July 27, 2008

There’s a new addition to Fort Nelson Park next to the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth. On a slab near other naval artifacts is a gleaming propeller with just a few words and numbers etched deep into its hub: “Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pa., 9’0”, Starboard, 3410 lbs.”

There’s not a clue, at least not yet, about its identity, but we will learn sometime this fall, when a “Path of History” sign has been prepared and installed, that this finely honed hunk of bronze pushed one of the storied ships of this region from one ocean to another through half a century of conflict and service.

The ship was the Coast Guard Cutter Taney, one of the “Secretary” class of vessels that began its career in 1936, helping spread American influence across the Pacific. The 327-foot ship, based in Honolulu, was transferred to the Navy just in time for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“The message: ‘Air Raid, Pearl Harbor. This is no drill’ came at 0755 on 7 December, as Japanese planes swept overhead in an attempt to cripple the Pacific Fleet,” the Coast Guard’s Web site http://www.uscg.mil/history/webcutters/Taney_1936.html, says. “Taney, moored alongside Pier 6, Honolulu harbor, stood to her antiaircraft guns swiftly when word of the surprise attack reached her simultaneously.”

It was the first, but not last, time that enemies and raging elements of two oceans would try to sink the Taney.

The Taney arrived in Norfolk in March 1944, and began service as a convoy guide. It survived a furious attack by German bombers and torpedo planes near the Canary Islands, then made several other crossings. Again transferred to the Pacific, it took part in the invasion of Okinawa, downing numerous suicide planes and other aircraft.

The Taney endured more than 100 combat operations and two typhoons before taking part in the occupation of Japan. After the war, the ship again assumed Coast Guard duties, this time as an ocean station where it performed weather patrols and search and rescue missions. From 1976-86, Taney served out of Portsmouth performing search and rescue and serving as a floating weather station, sending up weather balloons and tracking hurricanes.

“It was the easiest two years I ever had and the toughest,” former Coast Guard Capt. Eugene Moran, tells me. Moran, 74, who now lives in Chesapeake, served as Taney’s commander while stationed off Chincoteague from 1976 to 1978. “It could get pretty lumpy out there,” he says.

And then there was the North Atlantic in winter during training cruises for Coast Guard cadets. “There were not many good days in the North Atlantic in the winter,” he remembers.

Moran retired as captain from the service in April 1986, while the Taney -- the last of the ships to survive Pearl Harbor – was decommissioned on Dec. 7 of that year. It’s still afloat, as a museum ship in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Fair enough. It was named for a famous Marylander. Well, infamous in some ways. The fellow was Roger B. Taney, a one-time treasury secretary who became chief justice of the Supreme Court and authored the Dred Scott ruling in 1857, perpetuating slavery.

Scott, incidentally, was born in Southampton County, before his master took him to Missouri. Eventually he petitioned for citizenship but Taney held, and a majority of the court agreed, that the Constitution did not allow slaves to be free. We know what followed.

But that’s a whole other story. Taney’s still-floating namesake -- and its propeller – has many others to tell.


Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com
Or blog: http://www.paulclancystories.com/
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Photo credit: Photo: US Coast Guard cutter Taney, ca. 1943-44. Coast Guard Historian's Office.

July 20, 2008

It was six minutes after midnight on April 14, 1942, off the coast of North Carolina. Stars filled the clear night sky. With barely any wind, the sea was calm and sparkling with phosphorescence. Off the starboard side of the destroyer Roper, on its way south from Norfolk, the Bodie Island Light was visible.

At that moment, the radar operator saw a shape on the surface that could have been a Coast Guard vessel, but also possibly a submarine. The sound operator picked up the drone of propellers. Whatever its identity, it was a small vessel running away at high speed, frequently shifting course.

The Roper gave chase, increasing speed to 20 knots and gradually drew closer.

U-boat U-85 had left St. Nazaire, France, three weeks before on its fourth war cruise. There were about 45 officers and men in the “iron coffin,” as many called it.

On April 4, according to the diary of one of the crew, the sub was “just off America.” On the 10, it sank a Swedish freighter, with all hands lost. On the 12th, they spent the day lying on the bottom, waiting for nightfall. “All quiet off New York,” the 25-year-old seaman reported.

