Our Stories May 25

By Paul Clancy

I didn’t realize how essential the Battle of Great Bridge was to the history of America until I met Elizabeth Hanbury.

This resourceful lady, a teacher or administrator in the Chesapeake system for 28 years – and former adjunct professor at ODU – is now abstracting a booklet, which she wrote 10 years ago with her cousin Elizabeth Wingo, so that school children all over the state will appreciate what happened on that raw, bloody December morning.

The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways History Foundation – of which she is a member – recently convinced the State Board of Education to include the battle in the Standards of Learning, beginning in 2009. For its part, Chesapeake will include the subject in schools this fall. Who better to talk about all of this than the teacher herself?
Reaching Hanbury’s house is like traveling back in time, to the days when Chesapeake was a sparsely settled but vital part of Norfolk County, as it was formerly named. Driving south on Centerville Turnpike, then east on Beaver Dam Road over an abandoned railroad track, you seem to cross a dividing line between new and old. Especially, when you turn at the entrance and drive another half mile on a gravel road, past a sprawling wheat field, to her farmhouse.

“I guess,” she says, after a firm handshake, “I know about as much as anybody about this.”

The first thing she wants to point out is that Great Bridge was a vital transfer point in the movement of farm products and lumber from North Carolina and southeastern Virginia to market. Before the canal was dug connecting the North Landing River to the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River and to the locks at Great Bridge, the goods traveled over a torturous route. First they were offloaded on the North Landing, then hauled to Great Bridge by oxcart, and finally reloaded on vessels to be taken to waiting ships at the port of Norfolk. It was primitive and awkward, but it worked.

Lord Dunmore, on the run after fleeing the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, knew this and knew his troops could not survive without taking control of this supply line. But he misjudged the tenacity of the defenders. When the patriots, on Dec. 9, 1775, mowed down his soldiers as they attempted to advance across a makeshift causeway, Dunmore retreated to Norfolk Harbor, burned and bombarded the city and later fled to the Chesapeake Bay.

“Virginia had no more major battles until Yorktown,” Hanbury says, referring to the 1781 battle that ended the war. In-between, the Old Dominion served as a “supply state” for the rest of the colonies, continuing to bring corn, wheat, cattle and naval stores, like pitch and tar, through its waterways. There’s no doubt in her mind about what this meant. “If Virginia had not been able to supply the other colonies,” she says, “it might have turned out to be an entirely different story.”

Elizabeth Baum Hanbury, as her books identify her, goes back on her father’s side to German immigrants who settled in Currituck County, N.C., somewhere around 1712. Her latest work, “Getting to Pine Island, an Outer Banks Odyssey,” is a historic novel about her great-great grandfather, Joseph Baum – and his family – who settled and developed what is now a luxury oceanfront development between Duck and Corolla. An earlier book, “Currituck Legacy, The Baum Family of North Carolina,” further explores her tarheel roots.

She was born in Wheeling, W. Va., but her Tidewater roots run deep. Her father was from the Blackwater section of Princess Anne County, where she spent most summers. And her husband, Lawrence Hanbury, grew up on the farm where she now lives.

Hanbury, a former president of the Norfolk County Historical Society, doesn’t mind saying that those who created the city of Chesapeake by merging the Norfolk County and South Norfolk in 1963 chose the wrong name, the region having no direct connection to the bay for which it is named. “It could have had a more appropriate name like Elizabeth River City,” she says. And as for Great Bridge Bridge, where Virginia helped define the course of the Revolutionary War, she has no doubt. “It should have been called Battlefield Bridge.”

Right beside the bridge, near the obelisk that commemorates the battle, a visitor center and museum is planned. The battlefield-waterways commission – http://www.gbbattlefield-waterways.com/ – is busy raising funds for the project, encouraging us folks to become “patriot members.” Soon, billboards will promote the concept.

And, eventually, after the center is built, maybe all those students who learn about Great Bridge from the pen of Elizabeth Hanbury will flock to the center to ponder what it must have been like.

Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com or http://www.paulclancystories.com/

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Hanbury.

