John Garland Pollard

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John Garland Pollard (1871 - 1937) was an American politician. He served as the governor of Virginia from 1930 to 1934. Son of Baptist minister John Pollard of King and Queen County, Virginia, he first attended Richmond College but was forced to leave for ill health. He later entered Columbian College, now George Washington University. In 1893 and for the Smithsonian, he wrote The Pamunkey Indians of Virginia, an anthropological survey that detailed the vanishing language and traditions of the early Virginia tribe [1].

In 1904, he issued Pollard's Code, an annotation of Virginia's law. He became Attorney General in 1914 and moved to Europe in 1918, where he was trial justice of the Y.M.C.A. [2]. Afterward, he was named by Woodrow Wilson as a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

In 1921, he moved to Williamsburg, where he was first Dean of the Marshall Wythe School of Citizenship and Government. In Williamsburg, he became involved in the effort to restore the colonial town along with the Rev. W. A. R. Goodwin. There, he also developed Pollard Park, a small garden-like development that expressed his ideas on urban planningthat is on the National Register of Historic Places [3]. He was involved in one of the first great efforts of Colonial Willamsburg, the rebuilding of the Raleigh Tavern; while in Williamsburg he also became its mayor.

He became Democratic governor of Virginia in 1930, where, among his accomplishments, was establishing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the first state art museum in the United States [4]. After the death of his arthritic wife Grace Phillips Pollard, while in office he married Canadian-born Violet McDougall, secretary to a number of Virginia governors.