The next morning, he observed “American beacons and searchlights visible.” They were headed south, toward the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

They’d never spend another night alive.

Several minutes after the chase began, the distance between the two vessels dropped to 300 yards Then all doubt about the identity of the intruder vanished as a torpedo slashed by, close to the Roper’s port side. Suddenly, the sub turned sharply to starboard, its camouflaged side bathed in the destroyer’s searchlight, and prepared to fight it out on the surface.

Machine gun fire from the American ship kept the German crew from getting to their powerful 88-mm deck gun. A 3-inch gun battery hit the conning tower at the water line and the vessel began to submerge.

“The submarine,” according to the Roper’s report, “apparently was scuttled, inasmuch as she settled slowly and went down stern first.”

Scuttled or not, there were soon 40 German sailors in the water, many of them crying out for help. “’Bitte (Please)! Bitte!’ they were yelling. Kamrade. Please! Help me. Save me,’” Homer H. Hickam Jr. writes in “Torpedo Junction.”

The Americans were wary. This might have been a desperate ruse. They feared that, if they stopped to rescue the survivors, the sub with its remaining crew would “move out of the killing zone and then turn back to put a torpedo into the attacking force,” Hickam wrote.

The order was given to drop depth charges, set to go off at 100 feet. The explosions instantly killed all of the men in the water.

In the morning, the Roper returned and removed the dead. They were taken to a hanger at Norfolk Air Station for identification, and personal effects, like the diary, were examined,. Because of the secrecy of military operations, the bodies were transported at night to Hampton National Cemetery where a detail of German prisoners was busy digging graves. A Catholic and then Protestant chaplain read burial services. A volley of three shots was fired, taps was sounded, 29 young men were buried.

As you’re reading this, NOAA divers are inspecting the remains of two German subs, including U-85, off Oregon Inlet. This “Battle of the Atlantic” project, a multi-year effort, will document the condition of the subs and some of the ships they sank in that long-ago conflict.

Last week, along with Jeff Johnston, historian for NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, and Shannon Ricles, education outreach coordinator, I walked among gravestones at the cemetery bordering West County Street. The sea of white markers include those of veterans of conflicts going back to the Civil War, so it’s surprising to come across rows of graves that have markers indicating German seamen. Most of them give the date of death as April 14, 1942.

Typical of combatants of all countries, these were young people, somebody’s son or brother, or maybe new father, snuffed out before their lives had really begun.

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


Photos: Crew of U-85 prepares to depart St. Nazaire (National Archives). Graves at Hampton National Cemetery (Paul Clancy).

July 13, 2008

When they set out to inventory the historic structures in Virginia Beach, the folks who drove the back roads of the city didn’t know what they’d find. Many couldn’t name some of the houses and other buildings they were looking for – or know if some of them still existed.

What they found, after all the miles of zigzagging through the sprawling countryside, was what adds up to an architectural and historic treasure, comparable to some of the better-known old towns in Virginia.

But because Virginia’s largest city draws its character not from population centers like towns or seaports, but from rural settlements and farms spread over thousands of acres, its historic structures are mostly unknown, even to its own citizens.

“People in Virginia Beach greatly discount their history because they don’t know what’s there,” said C. Mac Rawls, former director of museums and historic resources of the city. “You can’t go to Ghent, Olde Towne or the Fan (in Richmond) and see everything in a day. You’d have to spend five days on the road, and still not see everything.”

This appreciation gap has been addressed in a glossy magazine, “50 Most Historically Significant Houses and Structures in Virginia Beach,” just published by the Virginia Beach Historic Preservation Partnership and recently presented to City Council.

The stories of the included places weave through local history like fine linen.

The structure that dates farthest back, I was surprised to learn, is Broad Bay Manor on Dey Cove Drive, even though its 1640 pedigree includes only a small, one-room structure that has been expanded beyond recognition to a multi-level mansion.