Our Stories, May 18

By Paul Clancy

Last week, in writing about chance meetings or events that change our lives, I asked whether readers have similar stories to tell. In response, Mary Jo (Bojarski) Idoni of Virginia Beach sent the following story, which she dedicates to her sons, Sam and Dave:

In the summer of 1969 when I was fifteen, it was my job to make breakfast for my Father. He worked until 2 a.m. as an engineer on the railroad and worked during the day at our dry cleaning store. My Mom went in early to open the business for my Dad so he could sleep until nine. During that summer I came to realize that my Dad was a very special person in his own right. We would sit and talk while he ate, me asking questions and he teaching me. One story in particular made me realize that it was one of those chance things that happened that made it such a close call that my siblings and I almost never existed.
My Dad was born in the United States but my grandmother left my grandfather and returned to their farm in Poland with the children. My Dad told me that during World War II, as a teenager, he would see the Nazis load up the Jews on cattle cars and they would never come back. He said that he could not stand to watch this. He told me how he hid a Jew in a chest in his house. He said that the Nazis came to his house and they looked everywhere, but that they had never looked in that chest. Had they found that person, it would have meant certain death for all.
When I was 25, I went to Poland and when I arrived at my grandmother’s house, to my surprise, there in the kitchen was the chest just as my Father had described it! It was about four feet tall and four feet long. I was stunned. After all those years it was still there! And it was so much bigger than I had imagined it. In the house there was a storage area in the floor for the potatoes, a cooler room to store food in, and an attic. Of course, there was a barn as well. Lots of good hiding places, yet the one place that they never looked was in that chest! Why had they not checked it? It was certainly big enough to squeeze a person into. I thank God that they did not check it!
I found out while I was in Poland that later (after my father had gone back to America because he knew that the Nazis were after him), the Nazis rounded up everyone they suspected of helping the Jews in that village and murdered them. They buried them all in one field and the people of the area came to call it the field of blood because the blood oozed up from the ground. How close we came to not existing at all! What a courageous man I had for a Dad. He died later that summer in a train accident, but I was always thankful that we had had that time of sharing together.
While I was in Poland I had a chance meeting of my own. I was at a bus stop and there was another woman waiting there as well. She turned to me and asked if I was Frank’s daughter. When I replied yes, she told me that she was my Dad’s girlfriend at the time and was the last person to see him in Poland. She had gone with him on the train to the port and then saw him off on his voyage to America. In a country of 38 million people with her living half a country away at the time, the two of us sat on the same bench at the same time and met each other.
Another chance meeting took place in Connecticut when my mother was walking the twins she babysat and overheard the men who were building a house speaking Polish. She spoke Polish as well and so started a conversation with a young man (who later became my father), and his Dad. That conversation led to the marriage of my mother and my father. O, but for the grace of God, so close.

Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com
Or my blog, www.paulclancystories.com/



Photo: Frank and Theodosia Bojarski in 1950 at Candlewood Lake in Connecticut. Courtesy of Halina Bojarski.

Our Stories, May 11

By Paul Clancy


Summers while in college I worked as a page at NBC studios in New York, ushering tourists into quiz shows and taking guided tours through the building at 30 Rockefeller Center. One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me took place one afternoon when a certain person from Richmond, standing on line at Radio City Music Hall with her grandma – Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were starring in a silly comedy, “Indiscreet” – decided there was just enough time to walk across the street and introduce herself. A mutual friend had suggested she look me up if she had the chance.

Well, as Robert Frost wrote, that has made all the difference. Barbara and I have been married for more than four decades, with kids and grandkids and all the blessed rest. I wonder sometimes what life would have been like had she not seen the sign across the street, or had the line not been long, or had she been distracted by something else. It was a chance encounter, a sudden impulse, a moment of pure dumb luck.

I’ve been thinking of this in the context of local history. What if…

What if Susan Wheeler, the daughter of Luke Wheeler, the mayor of Norfolk, had not had the nerve to manage an introduction to that dashing naval hero, Stephen Decatur, when the captain was being feted in town? They were both smitten with each other and eventually married and built a beautiful mansion in Washington across from the White House. And later, what if one of the seconds in a duel with Commodore James Barron had passed on Barron’s peace offering to Decatur before the fatal shot was fired? Barron lies forever disgraced in the churchyard in Portsmouth, while Susan and Stephen Decatur rest at a shrine in Philadelphia.

What if a telegram that a panicky navy secretary, Gideon Welles, had reached the captain of the Monitor before the ironclad left the Brooklyn Navy Yard? The instruction was to bypass Hampton Roads and steam immediately to Washington to defend the capital. In the official records of the Union and Confederate navies, there’s a blissfully uninformed message to Welles from Commander Worden, delivered by the pilot who took him out. He was honored to report that he had passed the bar and was standing out to sea.

What if the rector of Bruton Parish church, William Goodwin, had not sat next to John D. Rockefeller Jr. at a meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in New York and summoned the nerve to invite Rockefeller to Williamsburg. While there with his wife, Goodwin asked if he’d like to help restore a building or two in that colonial city. Rockefeller took a walk through town and returned with an audacious answer. He’d not only help restore a building or two. He’d restore the whole place.

