May 12, 2013

Soft spot near cemetery. By Paul Clancy

In the backyard of the historic Carraway House in Kempsville, beside a small stream, there’s a

small family cemetery bearing grave stones of that long-ago family. And next to one of the markers is a low spot filled with leaves.

“Don’t step on it ‘cause you’ll sink up to your knees,” Laura Wenslaff warns, and you back off, although unable to resist testing it. Sure enough, it’s soft.

The house on South Witchduck Road, one of the oldest in Virginia Beach, was built in 1734. It’s now the office for Home Realty, and Wenslaff, the principal broker, owns it. When she bought the building seven years ago the previous owner said there had been a tunnel there. And then she met Deborah Berry, a longtime Kempsville resident who told her quite a story.

Berry joins us for a walk. A dog barks as we head west along the creek bed through dense woods, then turn left near Overland Road, passing another small cemetery.

In the summer of 1968, Berry says, just after her family moved to Kempsville, her brother, Ron Howard, discovered a hatch cover with a metal ring behind the Carraway House. When they opened it, all they saw was stairs leading into a black hole. She wasn’t about to explore it but her 13-year-old brother didn’t hesitate.

What he found was an elaborate timber-supported tunnel. As he crawled, the passageway turned left and, when it passed the other cemetery, he could see the ends of caskets. Finally, he saw daylight and emerged at the back of Pleasant Hall, a historic mansion.

Tunnel exit? Near Pleasant Hall
by Paul Clancy

The house was supposedly used by Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last colonial governor, as headquarters during a skirmish with patriot troops in November 1775. The British won decisively, but then went on to Great Bridge where they suffered a lopsided loss. The humiliated Dunmore bombarded Norfolk and soon after sailed for New York.

Ever since the discovery of the tunnel there has been speculation:  that maybe Dunmore, fearing for his safety, had it dug as an escape route. He’d be able to emerge near the creek – then a much wider and deeper artery of the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River – and make his getaway. Or that it was used by escaping slaves who would hide out in the tunnel during the day and escape by boat at night.

As we follow the tunnel route, Berry talks about her brother’s tunnel obsession. Three times he crawled through it and three times the police caught him. “’You need to keep this boy out of there,’” she quotes the officer. “’He’s going to get hurt. If it collapses, he’s dead.’”

Soon after, a dump truck loaded with dirt pulled up and the entrance was closed.

We walk through a parking lot, cross a street and then a field behind Pleasant Hall and come to a grove of trees. In the middle is a swampy area where the tunnel may have exited.

Wenslaff  has tried to find answers. At one point the city suggested using ground-penetrating radar to determine how much of the tunnel still exists, but nothing came of it. She invited Norfolk State University history professor Cassandra Newby-Alexander to take a look to see if graduate students could treat it as an archaeological dig. That didn’t work, either.

She remains determined to find out. “You don’t build something like that, something that extensive. Just for the fun of it,” she says. “Hopefully we can open it up and find the absolute truth.”

The truth may be that there’s not much history there, at least not the ancient kind. Virginia Beach historian Stephen Mansfield says Dunmore wasn’t at Pleasant Hall long enough and had nothing to fear from locals whom he had soundly whipped and forced to sign loyalty oaths.

And Newby-Alexander says there’s no way slaves could have had a secret escape route under the noses of white owners.

But she has another theory: “I suspect it was a twentieth century type of gin-running.”

Hmmm.  During wild white lightnin’ days 50 or 60 years ago, some rural areas of Princess Anne County abounded in liquor stills – and operators who made enough money to afford hidden passageways.

Mark Reed, the city’s historic resource coordinator, says the question is what possible use an underground passageway might serve. “Nothing logical comes to mind unless there was something outside of the law that was occurring. Extralegal activities might be of interest.”

So Dunmore’s escape route it probably wasn’t. But escape, at a much later date, was very much on someone’s mind.

May 5, 2013

When last we met, I was buried in an avalanche of digital memorabilia on the Website of the

All courtesy of Virginia Beach Public Library

Virginia Beach Public Library. There’s so much there that this is Part Two of my exploration of this goldmine of local and regional history.