The collection ranges from colonial era gentry, like the 1719 dwelling built by descendants of Adam Thoroughgood, to the ultra modern, the 1959 creation of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It includes not just homes but structures like the 1792 Cape Henry Lighthouse, the nation’s first public works project. The tapered, octagonal brick structure guided ships into Hampton Roads for almost 90 years until being replaced by a second lighthouse in 1881.

Only one church, Old Donation Church on North Witchduck Road, made the cut. Originally built in 1736, it owes its heritage to the first Lynnhaven Parish about 100 years its senior. This takes you back almost to the dawn of Princess Anne County history, to the original courthouse where Grace Sherwood, the “witch of Pungo,” endured her trial by water and superstition.

Other stars in this galaxy include Pleasant Ridge School, a one-room schoolhouse on Princess Anne Road; the Old Coast Guard Station at the Oceanfront, dating to 1903; First Landing State Park, with cabins built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933; the 1927 Cavalier Hotel; the 1823 Princess Anne Courthouse; several buildings at Camp Pendleton and Fort Story; a couple of hunt clubs near Back Bay, the 1928 Edgar Cayce Hospital; and the Roland Courts Theater on 17th Street near Atlantic Avenue. This 1925 Mission Revival style theater once used for amateur stage productions is “a prime candidate for demolition,” according to the magazine.

The city’s history lives in the private houses built by descendants of some of the original settlers. The Hermitage, for instance, was built by another of the Thoroughgoods in 1699. The Adam Keeling House, on Adam Keeling Road, once known as “Ye Dudley’s,” took its bow in 1735. The Lynnhaven House, built in 1725 on Wishart Road by a Huguenot, is now managed by the city as a historic house museum.

Among the most imposing houses in the collection is Greystone, a Scottish baronial, Vermont granite mansion built on the shores of Crystal Lake in 1905. The one-time gambling establishment was known as the Crystal Club.

There’s the remote Upper Wolfsnare, on Potters Road, a 1759 plantation house that shares its origins with the rum and slave trade from Barbados. And Pleasant Hall, on Princess Anne Road in Kempsville, built by George Logan, a Tory who sided with Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor. The 1769 Georgian home was used by Dunmore following the skirmish with patriots in November 1775, the dawn of the American Revolution.

The history of the region doesn’t stand up and shout, but rather spreads out gently across the landscape, and the pages of this magazine.

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


Photo credit: Magazine cover.

