About Us

---

Stratford Mail is a microcast (a short podcast) for history lovers. It  broadcsts from the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia. If you're in the neighborhood, come sit a spell!

Episodes are researched, scripted, recorded, and produced by Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, the Director of Research and the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at Stratford Hall.  Each month we feature an historical letter from a onetime resident, ally, associate or friend of Stratford Hall. Candid, concise interpretation prompts you to reflect on some aspect of your own experience. Guaranteed to inform and entertain. If you would like to engage Dr. Steffey as a consultant, speaker, or voice actor, please contact Stratford Mail at arthurlee@strafordmail.org

Whether the topic is wine, war in the colonies, ghosts, or a fanciful hat from London, you'll learn what life on the ground looked like from those who lived the moments that make up our difficult and beloved past. And Stratford Mail is never more than 20 minutes! Finally, a History podcast for folks on the go & in the know! 

Stratford Mail opening and closing music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"

Audio production tools include AI voices from Play.ht and recording software from Hindenburg.com

About Stratford Hall

Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, the home of the Lee family, brings together people from around the world to experience two-thousand acres of natural and human history, preserved and presented so that we can all learn from the courageous struggles of our ancestors, taking inspiration both from what they endured and what they accomplished. There are few places in America where people can travel down small, rural roads to arrive at a vast site that preserves so many aspects of early-American life, from the Great House where the influential Lee family helped to forge a new nation, to the fields worked by enslaved Africans, to the waters of the rivers that fueled trade, to the ground, which still yields secrets about the people and animals that lived before.

Come experience this extraordinary place and learn about a layered history that began millions of years ago - a history that continues to educate, inspire, and influence Americans to the present day.