With the help of donations from private collectors, the library has scanned and placed online thousands of postcards, photographs and documents that reach back to the early days of the Virginia Beach oceanfront when it was still a town, and Princess Anne County when it was mostly farmland.

I was surprised by the depth and variety of the collection. Slave trading records, deed books, high school yearbooks, city directories, vestry books, Bible entries, cook books, sailors’ handbooks, marriage, birth and death records – all of this grist for historians, genealogy searchers and, well, history column writers. Many of the records are searchable, allowing browsers to enter keywords that lead directly to relevant records.

The count as of last week was 4,252 items and 1,331 books, and growing as staff and volunteers scan items and a digital lab at Princeton University scans books and other records. The impressive statistic is that, since the project was launched three years ago, there have been almost 80,000 downloads.
Probably the largest of the online resources is the Edgar T. Brown Collection, comprising what must be thousands of pictures, family and local histories and postcards. I counted 300 postcards just of the old Cavalier Hotel, like the one here of the hotel and gardens at night from about 1939. On the back of the card, a visitor wrote to a friend in Wytheville, “We are having a very nice time, but it sure is hot down here.”

There are period photographs, including one from a packed Easter parade in 1931. How did they get that many people in one place?

Recently, the library acquired the collection of Robert J. Gilson, who had amassed seven binders

of postcards, sheet music, clippings and brochures about the Beach, South Bay ferries, Chesapeake Bay steamers and other cities in Hampton Roads. The North End resident has been buying items of local significance at antique shows and flea markets. Included here is sheet music for “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay,” featuring a steamship the likes of which we’ll never see again.

Another source within the collection is the Waterfield Family Collection, a small but visually striking group of photos of family members and neighbors taken in Princess Anne County taken chiefly between 1924 and 1937. The one of Clyde’s Service Station is classic. There are several other collection, but here’s a representative sample.

April 28, 2013

Help, I’m trapped. Hopelessly trapped in the depths of Virginia Beach history.

I stumbled upon the huge and growing digital archives of the Virginia Beach Public Library last

The family of Denver and Emma (Peachey) Yoder, about 1960.
Courtesy of Virginia Beach Public Library.

week while researching the Cavalier and Princess Anne hotels. There are not only postcards and photos but brochures, menus, stationary and schedules for trains that went to the Oceanfront.

And there are not just digital images but whole books, like the one I almost spend all day browsing through: “Amish Mennonites of Kempsville, Va., 1900-1970. A Collection of Stories and Photos from a Time and Place, Gone Forever, Yet Living in our Memories of a Good and Pleasant Land.”

The section I chose was from the Yoder family, which came to the Kempsville area around 1936 and founded a cooperatively owned dairy. “Our hopes for better economic times in the new community did make one major adjustment, going back to horse and buggy after owning a car for six years,” the writer says. And speaking of the father, it adds, “Driving the horse-drawn two seated buggy, he found a waiting clientele for our poultry, pork and other farm produce.”

And then this: From the “Princess Anne County Minute Book, an Index to Enslaved and Free African-Virginians,” there’s a hand-written entry: “Samuel Tholaball never received any type of payment for rounding up Henry Irvin’s two runaway slaves.” And another, “Capt. Francis Land imported a young slave by name Quammino who was judged to be twelve years old and therefore tithable by law.”

Boxing at the State Military Reservation {Camp Pendleton)
during World War I era. Virginia Beach Public Library.

There’s also a postcard, “Boxing at the State Military Reservation,[Camp Pendleton] Virginia Beach, Va.” A huge crowd is gathered, mostly men in World War I type caps, and quite a few women who were probably their wives. The cars in the distance, probably Model Ts, are definitely from that era.

Spurred by Patricia J Cook, director of the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library, the archive has become one of the most significant in the region, if not the state. And it’s apparently getting attention by researchers around the country.