July 6, 2008

At the end of World War I, the city that sprang up as the result of Collis P. Huntington’s railroad and shipyard went into a financial swoon from which it would not recover until the dogs of war were again unleashed. And human cargo by the thousands again trod the decks of troop transports.
With the outbreak of World War II, the Newport News Port of Embarkation was reactivated. The Army again leased and expanded the city’s C&O piers. Before war’s end, Hampton Roads would bid farewell to 730,000 soldiers and welcome back nearly that many at war’s end.
Needless to say, the local USO was constantly jumping. The Peninsula swarmed with barracks and tent camps, and this time a new phenomenon, German and Italian prisoners of war – some 130,000 arrived and marched off to POW camps at Fort Eustis and several other places, including one near the James River Bridge.
Because of the lurking presence of German u-boats, Hampton Roads had the feel of an armed fortress. The Coast Guard placed submarine nets at the mouth of the bay and navy destroyers patrolled the coast. All of this played out as convoys of outward-bound ships, ever on guard against attack, stole away under cover of darkness. All the while, the shipyard was operating at full capacity. Between the main yard on the James River and its subsidiary in Wilmington, the shipyard turned out close to 50 vessels.
But this time when peace returned, Newport News did not again go into decline.
The shipyard continued aircraft carrier projects, and Fort Eustis became the permanent home of the Army Transportation Corps. Camp Patrick Henry was converted to an airport and state hospital. And out on the James off Mulberry Island, the hulking carcasses of decommissioned merchant marine vessels, especially the Liberty and Victory ships that helped win the war, began to congregate. The “ghost fleet” grew to more than 140 at its peak, then began to dwindle as the dangerously leaky ships were, one by one, towed to scrap yards.
The shipyard scrambled for work after the war, even taking on such distinctly non-maritime projects as wind tunnels and water turbines for places like Hoover Dam and Muscle Shoals. But the most exciting civilian project was the exquisitely beautiful super passenger liner, the SS United States. The 990-foot luxury liner, christened on June 23, 1951, had her sea trials off the Virginia Capes and then, on her maiden voyage, set the transatlantic record of three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes – an average speed of 35.5 knots!
Now the city that the shipyard and railroad built was ready for the next leap, but the question was, in which direction – and how far? There was growing sentiment to merge, and not just with the rapidly growing Warwick County suburbs but with next-door Hampton as well.
Could there be a super-city called Hampton Roads? Norfolk, for one, which considered itself part of Hampton Roads, nixed the idea, and it seemed to collapse as Hampton merged with Elizabeth City County and Phoebus. And then Warwick went its own way. The County that had enjoyed the rapid suburbanization caused by the growth of Newport News, became the city of Warwick on July 15, 1952.
But Warwick’s independence was not to last. Its own growth pangs – as well as the loyalty that many residents felt toward the neighboring city where they worked – led to the mega-merger of Warwick and Newport News. Not only did Warwick lose its status as a city, but its proud name, as voters chose to call the new entity Newport News.
And so it was that on July 1, 1958, the new city, with O.J. Brittingham Jr. serving as mayor, was born .The former boundary at 64th Street was extended all the way to the James City County line, encompassing six square miles and 113,000 residents. It would grow to nearly 200,000 by century’s end.
If it’s hard to visualize how the place that John Smith once called “Newports Newes” became a modern city, I recommend a walk through Victory Landing Park on the downtown waterfront. Chiseled at the top of the venerable Victory Arch, a successor of the one that welcomed back combatants of two world wars, is the poignant inscription, “Greetings with love to those who return, a triumph with tears for those who sleep.” That’s where the heart of the old city once beat.


Photo credit: Soldiers just before departing for war, July 13, 1943. Library of Virginia.

June 29, 2008

As cities go, Newport News is a baby, having come into being in 1896 – and, at that point, only the area we now know as downtown – and ballooning to its present size 50 years ago, July 1, 1958. But as a place with a defined history, it goes back just about as far as English-speaking people have walked this part of the world.
In the “General History of Virginia,” edited by Capt. John Smith, this reference jumps out: “November 22, 1621, arrived Master Gookin out of Ireland, with fifty men of his own, and thirty passengers exceedingly well furnished with all sorts of provisions and cattle, and planted himself at Newports Newes.” Never mind the spelling – no two people in that era spelled place names alike – but it is clear that the point of land where the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel disgorges traffic was settled by agriculturally minded colonials almost immediately upon their arrival.
And it’s obvious, at least to me, that the place got its name not for any “good news” that Christopher Newport might have imparted, but from Sir William Newce, an Irishman who had just recently arrived and on that point established a new seaport.
Not long after, Warwick River Shire and then the County of Warwick came into being and slumbered for 200 years until the end of the Civil War. At that point, the tip of the Peninsula lay in ruins. A Yankee soldier described it as “nothing more than a wild wilderness,” with only a few houses and wild hogs roaming the woods. Idle chimneys were all that remained of farmhouses. None of which bothered a Connecticut Yankee named Collis P. Huntington.
The driving force behind the nation’s transcontinental railroad, Huntington was intrigued by the area’s deep-water harbor. He quickly raised the capital to run tracks for the once-bankrupt Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad right to the end of Newport News Point. Rail service began In 1881 and Huntington added coal piers, grain elevators and cargo wharves to handle the dance of freight between trains and ships calling at the point. A small city sprang up, with homes, churches, a library and a newspaper. To be sure, there were rough spots, a veritable Hell’s Half Acre of saloons, with frequent blood-lettings in one part of town.
A depression followed the Civil War and vagrants and other displaced persons discovered the point. So Huntington, ever the opportunist, hired them. In 1896, in order to offer repairs to the ships that brought products for export on his rail cars, he founded the Chesapeake Dry Dock and Construction Company. That same year, the four square miles at the point officially became a city, even though only a fraction of what it was to become.
By 1898, when the U.S. declared war on Spain over Cuba, the company had already built three battleships and now had contracts for several more. Furthermore, the U.S made Newport News a military port of embarkation. It was the beginning of the town’s intimate association with wars. The same drama was played out in World War I. The government acquired Mulberry Island in 1918 to build Camp Abraham Eustis as a Coast Guard artillery training center. The camp would become Fort Eustis in 1923. The once-quiet Peninsula fairly bristled with barracks, camps and ammunition piers. All this activity created a population surge and the need for housing.
Imagine wartime Newport News: The shipyard working 24 hours a day, troops and supplies arriving and departing daily, streets crowded with jostling people and noisy automobiles, a swelling population searching for housing. In 1918, with the help of federal funds and the shipyard, a new town called Hilton Village was developed three miles north of city limits on 200 acres. The village included 500 English cottage-style homes and rows of stores, with small upstairs apartments. A streetcar line ran from the village to the city.
During the war, 583 convoy ships carried a quarter of a million troops from the city piers. The shipyard’s labor force swelled to 14,000 and the city’s population to 100,000. It was a giant bubble, and it burst in 1918 when peace was declared.
But first, the flush of victory. Troops returning home marched through a graceful Victory Arch, a memorial to American men and women returning from “over there.”
There was a brief respite as the embarkation camps became receiving camps, but shipyard contracts were cancelled and the yard’s workforce plummeted, finally reaching 2,200. When the depression hit in 1929, the local economy plunged to depths it had not seen in half a century. It would not re-emerge until war clouds again appeared on the horizon.

