Virginia T. Long

Virginia Tunsall Long (1861-1935) was the daughter of Armistead Lindsay Long (1825-1891), a Brigadier General for the Confederate forces in the Civil War. In 1893 the recently appointed U.S. Railroad Commissioner, Wade Hampton III, Lieutenant General in the Confederate army and former Governor of and U.S. Senator from South Carolina, made a railroad trip across the U.S. to inspect the railroads and make recommendations to Congress on needed legislation for maintaining and improving transcontinental transportation via the railways. On this trip he took his daughter and granddaughter with two of their young women friends, one of whom was Virginia T. Long. On June 7, 1893, their railroad car stopped at Menlo Park and the party took carriages to the Stanford estate for a visit with Senator Leland Stanford. Two weeks later Senator Stanford died and on July 19 Virginia penned a condolence letter to Mrs. Stanford. Virginia was married later in 1893, on Nov. 9, to Lieutenant Robert Alexander Brown (1859-1937). His military career took the two of them all over the U.S., including the Presidio in San Francisco several times, and he also served in the Philippines during and after the Philippine-American War and in World War I in Europe where he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. After his retirement from the military in 1930 they returned to San Francisco where they both died and were buried.