Education
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The Southwest Virginia Museum is located in a mansion built by lawyer and industrialist Rufus Ayers, Virginia attorney general in the 1880s. Newman and her brother, C. Bascom Slemp, former U.S. Congressman and private secretary to President Calvin Coolidge, assembled the initial collection of artifacts on display. Slemp bequeathed the collection to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946, and the museum opened to the public in 1948. It chronicles the development of Southwest Virginia and presents a picture of life in the past.
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Big Stone Gap, Virginia · United States