Next week, part two.

Photo credits: Bust of Collis P. Huntington by Anna Hyatt Huntington. The Library of Virginia.

The first Victory Arch, April 13, 1919. The Mariners’ Museum.

June 22, 2008

Imagine: A hazy dawn 195 years ago today, mid-tide, an armada of 20 barges loaded with an overwhelming force of British sailors and marines, approaching. Their target is 50 acres of sand and scrub pines at the mouth of the Elizabeth River known as Craney Island. A merchant sea captain by the name of Arthur Emmerson, once thought to be a natural successor to his father as man of the cloth, eagerly awaits as the first boats row into the shallows.

“Now, my brave boys, are you ready?” he asks, heart in his throat.

“All ready,” they reply.

“Fire!” the order is given.

Flash back. How has this swashbuckling captain/adventurer found himself at one of the pivotal moments in Hampton Roads – nay, American – history? Let’s step back a couple of generations.
Emmerson’s grandfather, the Rev. Arthur Emmerson, fetched up on these shores from Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. After marrying Ann Wishart from a prominent Princess Anne County family, they settled in the wilds of Assawoman Creek on the Eastern Shore and founded a church there. Their son, Arthur Emmerson II, started a school in Nansemond County, which, according to a newspaper ad, would teach “reading, writing and declamation,” along with a smattering of languages. But he, too, was a man of the cloth and answered a call to a church in Suffolk, then Trinity Church in Portsmouth. The papers of his daughter, Louisa, describe him as a “bookish man with strong powers of concentration, and as a consequence, unobserving and absent-minded.”

That wouldn’t describe his son, Arthur Emmerson III. Born in 1778, he studied both for the ministry and the law, but had much stronger taste for life at sea. He signed on with merchant ships and was soon put in command of a Portsmouth schooner, “Rebecca,” which plied the sugar and rum routes to the West Indies. In 1798, as he was heading back to Hampton Roads, his vessel was taken as a prize by a French warship and he ended up as a prisoner in Marseilles. While on parole in that city, he learned the language so well that the Marquis de Lafayette, later visiting Portsmouth, would mistake him for a Frenchman.

Emmerson’s career was cut short by non-importation laws, so he bided his time in Portsmouth, trying his hand at business ventures. He married Mary Ann Herbert at her parents’ home at Gosport. Their farm on the Southern Branch was to become part of the Gosport Navy Yard. The newlyweds set about the business of having 12 children – only four of whom lived to maturity.

