John Gibbons Shelton was principal of Union Ridge/Albemarle Training School (ATS) from 1903 to 1930, and published a local newspaper, the Charlottesville Messenger, from 1910 to 1927. He attended the Jefferson School and went to New York in 1876 to complete his education. After coming home to teach, he spent many summers working in New York as a newspaper correspondent. In the 1948 ATS yearbook, his students wrote that he had brought them the “culture, dignity, and refinement” of New York City. His Brown Street home, bought in 1910, later became the home of Rebecca McGinness, his niece.

Rebecca McGinness, affectionately called Mayor of Starr Hill, taught at Jefferson School for forty-five years. Her husband, Melvin, owned and operated a popular tailor shop on Vinegar Hill. Rebecca taught children who later became homeowners in the neighborhood, and she worked with some of them in the 1970s to save Starr Hill from decline and urban renewal. It was called Starr Hill, she liked to tell them, because it was the hill where the stars of the community lived. She lived to be 107 and, as noted in her obituary, is remembered for “her keen intelligence and wit, and great dignity.”