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Arena Johnson Richardson Preston was born on February 22, 1868 in Fincastle. She died on March 5, 1954. Her parents were Pleasant Richardson and Henrietta Braxton Richardson. She married A.H. Preston on December 25, 1919. They lived in Fincastle. The couple didn’t have any children.
Preston’s father, Pleasant Richardson, and grandmother, Martha, were slaves of Thomas Henry Johnson at Lauderdale. They were listed on Johnson’s inventory in 1853. Pleasant Richardson, at the age of 19, went to West Virginia and joined the Union Army to fight in the Civil War.
Preston attended and graduated from Hartshorn Memorial College in Richmond. The college was founded in 1883 by Joseph C. Hartshorn, of Massachusetts, in memory of his wife for African American women and the single purpose of raising up a body of thoroughly educated Christian women as consecrated workers in the harvest field of the world.
Hartshorn Memorial College, the first black women’s college in the country, opened on November 7, 1883. It began in Richmond, in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church, with 58 students. It was chartered on March 13 by the Virginia legislature as “an institution of learning of collegiate grades for the education of young women.” The college awarded its first degrees in 1892 to three young women, one of whom was from Buchanan— Mary Moore Booze. Hartshorn became Virginia Union University.
Preston taught for a number of years in Botetourt County African American schools. She organized the PTA and helped organize the County-Wide League for the African American community.
A friend of Preston’s published the following tribute to her in The Herald in 1954: “The life of our deceased friend was one we could well emulate. She was kind, always ready to help where needed. She was understanding, never condemning those less fortunate than she with her background of a college education, and the culture resulting. She was patient, continually trying to instill in those persons with whom she came in contact principals of honor, loyalty, politeness and faith. She bore her suffering with real fortitude, never tiring others with physical complaints, but ever thankful that she was well enough to not be a burden on her friends. It may be said that she had a philosophy of life based on the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul’s admonition to the Christians, from First Corinthians, Chapter 13. Someone has said ‘let me do all the good I can, for I pass this way but once.’ She did, and left the world a better place than she found it.”