In the meantime, he played soldier, forming a militia unit known as the Portsmouth Light Artillery Blues and became its captain. It was this group of men he would lead into uncertain battle against foes who were determined to capture Norfolk, Portsmouth, the Navy Yard and perhaps the biggest prize, the frigate Constellation, then hemmed in on the Elizabeth River.

Now, on the morning of June 22, they don’t have long to wait. From the west, a party of 700 British soldiers and marines lands near Hoffler’s Creek in Portsmouth – there’s a wildlife refuge there now – and, after tromping through underbrush, attempts to wade across a narrow creek separating the mainland from Craney Island. The invaders are met by the withering fire of gunners, including several from the Constellation. Stumbling and disordered, they fall back across the creek and into nearby woods.

Now, Emmerson’s gunners open up on the second attack from the barges, splintering some of the vessels and sending Royal Marines spilling into the water. It’s over quickly, as the boats retreat to their ships. At least 60, but perhaps 200, British troops lose their lives, while there’s not a single American fatality. Amazing how a far inferior force held off the attack. It turns out to be one of the only land victories during the War of 1812.

Today, Hampton Roads celebrates what the State Legislature deems the Battle of Craney Island Day in Virginia – a crucial moment in American history that the rest of the nation has largely ignored – even though the red glare of Congreve Rockets was seen here long before it was at Fort McHenry. And, fittingly, observers will gather at the modest assembly of graves of the Emmerson family at historic Cedar Grove Cemetery in Portsmouth.

After the battle at Craney Island, Emmerson became an enduring local hero. He was a lifelong member of Trinity Church and served on the vestry for many years. He dabbled in politics, accepting the nod of the Whig Party to run for Congress but was defeated by the Democratic nominee. He helped found the Portsmouth branch of the Bank of Virginia and, with other investors, the Portsmouth and Roanoke Railroad Co. It was one of the first in the nation, later becoming Seaboard Airline Railroad.

Emmerson was venerated throughout the rest of his life. A genealogical search found a request by the Light Artillery Blues for the pleasure of his company “at a social glass this afternoon at or near sunset. The company would also be glad to have any other Craney Island patriots who may be in the neighborhood to join them on this occasion.”

Here’s to you, Captain.

Illustration: Arthur Emmerson III, from a family memoir.

June 15, 2008

You would have thought royalty had come to town. And in a way it had.

“Large numbers of ladies and gentlemen were present to witness the opening ceremonies, which were made as imposing as possible,” one naval official reported, “the occasion being of great rejoicing as well to the citizens of Norfolk and Portsmouth as to the whole Navy.”

Local newspapers promoted the event at the Gosport Navy Yard: “Steam ferry boats will ply between County Wharf and the Dry Dock during the day! Fare 12 ½ cents. A spacious apartment for the ladies has been set up in the engine house and a viewing stand erected.”


What was going on that day, June 17, 1833, was a big deal, the first drydocking of a ship on the east coast of America. It was a signal that an emerging naval sea power had come of age, with elaborate facilities not just for building ships but for repairing them. Almost simultaneously, two dry docks, one here and one in Boston, both carrying the Number 1 name and costing about $1 million each, were built and ready for their first customers.

It so happened, though, that the 74-gun frigate Delaware –built at the Portsmouth yard 13 years before – was ready for servicing one week before the venerable frigate Constitution was scheduled in to Boston’s Charleston Navy Yard. And so Portsmouth, with President Andrew Jackson in attendance, won the crown of first. There was much chest-thumping about that, as you might guess. Drydock # 1 at what is now known as Norfolk Naval Shipyard, is 175 years this week, the oldest continuously operating drydock in the country.

And here’s this gorgeous illustration. You can see the caisson gates swinging open as the ship approaches, then imagine, after the gates closed and the water was slowly pumped out, how the Delaware would settle down onto a specially arranged cradle. Then, high and dry, ship tenders would be able to work on its probably-copper-sheathed bottom. Special stands were constructed for the occasion, with an overflow crowd, including a stray dog, on hand.