They’re not just photo copies of book pages, but digital scans that are searchable. So if someone from Middle America – or China, for that matter – looks for records of someone born in Princess Anne in the mid-19^th century, for instance, he or she might find Bible records from that period. And the magic of the Internet takes you not just to a book, deed transfer or whatnot, but right to the entry.

In the three years the library has been putting records online, Cook says, there had been almost 80,000 downloads. “We would never have that kind of use if people had to drive here to look at these books,” she said.

The tedious work of scanning books is performed for the library by a digital service at Princeton University. When you call the books up on your computer, you can flip through pages as if you’re reading an actual text, and zoom in or out for close-up viewing. It’s expensive but the city and Friends of the Virginia Beach Library are enthusiastic about funding the project.

Cook showed me the rooms where library staff and volunteers have been busy scanning other documents, from postcards and photographs to menus, placemats and matchbook covers. It’s all history, even if people don’t realize it at the time.

 “My thing is I never say no,” she said. “If you’re going to throw it away, throw it to me.”

The postcards show both front and back, so sometimes you’ll find personal notes from vacationers to their friends back home. Like the one to “Mom” in Altoona, PA, complaining that it rained for two days in a row. “Hope it shines tomorrow or I’ll have to get Angie a sun lamp.”

There are copies of local newspapers, including the Country Day School for Girls’ “Seaweed Gazette” for Thanksgiving, 1957 in which the 8^th grade hit parade shows “Wale Up Little Suzie” as the top song, followed by “An Affair to Remember,” and “The Twelfth of Never.”

I’ve spent the better part of a week plunging into the archives and feel that if there’s a history researcher quicksand, I’m in it. Won’t someone please throw me a line? 

April 21, 2013

Look here, dear, there’s a hotel on the ocean at a place called Virginia Beach. It’s open year-round and we can get there by overnight train or steamer from New York. And, according to this brochure, the climate will do wonders for our health.

Postcard of Princess Anne Hotel in 1907, the year if burned
to the ground. Courtesy of Virginia Beach Public Library.

Just think, the combination of pure ocean breezes and – I’m not kidding, it says so right here in the brochure – “the resinous exhalations of the pine forests produces restorative influences unsurpassed.”

We’ll be able to can play tennis, take warm sea water baths, go horseback riding right on the beach or through those pine forests. We might play billiards, go bicycling, stroll on wide verandas and, get this, dance the night away in a ballroom overlooking the ocean.

And the food! Fish from Chesapeake, oysters from the Lynnhaven, game from local hunt clubs and fruit and vegetables from nearby farms. Why, see here, it’s “unexceptionable!”

There’s one thing, though: At $3 a night, we can’t stay forever.

The year was 1895 and Virginia Beach – it had only recently tried on that name – was just being discovered thanks to railroad hotshots who ran narrow-gage tracks out across forests and farmland to the sea shore, bought up and sold thousands of acres of prime land and built a sumptuous hotel at about the present 16^th Street

Long before the Cavalier, the presently threatened establishment at the Beach, there was a just-as-grand hotel that was destined to meet a tragic end. It debuted in 1884 as the Virginia Beach Hotel, all aglow with gas lamps, and began attracting the rich and powerful, including Alexander Graham Bell who had only recently invented the telephone.

The hotel was soon upgraded, with electricity in every room and warm sea water baths, and the name was changed to the Princess Anne. It was popular not just with tourists but locals as well.  The Norfolk Landmark, called it “the social centre of the summer colony of Virginia Beach.”

The hotel and the oceanfront lots were owned by a series of railroads, dozens of which seemingly sprang up and either failed or merged and changed names. At the time of the brochure, the owner was the Norfolk, Albemarle and Atlantic Railroad, and it offered ten trains a day from Norfolk and back. A through express took 35 minutes.

Local trains would stop on demand at places like Kempsville and Oceana (a small village that sprang up around the station). The trains were often crowded with passengers who arrived in Norfolk on steamers from New York, Baltimore and Richmond, or on other trains from just about everywhere in the country.

The then-superintendent of the railroad was B. P. Holland who would go on to become the first mayor of Virginia Beach in 1906. Holland himself bought one of the lots and built a cottage there.

