DONALD M. WILKINSON, JR. A LIFE DEVOTED TO SERVICE - AND HISTORY
Don Wilkinson and Waite Rawls (above) peruse the official program for the opening of the Museum’s 2005 exhibition, The Confederate Navy, which Don Wilkinson underwrote. A few days later I received a kind letter from Mr. Wilkinson, “enclosing a brochure about my day job” and thanking me for “patiently listening to my project on John Wilkinson.”
BY JOHN M. COSKI
I
n January 1998, when I was in charge of The Museum of the Confederacy’s Eleanor S. Brockenbrough research library, I received a call from the Museum’s front desk to let me know that there was a “nice man” at the desk who wanted to talk with me. The man proved very nice indeed, impeccably dressed, and very apologetic about dropping by without an appointment. His name was Don Wilkinson, and he explained that he lived in New York and was only in town for a short while. Knowing that I had written a book on the Confederate Navy, he wanted to talk with me about his own research on his collateral ancestor, the famed Confederate blockade runner captain
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John Wilkinson. He showed me a large binder containing his substantial research. I told him that our collections had little or nothing on John Wilkinson except his memoir and other widely available published materials.
Six years later I found myself in the Museum lobby meeting Don Wilkinson again, this time introduced by the Museum’s new executive director, Waite Rawls. The two men both were graduates of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business; they knew each other from those school’s boards and from the New York City financial world. Both were proud native Virginians who had spent most of their careers outside the Commonwealth but never lost touch with Virginia. Those first encounters with Don