It was an enormous public works project, headed by famed engineer Laomni Baldwin. Soon after construction began, the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth was jammed with barges laden with giant granite blocks shipped from Quincy, Mass., as well as white oak and yellow pine planks from local lumberyards. One contemporary account says the blocks were cut and dressed before arriving, “and so well was this work done that it is estimated that not $100 were spent in altering stone.”

That’s interesting in light of what I found in a column written for this space 10 years ago by George Tucker. As an economy measure, he wrote, Baldwin hired African-American stonecutters, rather than employing higher-wage white workers, to put the finishing touches on the blocks before they were lowered into place. “This caused an uproar among Norfolk-area stonecutters,” Tucker wrote, adding that Baldwin stood his ground.

“As a result, the carefully constructed dock survives as a monument to the skills of the now nameless black craftsmen whose stonecutting artistry is still recognizable in the facility they helped to construct.”

The Delaware’s demise is part of the other famous event at Drydock # 1. In April 1861, fearful that the shipyard would fall into Confederate hands, Union commanders blew up the yard and sank several ships, among them the Delaware and the steam frigate Merrimack. It was at the granite dock that the raised Merrimack was converted to the lethal ironclad Virginia. The Delaware, too, was refloated in 1868, but soon ended its existence as workers at the shipyard dismantled it.

Drydock # 1 at the Naval Shipyard is off limits to the public, but there’s a hands-on exhibit at the Naval Shipyard Museum on High Street that shows how it works. Nearby is one of the most impressive ship models you’ll ever see, that of a three-masted ship-of-the-line, with a gold painted figurehead, of Tamanend, chief of the Delaware Indians.

Illustration: The Delaware entering Drydock # 1. Naval Historical Center

June 8, 2008

When last we encountered Capt. John Smith, it was late 1607. He had just extricated himself from a none-too-friendly encounter with Powhatan. It’s no wonder. The all-powerful chief was not known for tolerating potential rivals, whether of the white settler persuasion or those from an uncooperative tribe.

Smith probably didn’t know the rumors about his host. They only surfaced later when William Strachey, the most reliable historian for the new colony, pieced together the story. It suggests that Powhatan, when his priests told him a rival group would arise and threaten his empire, suspected the Chesapeakes, a tribe that then flourished throughout what we call South Hampton Roads and did so in defiance of his rule.

Powhatan reacted brutally, sending warriors across the water to attack and destroy Chesapeake villages. By the time the Jamestown settlers arrived in 1607, the rivals were extinct or driven out. There’s also the intriguing possibility – although less credible – that the lost colonists from Roanoke had found their way north and settled among the Chesapeake, and were finally exterminated by Powhatan.

Now comes Smith, in the summer of 1608, determined to learn what he could about native tribes.

We don’t know the exact date, only that it was summer and he and a dozen other men were making their way south on the Chesapeake Bay. After exploring the Piankatank River, they anchored in what is apparently now Mobjack Bay. But a storm caught them off guard “in the night with thunder and rayne that we never thought more to have seene in James Towne.”

It was a wild ride. With sheets eased, they ran before the wind, able to judge their position and keep from running ashore by lightning flashes “until it pleased God in that black darkness to preserve us” and catch a glimpse of Point Comfort. Here they paused and decided that the next morning they would cross Hampton Roads to the Elizabeth to learn more about native settlements.

“So setting sayle for the Southerne shore, we sayled up a narrow river up to the country of the Chisapeak; it hath a good channel, but many shoules about the entrance. By that we had sayled six or seaven myles, we saw two or three little garden plots with their houses, the shore overgrowne with the greatest Pyne and Firre trees we ever saw in the Country. But not seeing nor hearing any people, and the river very narrow, we returned to the great river, to see if we could find any of them.”

What Smith saw, historians guess, was the remains of the great Chesapeake Indian village called Skicoak (Sky-co-ak). It’s indicated on his map of the Chesapeake region by a small Maltese cross, at about present-day Lambert’s Point, or perhaps further south, near Fort Norfolk. But the eerie thing is that he saw no one. Houses, yes, but no native people, nor even smoke from a fire.

The future city of Norfolk was a ghost town.

