Harry Flood Byrd was born in 1887 into an old Virginia family whose fortune had been lost. At about 15 he took over his father’s insolvent Winchester Star, which owed its newsprint supplier $2,500, and paid the debt off with daily cash payments. By 21 he was running a 93 mile toll road for $33 a month, and he built a large apple business in the Shenandoah Valley, where squalid conditions for migrant workers later inspired Edward R. Murrow’s documentary Harvest of Shame. Elected to the state senate at 28, he fought bond financing for roads, won a libel suit brought by highway contractors, and became governor in 1926 with a strict pay as you go policy and a short ballot that cut statewide elected offices to three.

Through county officials known as courthouse cliques, the Byrd organization controlled Virginia for decades, and candidates needed “the nod” to run. Appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1933, Byrd opposed New Deal deficit spending and declined to endorse Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 he helped author the Southern Manifesto and led Massive Resistance, under which the state would close schools that integrated. He resigned in late 1965, died in October 1966, and was succeeded by his son Harry F. Byrd Jr.

• He championed Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park, which remained segregated for a year after a federal order to desegregate national parks.
• Delegates at the 1944 Democratic convention gave him 89 votes against Franklin Roosevelt without his consent.
• Unpledged electors gave him 15 electoral votes in the 1960 presidential election.
• Prince Edward County kept its public schools closed from 1959 to 1964.
• His statue was removed from Richmond’s Capitol Square in 2021, and a Richmond area middle school named for him was renamed.