What strikes you first as you pass through the entrance is the thickness of the walls, two feet deep at least, then the wide heart-of-pine floorboards and wavy glass windows blurring the passing traffic on Princess Anne Road.
In the front parlor, with its elaborate crown molding and powder blue walls, a glass cabinet displays artifacts found on the property: musket balls, cannon shot, clay pipe stems, pottery shards and, most fascinating of all, George III British coins.
The history of this place comes roaring back with the flash of gunpowder, the urgency of shouted commands. This is Pleasant Hall, one of the most historically significant buildings in Hampton Roads, a place that watched over – and perhaps played a part in – a small but crucial battle as the American Revolutionary War began.
Just imagine this fellow, John Murray, 4th earl of Dunmore, outsmarted and embarrassed by Patrick Henry and other upstarts, forced into exile in Gosport where he watched the trappings of government power fall away.
And then consider the reports he heard about a stash of gunpowder hidden at a place called Kemp’s Landing. It was time, he blustered, to “reduce this colony to a proper sense of their duty.”
Leading a force of British regulars and loyalists, Lord Dunmore marched toward Kemp’s Landing, later Kempsville. The locals knew he was coming, lore has it, because of an elegant rogue named Peter Singleton. The young officer, as extravagant in dress as he was reckless at cards, supposedly rode into town from Great Bridge, Paul Revere-style, to warn that the British were coming! By land!
So it was that local minute men hid the gunpowder and then, with hearts surely in their throats, stood up to the British on the night of Nov. 16, 1775.
“They fired one gun at our flanking partee and two at our advance Guard,” one British soldier wrote. “This was returned by a heavy fire from the Grandeers, which instantly put the villains to flight.” One patriot, John Ackiss, became the first southerner killed in the Revolutionary War. Two others were taken prisoner.
The Skirmish at Kempsville, as it became known, was quickly over and Dunmore immediately demanded that everyone in town take a loyalty oath. Those who “could not conveniently run away,” as one writer put it, took the oath at once and swallowed bitterly as red cloth badges were pinned to their breasts.
Dunmore set up temporary headquarter at the home of George Logan, a Scotch Tory. He had never seen a finer house in Virginia, he was to write. He dined there and held a lavish victory party. Then, still puffed up with victory, he foolishly marched his troops into slaughter against patriots waiting for him at Great Bridge.
But as far as Logan’s house goes, does it still exist?
The official story is that Pleasant Hall, built in 1769, is the one Logan built. But if you look up the 1972 application by Virginia Beach to have house listed on the National Register of Historic Places, you find a different story. Judging from an inscription chiseled in a brick beside a basement window, the house was built in 1779, likely by none other than Peter Singleton.
A slightly different view stems from historic research by John H. Robertson of Chesapeake. He found that the house was built by Samuel Tennant, a ship’s captain, around 1765, and soon after sold to Singleton. Further, he concluded, Logan’s house was on the west side of what is known as Overland Road where Pleasant Hall’s present owner, Kempsville Baptist Church, now sits.
Three women from the church, Elizabeth McBride, Marjorie Stanton and Edna Stocks, showed me through the house. Then we went out front and discovered the supposedly definitive brick beside a basement window. But the date “April 1771” is only faintly scratched on the surface, not chiseled, and could have been added later.
It isn’t clear that we’ll ever know the truth; for now, at least, we get to choose.
Hmm, which version seems best, the one about the disgraced Tory or the dashing patriot?
Photo: Pleasant Hall, circa 1972. From National Register of Historic Places.