Illustration: Detail from Captain John Smith’s 1612 Map. The Maltese cross above the word “Chesapeack” shows where the Skicoak village may have existed. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

June 1, 2008

By Paul Clancy


On the original 1680 plan for “Norfolk Town,” recreated by Rogers Dey Whichard, there’s a road that cuts through the middle of town. It’s labeled “The Roadway That Leadeth to the Waterside.” It ends almost exactly where, about three centuries later, urban visionary James W. Rouse decided that the renaissance of the city’s downtown should begin. “The Waterside,” he originally called it.

And on this day, 25 years ago, a place bearing that name opened with great fanfare and promise.

A parade of numerous bands and an assortment of clowns, jugglers, mimes, belly dancers and antique cars snaked through downtown and then streamed by the gleaming glass-and-steel structure on the waterfront. A Navy band swung into “Anchors Aweigh.” Lynda Robb, wife of the governor, cracked a confetti-filled champagne bottle against a railing. A couple of dozen tugboats standing off in the harbor released a cloud of red, white and blue balloons into a misty rain. And an enthusiastic crowd descended on the brand-new marketplace to sample the fair at 122 restaurants, markets, specialty shops, kiosks and pushcarts.

“With the great spirit of the people here and the beauty of the Waterside,” Rouse declared the night before, “I think we’re about to embark on something that will be a smashing success.”

The nice part of this story, unlike other dashed urban schemes, is that Waterside did exactly what it was supposed to do. It became a magnate for tourists, shoppers and investors that led to what has been called an urban miracle. There’s no doubt that it fulfilled the dream of the man who envisioned it.

Ironically, Rouse had helped accelerate the decline of cities by building, before anyone else, enclosed shopping malls in suburban areas. But he later came to deplore the “mindlessness” of suburban sprawl and clutter, and launched, almost simultaneously, two major counterattacks.

One was the new town of Columbia, Md., on 14,000 acres of farmland between Washington and Baltimore. It was organized around eight villages, each with its own shopping center and elementary school. The villages were interconnected not only with roadways but with walking and biking trails. There was a mix of housing for different income levels and lifestyles, recreational facilities and open space. It introduced the novel idea that people didn’t need to get in a car every time they went somewhere. The “new town” concept, to one extent or another, caught on across America.

Then Rouse did something equally radical. He decided to help rescue declining cities by building “festival marketplaces” that would bring people back downtown. These places, Faneuil Hall in Boston, Harborplace in Baltimore, South Street Seaport in New York and Union Station in St. Louis, were enormously successful. As Time Magazine, said in a cover story, he was “the man who made cities fun again.”

He’d been to Norfolk on a couple of earlier occasions. It was on one of these forays that he met his second wife, Patricia Traugott, who was then a member of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. There would be numerous roadblocks in his vision for Norfolk but he wasn’t the sort to take no for an answer.

“He called me one day, and said he wanted to go look at the waterfront for a place to build a festival marketplace,” said Harvey Lindsay, a commercial realtor, swiveling around to look across to Waterside from his 14th floor Dominion Tower office. “I’ll never forget it. We started in Freemason and stopped right there. ‘This is where it should be,’ he said.”

Waterside was completely leased out, with only one thing missing. Lindsay remembers Rouse scolding him for not finding an old-fashioned butcher. That’s how fussy Rouse was about selecting just the right mix for these marketplaces.

One of the most fascinating things about Rouse was that he not only tried to rescue cities, he attempted to rescue people from the squalor of substandard housing. With the profits from his urban investments, he formed The Enterprise Foundation and, using tax incentives, public and private grants, donated materials and volunteers, helped build thousands of homes in dozens of cities. Patricia Rouse still serves on the board of what is now Enterprise Community Partners.

“He was one of the finest human spirits I’ve ever known,” Lindsay said. “He was dedicated to helping the underprivileged and the poor. He just felt if they could get decent housing, the rest would follow.”

Twenty-five years after its founding, it looks as though the engine that drove the redevelopment of downtown needs some new sparkplugs. Maybe a new vision. Or visionary.

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


Photo: James W. Rouse, Virginian-Pilot file photo.