It was just a year later that tragedy struck.

On June 10, 1907, a young man from Richmond rose before dawn and made his way to a nearby trolley station. He was due to march in a parade welcoming President Teddy Roosevelt to the Jamestown Exposition on land that was to become the Norfolk Naval Base.

But he noticed flames coming from the kitchen of the hotel and ran over to summon help. He aroused the cook and together they raced from room to room, banging on doors and waking guests. There was a mad scramble as guests, mostly in sleepwear, many carrying children, stumbled out onto the beach and watched as flames quickly engulfed the massive wooden structure.

They stood in horror as a maid, who had helped arouse the guests, was overcome by flames as she stood on the roof.  She and one of the hotel clerks were lost in the fire.

Quick thinking, though, might have saved the small village. Guests formed a bucket brigade and hauled water all the way from the surf, soaking several nearby structures that surely would have gone up with the raging fire.

When it was over all that remained were four red brick chimneys and a pile of ashes.

And Virginia Beach, without the hotel as its big draw, would go into a long swoon. There were promises to rebuild but they dragged on for years. And the railroad, reeling from debt, was unable to wait any longer and sold off the property.

It would take a full 20 years before investors were bold enough to finance a new hotel, the Cavalier. And to begin drawing crowds with over-inflated promises. Like the one I mentioned last week and can’t resist repeating. A little band music please: “You dance like a dream and wish the night would never end.”

April 14, 2013

Dancing at the Old Cavalier. Virginian-Pilot file photo.

Do you remember?

As you walk around the grounds of the old Cavalier Hotel and maybe peer inside, as you observe the still manicured gardens, can you feel, along with the breeze wafting in from the Atlantic, the drumbeat of history, the slipstream of memory?

Such recollections may seem all the more poignant as potential buyers for the old and new hotels, as well as the sprawling acres surrounding them, submit bids later this month and divulge whether or not they intend to demolish one of the region’s best-known landmarks.
 

While all of that’s going on, what with historic tax credits and boardwalk extensions, we might just as well indulge in a bit of nostalgia.

It was April, 1927. Babe Ruth was about to hit the first of his 60 home runs and Charles Lindbergh was waiting for delivery of his new plane, which he intended to fly non-stop to Paris. And the Cavalier, hailed as one of the most luxurious hotels in America, had a spectacular opening.

Al Jolson, who would soon star in the Jazz Singer, the first movie with a soundtrack, sent congratulations while Ben Bernie’s orchestra almost certainly played “Ain’t She Sweet,” its number one pop single that year. The “Cavalier,” a fast Norfolk & Western train, geared up to deliver hotel guests from as far away as Chicago, and a fleet of limousines began arriving with guests who had journeyed to Norfolk by steamship.

Hotel guests had just about every amenity at their disposal, including bathtubs with a special spigot for sea water – supposedly a miraculous balm for the skin – and each sink dispensed cold water from an ice-filled tank on the roof. Gentlemen could bring their hunting dogs and provide the hotel’s cooks with fish and game to be specially prepared.

Within two years – but before the market crash – the Cavalier Beach Club would open on the oceanfront and all of the country’s greatest bands, including  Les Brown, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller would put Virginia Beach on their tours. So would presidents and the rich and famous, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Will Rogers among them.

The Beach Club was not only famous nationally, but locals couldn’t get enough of it. Generations of Hampton Roads residents danced the night away on the deck outside the club and others listened, danced, held hands and surely necked on the beach.

 A lot of people met and romanced there.

“I worked in the gift shop which was located in the passageway during my college vacations,” Eloise Morton recently wrote to me. “I sold cigarettes, sun lotion, candy, all kinds of things anyone might want while at the beach.  There were (afternoon) tea dances with music by some of the big bands of the era, and men and women in appropriate dress.  It was an elegant venue that a lot of the wealthier people of Virginia Beach enjoyed on a regular basis.”

