Dec. 28, 2008

It was the dawn of a new century in old Norfolk. Electric-powered streetcars clanged through the city, shouldering aside horse-drawn carriages. Hotels, some of them huge and lavish, were filling up with guests. Railroads were chugging, steamships and cargo ships were calling at the docks.

And now a news flash from Dec. 2, 1900: “Norfolk’s new federal building is finished. It is a beautiful edifice, wonderfully adapted to the purpose for which it was designed. Every detail of necessity, convenience and comfort seems to have been so thoroughly looked after that there is practically nothing to be desired.”

This imposing edifice on Plume Street, first a post office and courthouse, then Norfolk’s City Hall and, for a time the headquarters for an insurance company, takes a new bow in the coming weeks as – how would a newspaper of its day put it? – a grand, no, elegant, downtown library.

The Norfolk Main Library is scheduled to partially open on Saturday, just before demolition of the 46-year-old Kirn Memorial begins. Inside, there won’t be much to see at first, just the sprawling basement room where several dozen computers will offer the latest news of the 21st century. But as the rest of the library opens in the coming months, we’ll find ourselves in another time and place.

The building was designed in 1898 under the guidance of John Knox Taylor, the Treasury Department’s supervising architect. With the nation recovering from the Civil War, the dominant language of the building, with its United States shield on top, spoke of “the reintegration of the federal presence in state and local bureaucracy,” says ODU art historian Robert Wojtowicz (cq) “It was the most significant piece of federal construction in Norfolk after the Civil War.”

“To me, it has such a presence,” says City Historian Peggy Haile-McPhillips as we tour the building. Boxes of books wait for their destinations. The smell of fresh paint lingers. -“And fortunately it’s been preserved. Not much has changed.”

The first floor, where popular fiction, CDs, DVDs and children’s books will reside, was originally the post office. The striking thing here is that the postal windows have been preserved amidst somber oak panels. There were then “all the modern conveniences for handling the large postal business of the thriving City by the Sea,” this newspaper gushed.

But the showpiece of the building is the second-floor atrium. Inspired by ideas that go back to 15th century Florence, Italy, there’s a central courtyard surrounded by a columned arcade. Besides being the stomping ground of lawyers, judges and clerks of court, it was, with its palm garden and, two stories up, a skylight, a majestic public space. The library’s non-fiction and reference books will be in this space, inviting patrons to study amidst light-splashed ambience.

The third floor, which looks down into the atrium, will accommodate the Sargeant Memorial Room, where books, records and photographs document the region’s history, as well as the city historian’s office. It once housed the library of the Norfolk Bar Association, dormitories for the railway mail clerks, a suit of rooms for the U.S. Marshall and a jury room.

After the current federal courthouse was built in 1937, the city bought the building and turned it into City Hall. Just off the atrium is the marbled City Council chamber, and on the far side of the building a wood-paneled mayor’s office with chandelier and palladium windows. You might imagine here the debates that took place over urban renewal and –50 years ago – bitter skirmishes over the closing of public schools.

The government moved to its current City Hall in the mid-60s. The old building was almost sold to a Richmond restaurateur in 1980, but the deal fell through. Seaboard Associates, a partnership headed by George Phillips, president of Henderson-Phillips Inc., bought the building and used it for insurance offices. Now the temporarily named “Seaboard Center” enters a new era.

“The next chapter in the building’s history,” Wojtowicz predicts, “is going to be as interesting as all of its previous incarnations.”

Next week: Just after the courthouse opens, a sensational murder trial.

Photo: The Atrium at the new library, Virtinian-Pilot file photo.

Dec. 21, 2008

There’s something immensely satisfying about sitting down to a microfilm reader: turning on the machine, threading the film over and under rollers, through glass plates and a take-up reel, then rotating the dial, creeping through the pages of history.

I begin to scroll and suddenly, with a flicker of light as the reader goes from black to black and white, I’m looking at the evidence, walking the streets, so to speak, of a bleak and devastated city. The date is Saturday, Dec. 16, 1865, and these are the first available pages of The Norfolk Virginian, a long-distant relative of this newspaper.

It’s just eight months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the Virginian’s columns are drenched with the indignation of defeat.

There is a long poem, an ode to deceased Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, and on the editorial page, associate editor James Barron Hope boils with outrage at the news that the widow of “our great hero” is in a destitute condition. He appeals for funds to be raised out of gratitude and affection to ease her plight.

There’s a dry recitation of events in the state legislature, although one item stands out, a resolution earnestly praying “that the President of the United States grant full and complete pardon to all persons now confined in prison under charges of treason or other political crimes, believing as we do, that the prosperity of the country will be promoted thereby.”

And, the strangest thing, a front-page dispatch by ex-Tennessee Gov. Isham Harris about escaping, “with my luggage, cooking utensils and provisions on a pack mule,” to Mexico. There he met other former southern governors-in-exile, several generals, including John Magruder, and our own Commodore Matthew Maury. The government there had embraced these refugees, even found work for some of them. Maury was appointed Imperial Minister of Colonization, “which makes his authority in the matter of colonization second only to that of the Emperor.”

