papers.

“The Fleming and Reid papers have been stewarded by the University Library for almost a century now,” said Kim Sims, associate professor and associate university librarian for Special Collections and Archives. “We take our role as steward seriously to make certain that the W&L community and others continue to have access to these materials for centuries to come. This grant provides the means necessary to ensure we can make that happen.”

The Fleming papers document the life of William Fleming, a Scottish-born surgeon who emigrated to Virginia, joined George Washington’s regiment in 1755, was a Liberty Hall Academy trustee and served eight days as acting governor of Virginia in June 1781. The collection includes documents signed by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry along with material on the French and Indian War and the settlement of Kentucky, then still a county of Virginia.

Each of the 14 oaths of allegiance records a man from what is now Rockbridge County renouncing King George III and pledging loyalty to the Commonwealth of Virginia. A 1777 act of the General Assembly required every free-born male inhabitant older than 16 to swear the oath before a justice of the peace, and those who refused could not hold office, serve on a jury, vote or buy land. The oaths survive among the Reid family papers because Andrew Reid was the first clerk of the Rockbridge County court, an office he and his son, Samuel McDowell Reid, an alumnus of Washington College, held from 1778 until 1852.

Items in both collections were laminated in the 1970s using a conservation method later found to damage paper over time. The grant will fund reversing that treatment, stabilizing the paper and the digitizing the collections. When completed, both collections will be freely available online, expanding access for students, faculty and researchers beyond the reading room.

“I’m excited that this grant will help us share these documents more widely,” said Paula Kiser, associate professor and digital scholarship librarian. “Part of the project includes digitizing the materials to create preservation master files of each page: very high-resolution images in a non-proprietary format that we will save in at least three different digital and physical locations to protect them from bit rot or server failure. The library will then upload the files, along with information about each item, into the W&L Digital Archive so anyone can view them at any time and zoom in for a magnified look at each page.”

The NEH has awarded $41.4 million in 2026 to support 81 humanities projects, including 33 grants totaling $13.4 million through the Rediscovering Our Revolutionary Tradition program. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from across the nation.