Her husband, Bob Morton, writes. “I was awfully shy in high school and then I went into the Army in 1944 without ever being on a date. But when I first saw Eloise I fell hard and she has been my only girl friend since.  I must mention that when she manned the gift shop at the Cavalier she often wore a sundress which had no back.  Her back was exposed to the waist and there were no suntan lines which bespoke of how she sunbathed.  It was before the advent of miniskirts and bikinis and I was fascinated by the beautiful skin.  I’ve never gotten over the fascination even though here it is 67 years later.”

Now that the Cavalier is threatened, a popular Facebook page, Save the Old Cavalier Hotel, has sprung up, receiving thousands of “likes” and dozens of reminiscences. Chris Bonney, who grew up watching his parents dance at the hotel, put it together.

According to some of the contributors, Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were known to have screaming fights that could be heard up and down their hallway, and she reportedly slung room service dinnerware at him. Another gem: Bandleader Xavier Cugat, “the Rumba King,” and his wife, actress Abbe Lane, were constantly chasing their pet Chihuahuas down the hall in their underwear.

 Several have submitted postcards and brochures, including one that boasted, “You can enjoy the next best thing to a Park Avenue apartment (plus Southern cooking and service) right at the seashore. . . .You dance like a dream and wish the night would never end.”

 Next week….much more about the old Cavalier.

April 7, 2013

The Fairfield Oak by Paul Clancy

My first inclination on seeing the massive oak tree was to hug it. Not to save it, mind you, but to take a measure of its girth. 
 
The Fairfield Oak, as it’s known, dominates a corner of Charlene Hood’s backyard in Kempsville. This prodigiously stout live oak must be . . . Let’s see, if I stretched my arms around it  – with about a six-foot wingspan – how many times would it take? Turns out it was three stretches plus about two feet, for a total of 20 feet in circumference.

OK, I could have used a tape measure. But hugging puts you, literally, in touch with history.

According to the book Remarkable Trees of Virginia, this marvelous tree, quercus virginiana, is 300 to 500 years old. Which means you could be in contact with a large woody perennial that began its life when Native Americans roamed this part of the world, or if a mere 300 years old, it might have graced a plantation and manor house that once held sway over this part of Princess Anne County, and shaded the days of one of its most powerful families.
And perhaps even witnessed the deliberations of a man who helped secure our liberties.

Fairfield, a subdivision at the southern end of Kempsville, derives its name from “Fairfields,” a plantation that goes back to a long-lived dynasty begun in the 1600s by Thomas Walke, who amassed his fortune, I have read, buying and selling rum and slaves in Barbados.

Walke emigrated to Virginia and acquired what must have been thousands of acres of land, all the while building a fleet of ships. Presumably some of them called at Kempe’s Landing on the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth.

On passing, Walke willed part of his land to one of his sons, Anthony, the first of many by that name. Anthony’s son, “Colonel” Anthony Walke II, built Fairfields, a huge, almost-baronial manor, peopled with slaves, liveried servants, blacksmiths and the like.

It was in turn passed on to Anthony Walke III, who took to preaching and was at one time pastor of Lynnhaven Parish Church, forerunner of Old Donation Episcopal Church. He was reportedly an eloquent preacher, although so fond of hunting that whenever he heard the sound of the hunting horns, would duck out of services and dash off on his horse, Silverheels.

But he played an important role in the founding of the nation. He and his distant cousin Thomas were elected to represent Princess Anne County at the Virginia Constitutional Convention in Richmond in 1788. And although Anthony was something of a Tory – he didn’t think much of the hotheads who dumped tea into Boston Harbor – he evidently had a change of heart.

Both brother and cousin joined the opposition to powerful anti-federalists  like Patrick Henry and George Mason. When the long-winded debate finally ended, the convention approved the Constitution 89 to79. So it was something of a squeaker.

“If it had been five votes in the opposite direction, we wouldn’t have had the Constitution,” said Virginia Beach historian Stephen Mansfield.
Less than a year later, Walke helped implement that very document, serving as an elector who cast his vote for George Washington for president.

According to a new history of Old Donation, Walke and his whole family, including two wives and nine children, were buried in the family cemetery at Fairfields, but the whereabouts of the grave stones is unknown. This has given rise to speculation that the subdivision may have a ghost or two.