Also, with great solemnity, the Virginian published a long list of “those gallant and self-sacrificing men who, in the defense of what they regarded as their most cherished rights, took up arms, fought nobly, and now sleep the sleep of death.”

At this point I’m dying of curiosity about the origins of the newspaper and turn to “Salt Water & Printer’s Ink,” a 1967 history by Lenoir Chambers, the Pulitzer Prize winning Pilot editor, and Joseph E. Shank.

There were earlier daily newspapers here, but they had been “killed or mortally wounded” by the Civil War, the authors wrote. The Virginian was founded by a group of printers and editors from Petersburg who had started a newspaper there. The two most prominent partners, Gustavus Sykes and Anthony Keiley, were Confederate officers during the war. Their first offering was shut down by military authorities because of ardent pro-southern sentiments. A second, less controversial, daily survived. The owners saw a need in Norfolk and Portsmouth and on, Nov. 21, 1865, gave birth to the Virginian.

There are almost four weeks of missing issues. Chambers and Shanks wrote that the first four-pager included, with some literary flourish, a grudging admission:

“We have seen many of our theories of state sovereignty sent to the tomb of all the Capulets…We appealed to the arbitration of battle, and when the fight was done, we sheathed our swords, and said, like King Francis…we have not lost our honor….”

But it was, as the writers saw it, a dreary time for such a beginning. Norfolk was in an economic depression. Union soldiers still marched in the streets. Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the then-hated military commander, called Norfolk “the filthiest place I ever saw where there were human inhabitants…”

Even so, on that surely doubtful December day, signs of business-as-usual, if not hope, flicker across the microfilm.

The Atlantic Hotel had recently been renovated and its billiard saloon “handsomely refurnished” for the pleasure of its guests. Glenn’s Theater in Norfolk was presenting “the talented young tragedienne” Miss Fanny B. Price in “The Wrecker’s Daughter.” The Oxford Theatre and Music Hall in Portsmouth was “open every night, with a company of first-class performers, male and female.” Steamers and trains were leaving daily. Oysters were abundant.

Furthermore, you could send away to New York for the “Cherokee Cure,” which would solve all problems of loss of memory, “universal lassitude,” back pain, dim vision, premature old age, weak nerves, pale countenance, insanity, consumption and “all diseases that follow as a consequence of youthful indiscretions.”

The Virginian struggled and frequent shakeups followed, but it survived as competitors fell. In 1898, it merged with one of them, the Daily Pilot, and the result, 143 years and maybe a million pages later, is evidence of this time and place.

A personal note: This is the 100th column I’ve written since January 2007.

Illustration: From the Dec. 16, 1865 Norfolk Virginian. Virginian-Pilot Library.

Dec. 14, 2008

In the bitter wind of last Sunday afternoon, as rifles and muskets boomed and gunsmoke filled the air, men and boys in red coats fell in a heap on the cold ground.

You could imagine, but only in part, what the real scene must have been like as the cream of Britain’s army, the Grenadiers, marched shoulder-to-shoulder into the savage gunfire that awaited them on another December day at Great Bridge.

Why wouldn’t those rebels, mostly unseasoned volunteers, turn and run at the sight of professional soldiers, as Lord Dunmore had predicted?

Instead, the patriots stood their ground and waited until the redcoats were 50 yards away, then mowed them down, almost to a man. The Battle of Great Bridge was one of the most one-sided contests in the Revolutionary War, with between 60 and 102 British soldiers killed or wounded, while a single American, a captain, suffered a slight wound to his thumb.

It was also one of the most pivotal, causing Dunmore to pull up stakes and leave Virginia for good.

Last weekend, the Chesapeake Parks and Recreation Department sponsored the 14th Annual Battle of Great Bridge, an observance of the confrontation that occurred on the also-chilly morning of December 9, 1775.

There were about 60 re-enactors, more or less equally divided between British and patriot fighters. A genial Bill Blair of Gloucester played Col. William Woolford, who led the Americans, and a dour, black-hatted David Pondolfino of Williamsburg portrayed Dunmore. The men make their own costumes, sometimes switching allegiances, depending on the number on each side. They own their muskets or rifles and roll their own black powder cartridges. And, yes, they make a lot of noise and smoke. As Blair, said, in narrating the event, you don’t expect re-enactors to stand in the cold all day without blasting away at each other.

Considering the weather, there was a good turnout. Tents and exhibits were manned by the Norfolk County Historical Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution and others, as well as a few craftspeople. The Great Bridge Battlefield and Waterways History Foundation, which has an office near the site, made sure the contenders did not have to fall and die, twice each day, without benefit of cookies or hot chocolate.

Children were impressed by the pretend soldiers, especially their booming guns. And the guns did boom that far-off December day.

Dunmore had been flush with victory from a skirmish at Kempsville a few weeks before, and decided to show the patriot cowards a thing or two. Great Bridge, the little community at the Virginia-North Carolina crossroads, was vital to controlling goods flowing to and from Norfolk. He had built a ramshackle fort there. It was dubbed “the pig pen” by the patriots, but it was fortified by four-pounder cannon that effectively guarded the causeway.

