To power the new digital economy, Virginia moved the dead

Back in 2000, I got my first computer, a Compaq. I was excited to be connected to the internet. The dial-up sound felt like a doorway opening. My father, fresh from work in his correctional officer uniform, would glance into my room, see me typing away, and smile. Technology felt full of possibility.

At 17, I imagined computers expanding opportunity, not replacing people. I never imagined that the infrastructure powering the internet might one day displace my ancestors’ graves. 

But that is the quiet reality unfolding in southern Virginia.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) has appointed the state’s first chief energy officer to confront rising power demand driven by data centers. The position signals urgency. Virginia is the global center of data storage, and electricity demand is surging. Meeting that demand will require new transmission lines, substations and large-scale industrial development.

Much of that expansion is moving south. In places like Pittsylvania County, where land is cheaper and more abundant, the state is positioning rural communities as the next frontier of the digital economy.

But the land there is not empty. It never was. 

My oldest known ancestor, Flem Adams Senior, was born enslaved around 1830 in Pittsylvania County. Family accounts describe him as an enormous man, reportedly seven feet tall. In slavery, size often meant usefulness. Men like him were forced into labor regimes that valued physical strength in the fields and, at times, capacity to reproduce. 

Long before industrial parks or technology corridors appeared on county planning maps, this land functioned as a plantation economy sustained by slave labor.

After emancipation, my family stayed. They farmed nearby land, built churches, raised children, and buried their dead in small rural cemeteries. These burial grounds........

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