A new book, Ghosts, Witches and Weird Tales of Virginia Beach, tells of strange goings on at Fairfield, including coffee pots, microwaves and toasters that would turn on by themselves and phones that wouldn’t work. But, the story goes that after the new owner went out back and firmly explained that she wasn’t going to be scared off, “all eerie electronic mishaps ceased.”

Hood isn’t sure where the manor house stood, although she has a 1931 photo that shows a small building, possibly the slave quarters, near her tree. The house itself, which burned down during the Civil War, may have stood where the Fairfield Shopping Center now exists.

But the tree, this silent witness to history, still stands.

March 31, 2013

Norfolk's station was opened in 1912. Courtesy of Sargeant
 Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library

I hadn’t noticed it in the early morning darkness. But returning from New York on the Amtrak train to the Harbor Park platform last week, I saw the heavy construction equipment at the site of the new station. And I thought, yes, it’ll be nice, but nothing like the beauty that once greeted rail passengers in these parts.

From the outside, Norfolk’s Terminal Station, sometimes called Union Station, wasn’t much. It was on the ground floor of an eight-story brick building that housed offices of three railroad companies: Norfolk and Western, Virginian and an early version of Norfolk Southern, then a strictly Virginia-North Carolina line.

Built in 1912 in the seedy warrens of East Main Street, it had none of the exterior grandeur of the neo-classical wonders of Washington, St. Louis and other cities. But inside the station, where soldiers and college girls said goodbye to their sweethearts, there was a kind of “imperial serenity,” as the late George Tucker once put it, with lofty marble and elaborate stucco ceiling.

And then, 50 years after it opened, it was no more. The advent of automobiles and interstate highways killed most passenger train service. And Norfolk, never much interested in saving old buildings, allowed it to be demolished.

Other than the tracks and the railroad bridges across two branches of the Elizabeth River, though, there’s not a shred of evidence that the old station existed. It was somewhere in the vicinity of the new City Hall and courts complex, with sprawling, interlacing tracks, a repair yard and the once-prosperous Railway Express Agency.

The city’s railroad boom began before the Civil War, died out and then resumed with a vengeance, with coal, lumber, cotton and fertilizer coming into port and leaving by rail – and vice versa. Passenger service quickly followed, and Norfolk in its heyday had seven passenger – passenger! – railroads calling on the city, says Bill Schafer, a Norfolk Southern historian who worked for the line for more than 40 years.

“Norfolk has an absolutely fascinating railroad history,” he told me. “You could go to a lot of places from Norfolk without ever getting in a car.”

And although the gaudy old train station is gone, you can still find evidence of the passenger train era.

Across City Hall Avenue from MacArthur Center is the entrance to the Monticello Arcade, built in 1907. The stores on either side of the fluted columned entrance once served as ticket office and waiting room for the old Norfolk Southern Railroad, according to Schafer.

The building now used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Brambleton Avenue next to the mouth of the Hague was once an Atlantic Coast Line Railroad passenger station. Travelers would be ferried across to Portsmouth to board trains at Pinners Point.

Locals, never suspecting the NOAA future for the building, referred to the ferry as Noah’s Ark.

At Towne Point Park, next to Otter Berth, Southern had a dual purpose station from which passengers ferried across to trains at Pinners Point in Portsmouth or boarded steamships – owned by the railroad – for an overnight trip to Baltimore.

Among the others: The Pennsylvania Railroad operated a steamboat from Cape Charles to downtown Norfolk – about where the Wisconsin is now berthed, and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway ferried passengers to about the same spot from its terminus at Newport News.

Lastly, at the end of Redgate Avenue in West Ghent there’s a small, flat yellow brick building that served as Norfolk and Western’s station after the downtown one was torn down. That’s where the last N&W train departed on its last run in May 1971.

It seemed the end of an era. But it wasn’t, as it turns out. Maybe there’ll be more than one daily train one of these days – all of them hooked into light rail.

Three whistles!