Prompted by George Washington, who felt the fate of the Revolution depended on forcing Dunmore out of Norfolk, regiments of minutemen from around the region marched to Great Bridge. Among the contingent from Culpeper was a 20-year-old lieutenant named John Marshall, who was destined to become the most influential chief justice in the history of the Supreme Court.

The patriots built redoubts and for several days exchanged gunfire with Dunmore’s forces, but because of the cannon, declined to attack. Fortunately, the British made the first move, marching six-abreast across a narrow causeway just north of the present Great Bridge Bridge.

The British were mostly using smooth-bore muskets, which are not as accurate as the rifled American guns, and the gunners’ aim was true. The genteel Captain Charles Fordyce, leading about 60 Grenadiers and 120 others, fell within 15 feet of the breastworks, his body riddled with no less than 14 bullets.

One witness told of “a vast effusion of blood, so dreadful that it beggars description, a scene that, when the dead and wounded were bro’t off, [that] was too much. I then saw the horrors of war in perfection, worse than can be imagin’d; 10 and 12 bullets thro’ many; limbs broke in 2 or 3 places; brains turning out. Good God, what a sight!”

Sunday, after lying on the cold ground for what seemed an eternity, these vanquished soldiers sprang to their feet and went off, perhaps in search of hot chocolate.

Photo: “Red Coats” fire at Great Bridge. Nancie Laing, City of Chesapeake.

Dec. 7, 2008

Calypso, the research boat captained by famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, was not the first vessel of that name to visit these waters. There was another Calypso – named for the nymph who seduced Odysseus – that was perhaps less adventurous but nevertheless a cornerstone of our history. And next month we quietly observe the sesquicentennial of its passage.

It was Jan. 9, 1859. The crew of this Calypso, a 50-foot steamboat, ran a hawser to a heavy iron barge waiting patiently by a siding at Great Bridge and fired up the vessel’s trusty high-pressure boiler. With a likely toot of its steam whistle, side paddle wheels churned the mahogany waters of the just-finished Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal and off they went toward Currituck.

The Calypso thus became the first vessel to transit the A&C Canal. This new waterway, 70 miles of rivers, channels and protected natural bays, is most noticed here when the bridge at Great Bridge begins to rise and traffic grinds to a halt, but it has been a vital link between southeastern Virginia and the east coast, from Maine to Florida, for a century and a half.

Before the A&C, the only means of moving goods from North Carolina to the port of Norfolk was to trek them overland, ship them around Cape Hatteras or use the slow, shallow and time-consuming Dismal Swamp Canal. The solution was to burrow through miles of hard, sometimes unyielding land and tie the deeper waters of the two states together.

Late last month, the city of Chesapeake recognized several improvements to Great Bridge Lock Park, including a bronze-covered medallion that commemorates the little steamboat. The four-foot round, compass-shaped monument was inspired and created by the Virginia Canal and Navigation Society. Etched in polished granite at the center of the medallion is a likeness of the Calypso, a stream of smoke trailing behind its jaunty smokestack.

Last week, George Ramsey, southeast regional director of the canal society – and its most avid local historian – met me at the park. We stood on the berm overlooking the lock on the north side, watching southbound boats entering the lock from the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River, waiting for the double lock gates to send them on their way.

The canal, he said, was hugely important. Until then, anyone attempting to ferry goods north on the Dismal Swamp Canal had to crawl though seven locks in the canal and a couple more at what was called the Gilmerton Cut. He’s seen a letter, he said, by one skipper who complained that the trip took him three weeks.

The need for the canal had been recognized for more than a century, but we had to wait for the invention of a steam-powered to get the job done. Nine of these “iron titans,” brought down from Wilmington, Del., ripped through tangled roots and hard-as-rock stumps of ancient cypress trees. Then, what the dredges couldn’t budge, blasting powder finally did.

Ramsey showed me a richly illustrated book about the canal, “Juniper Waterway, A History of the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, by Alexander Crosby Brown, published for the Mariners’ Museum. It’s fascinating, especially the passage that Brown quotes from a writer-illustrator who journeyed down the waterway on the Calypso for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

The Calypso, he wrote, “commenced operations by thoroughly sprinkling, in two or three well-directed puffs, a solution of soot over the clothes of the passengers. This preliminary through, she struck down the center of the canal-like stream, the overhanging branches almost brushing her wheel-houses. The water having the color of brown stout, the sensation was somewhat that of navigating the torrent that swept away a London street some years ago when one of Whitehead’s vats gave way.

“The Calypso continued on down the twisting, amber-colored, juniper stream, apparently devoid of all human habitation on the banks save for one shack they encountered during the first dozen of so miles of travel. Although they saw only two people, apparently there were plenty of muskrats. They dived under our bows with a calmness that savored more of philosophy than fright and perhaps more contempt than either.”

This little workhorse of a boat, Calypso, represents the spirit of the canal. Its ending, though, is intertwined with another, darker story. The Civil War was about to begin, and soon all commerce on the canal was halted as once-proud vessels like Calypso were scuttled and sent to the bottom.

The only trace now is the medallion.

The center of the medallion is a sketch by “Waterman Will” Turnage of the Virginia Canals and Navigation Society.