JONI LYNN CRANE
Currently living in Vernal, Utah, Joni Lynn Crane is a historian, webmaster and documentary film maker. While a resident of Loudoun County, Virginia in the1990s, Joni Crane spear-headed several local history projects, including the co-founding of Run, Rabbit, Run history video company whose first work aired several times on The History Channel.
While in Loudoun County, Joni Crane was involved in a multitude of community, church and historic preservation activities.
She developed an interest in Loudoun County history through her work as a Cablevision Spotlight Reporter for Loudoun's Channel 3. Half her spotlight reports focused on the local history of Sterling. Features included a study of the Toll House which lies almost under the crossroad of Rt. 7 and 28, and the Miskell Farm House where Confederate Colonel John Mosby and his crew turned a potentially deadly Union ambush into a Union rout. While researching the history of her own neighborhood, Mirror Ridge, and its use as a Civil War signal site, she ran across an old deed showing an unmarked cemetery on the nearby grounds of Northern Virginia Community College.
With help from U.S.G.S. Emeritus Bill Hannah and Smithsonian employee Richard Malcolm Richardson, Joni began to interview the previous owners &emdash; the Ankers family &emdash; and studied their family history. Oral history revealed the Ankers home had been used as a field hospital for both armies after the Second Battle of Dranesville (also known as The Battle of Anker's Shop) and The Battle of Miskell's Farm, and some of the Union soldiers who died were buried in the family plot beside the home.
Joni then asked Loudoun Museum board member Wynn Saffer to research the soldiers' names at The National Archives, and he was able to confirm the names of most of the dead buried there - soldiers, as it turned out, who had never been accounted for by the Union Army. Loudoun County has yet to document the gravesite, but the cemetery area has been marked, its white pegs clearly visible from Route 7 by the Northern Virginia Community College entrance.
As a resident of Sterling, Virginia Joni created an extensive web site featuring Sterling Civil War history (including the battles previously referred to). Joni was also politically active in land use issues related to her subdivision of Mirror Ridge and the town of Sterling, coming before the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors so often and so effectively that, to date, she is the only person anyone's ever known who was asked to run for office by both political parties.
In 1998, Crane co-founded Run, Rabbit, Run Productions, Inc., with Meredith Bean McMath and serves as Technical Director. Their first work, "Having a Ball: Ballroom Costume, Etiquette and Dance in the Midst of the Rebellion" aired several times on The History Channel's History Showcase program between 1999 and 2000. A second video, "Southern Courage: Civil War Women of Loudoun County, Virginia" was created to support Virginia SOL's in Womens Studies and Civil War History.
Joni also served as a volunteer for various living history programs and fundraisers for The Loudoun Museum and eventually created a living history presentation for schools, portraying her own grandmother in order to enlighten students about life during the Civil War and providing students with a booklet of the transcripts of letters home written by her Union soldier grandfather William McCormick. Joni moved to the Denver area of Colorado in 2000 where she continued to perform living history programs in Colorado schools and assist with the preservation of local history.
In 2001, she returned from Colorado to receive The Loudoun History Award, in recognition of her tremendous contribution to the preservation and dissemination of Loudoun County Virginia history.
While in Colorado she continued work as a historian and documentarian, becoming deeply involved in the Daughters of the American Revolution and creating a short video documentary for "Project Linus," a national volunteer organization which provides free hand-made blankets to ill or traumatized children (See McMath article, Project Linus). Portions of her Project Linus video were featured on a segment of The Oprah Show when Project Linus won a 2000 Angel Award.
Since moving to Vernal Utah in 2004, Joni has become a webmaster, creating several unique sites including:
http://coloradodar.org/chapters/centennialstate/
http://coloradodar.org/chapters/bluespruce/
http://coloradodar.org/chapters/generalmarion/
http://coloradodar.org/chapters/peacepipe/
http://patriotdreams.us/utahdar/utahmembers.html
http://patriotdreams.us/utahdar/utahpublic.html
http://patriotdreams.us/car/jenniemcneil.html
Contact Joni Crane.
