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Virginia Petitions

A Django web portal for exploring ~3,700 digitized petitions from the Library of Virginia, spanning 1773–1861. The collection includes legislative petitions to the General Assembly and Revolutionary War pension declarations.

Features

  • Browse petitions by type, subject, county, or date
  • Interactive map with petition counts per county (VA, WV, KY, PA)
  • Toggleable historical county boundaries via the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries API
  • Links to digitized petition images in the LVA's Rosetta digital repository
  • Django admin for data management

Setup

Requires Python 3.13+ and uv.

uv sync
uv run python manage.py migrate
uv run python manage.py import_petitions <path-to-csv>
uv run python manage.py geocode_counties
uv run python manage.py createsuperuser

Development

Run the Django dev server and Tailwind watcher in separate terminals:

uv run python manage.py tailwind start
uv run python manage.py runserver

Data

Petition data is imported from a CSV export of the LVA catalog. Geographic assignments use the spreadsheet's binary county columns to map petitions to modern counties across four states. The original Locality field is preserved but not used for geographic lookups, as historical county names often don't correspond to modern boundaries.