What if Walter Chrysler had not met Jean Outland from the Berkley section of Norfolk while stationed here during World War II? What if Outland had not gone to Maury High School with Norfolk’s eventual mayor, Roy Martin, and thought to call Martin when the couple was looking for a city where they could house his astonishing collection of art? I’d like to have seen how far Martin’s jaw dropped.

What if Moses Meyers had been successful at soldiering while he served in the Continental Army in New York against the British? He wasn’t, but went on to become a thorn in the British side by smuggling arms to the Americans through the tiny Dutch island of St. Eustacia and then used his shipping contacts to become one of the country’s leading importers, and settled on Norfolk as a great port from which to do business.

And what if my grandfather, who emigrated to America from England, had not found a particular house with rooms for rent in Hoboken, New Jersey – and fallen in love with the owner’s daughter?

I’m reminded of the song by James Taylor that goes,

If I had stopped to listen once or twice
If I had closed my mouth and opened my eyes.
If I had cooled my head and warmed my heart,
I’d not be on this road tonight.

I’ll bet 99 percent of us have similar stories. If you’ll write me, maybe I’ll be able to compile several of them for this space.

Take care.


Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com or http://www.paulclancy.blogspot.com/.



Photo: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the 1958 movie “Indiscreet.” Amazon.com

Our Stories, May 4

By Paul Clancy


It’s such an unexpected encounter. Driving along Potters Road at the northern edge of Ocean Naval Air Station, you come upon a sign for “Upper Wolfsnare” and a long country lane that bumps over abandoned railroad tracks, ending at a white two-story home in the style of an English manor house.

Three acres surround the house, with a magnificent swamp chestnut oak on one side that must be older than the bones of Thomas Walke III, the man who built the place in 1759. Maybe as old as his grandfather who settled in Lynnhaven Parish more than a hundred years before from Barbados.

Upper Wolfsnare, so called because of its location on the upper reaches of Wolf Snare Creek, is owned by the Princess Anne County/Virginia Beach Historic Society. The society today is holding a fund-raising reception and auction to help renovate the building’s kitchen area. The 3 p.m. event is being held at another historic Virginia Beach home, the Adam Keeling House.
It’s so odd having this place here. Smack dab in the middle of the high-decibel corridor near the air station, you wonder how it was ever preserved. In fact, the state planned to knock it down and dig up the property to use the earth for expressway ramps, but preservationists saved it and deeded over to the society. And here it stands, begging to tell its story.

Upper Wolfesnare. Courtesy of Princess Anne County/Virginia Beach Historical Society

First, the House: Inside, there’s a wide passageway – instead of the kind of center hall you’d expect. The drawing room on the right is dominated by dark, hand-carved wainscoting. You can see through cracks between the random-width heart pine floorboards. On one wall is a portrait of one of the Walkes, perhaps one of many cousins. Absent is any likeness of Thomas Walke IV, the son of the builder who went to Richmond in the spring of 1788 and helped Virginia, by a narrow margin, ratify the U.S. Constitution. The room on the left (chair railing, with molding) has a copy of a painting of a grand reception given by Martha Washington. She and George were married in 1759, the year the house was built.

Anne Henry, a society member and avid local historian, gave me a tour – it’s only open to the public on Wednesdays in July and August, so she arranged with the caretakers to let me see it. “I think it clearly shows what one segment of life was like in the 18th century,” she says. “It was a major piece of our history.”

And so it is, but there’s another side of the story and it begins with Barbados. The original Thomas Walke came to Virginia in 1662 from that British-ruled Caribbean island and soon began shipping goods back and forth between the new American colony and Barbados where his family remained. In the hold of his small fleet of ships, he may have included slaves.

A new book (2007) by historian April Lee Hatfield, “Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century,” delves deeply into Walke’s Barbados connections. Hatfield writes that Walke developed close ties with William Bryd I, one of Virginia’s elite planters and traders. “Many Virginians interested in Barbados trade sought African slaves from the island,” she writes. Barbados also “likely provided Byrd with a market for Indian slaves he acquired in exchange for Barbadian rum.” What human misery this route must have known!

According to the official Virginia Beach Website, when Thomas Walke III died in 1761 – just two years after building this house – he left to his infant son 7,000 acres and 55 slaves.

And then there’s this. In the Papers of James Madison, available online, you can find a little-known episode involving Thomas Walke. In April, 1783, he petitioned Virginia’s delegates to Congress – that’s what they were called then – for the right “to reclaim our slaves that were wrested from us by the British enimy (sic).” It would be, he said, “a glaring piece of injustice” if they were not. He further complained that “several hundred of the above slaves sailed during the last week to Nova Scotia.”

You wonder if some of those no-doubt-scared, but now free individuals fled from this fascinating place out on the edge of our history.

Paul Clancy, http://www.paulclancy57.googlepages.com/