Landonia Randolph Minor Dashiell (11 December 1855–11 December 1925), educational reformer, was born in Fauquier County and was the daughter of Landonia Randolph Minor and Robert Dabney Minor, a United States naval officer who entered the Confederate States Navy at the beginning of the Civil War, served aboard the CSS Virginia, and died in 1871. She attended a private school in Richmond. On 12 December 1883 she married William Sparrow Dashiell, a Richmond real estate agent whose younger half brother was married to Margaret May Dashiell, a noted artist who sought to capture the vanishing ways of the Old South. William Dashiell was acquitted on forgery charges in October 1891, but after a new charge was filed in November he fled the country for Mexico and later Panama, where he died on 3 March 1895. For about six years beginning in 1894 Landonia Minor Dashiell worked as a clerk in the local office of the United States Internal Revenue Service in order to support their two sons.

Dashiell belonged to many cultural organizations, including the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and the Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Virginia (later the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia), of which she served as recording secretary from 1899 to 1906. Through membership in the Woman's Club of Richmond she became involved in the effort to reform public education in the city. Several club members helped establish the Richmond Education Association in the spring of 1900, and the following year Dashiell joined the REA's executive committee. During the next seven years she chaired the Kindergarten and Manual Training Committee (1902–1903), the Legislative Committee (1903–1907), and the Membership Committee (1907–1908). Dashiell became first vice president of the REA in 1905 and served as acting president for the 1906–1907 term. She often reported on the state of education in Virginia at the annual Conference for Education in the South, which she helped bring to Richmond in 1903.

The Richmond Education Association intended to foster an interest in public education and quickly addressed the many challenges facing the city's schools. The association helped establish training schools for kindergarten teachers, opened kindergartens in public schools, worked to improve often inadequate school buildings, called for health inspections, and encouraged cooperation between parents and teachers. Seeking to expand its work beyond the city, the REA joined forces in 1904 with the recently organized Co-operative Education Association of Virginia (later the Virginia Congress of Parents and Teachers), which worked to extend the school year to nine months, adopt a general curriculum that included agricultural and industrial training, construct new high schools, and establish local associations in each county. As chair of the Local Education Association Committee, Dashiell saw such local groups as vital for encouraging the community involvement necessary to improve the poor condition of the state's rural schools.

In May 1905 the Co-operative Education Association launched its May Campaign to raise awareness and organize education associations across the state. At the annual meeting later that year, Dashiell reported on the establishment of more than 150 local groups. She became the association's first paid employee when she was elected general secretary of citizens' leagues late in 1905. In that capacity she traveled thousands of miles each year. She visited Virginia communities, teachers' institutes, and the state's normal schools; helped organize local education associations and improvement leagues; and spoke to teachers about the association's work. In 1908 Dashiell resigned as first vice president of the Richmond Education Association in order to focus on her work with the Co-operative Education Association. She had by then become executive secretary of the latter organization, which had expanded its mission to include issues of transportation and public health. The private organization became more closely tied to the state's Board of Education, and a new president, elected in 1909, transformed the association into a male-dominated activist group. Although Jesse Hinton Binford replaced Dashiell as executive secretary in 1909, Dashiell continued her work as director of citizens' leagues, and by the time she retired early in 1915, more than 900 local groups had been founded across Virginia. These leagues served to unite communities around a common goal, and their accomplishments included raising money for such school improvements as landscaping and wells; for such supplies as musical instruments, books, and desks; and for the construction of new buildings.

In addition to the circulars and pamphlets that Dashiell wrote on community improvement in rural areas, in August 1908 she edited a special "Playground Issue" of the Richmond Evening Journal, in which supporters of public playgrounds, libraries, woman suffrage, and educational reform promoted their work. She also wrote poetry, some of which appeared in local newspapers, Southern Women's Magazine, and American Poetry Magazine. During World War I, Dashiell worked with the Red Cross throughout the state. She helped to save from demolition and to preserve the historic Richmond home of Chief Justice John Marshall. Landonia Randolph Minor Dashiell died of uterine cancer at her Richmond home on 11 December 1925 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in John William Leonard, ed., Woman's Who's Who of America (1914/1915), 229, and William L. Bowden, "History of the Cooperative Education Association of Virginia: An Analysis of a Community Development Agency and Its Practice of Adult Education" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1957), esp. 162–167 and 516–519; Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 13 Dec. 1883; Richmond Evening Journal, 1 Aug. 1908; Dashiell poetry album (1898–1925) and correspondence and writing exercises in Minor Family Papers (1657–1942 and 1810–1932), including birth date of 11 Dec. 1855 in letter to her father, 1 Dec. 1868, all Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; correspondence and reports in Southern Education Board Records (1898–1925), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.; publications include Dashiell, "Report of Local Education Associations," Co-operative Education Association of Virginia Proceedings (1905), 31–34, and "Report upon the Richmond Education Association," Proceedings of the Ninth Conference for Education in the South (1906), 41–44; report as acting president in Richmond Education Association Annual Report (1906–1907), 5–8; William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870–1920 (1986); BVS Death Certificate, Richmond City (with variant birth date of 11 Dec. 1856); obituary and account of funeral in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12, 13 Dec. 1925; editorial tribute in Richmond News Leader, 14 Dec. 1925.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leah M. Thomas.

How to cite this page:
Leah M. Thomas,"Landonia Randolph Minor Dashiell (1855–1925)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dashiell_Landonia_Randolph_Minor, accessed [today's date]).

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