April 26, 2009

The small bus owned by the First Baptist Church of Suffolk quickly filled to capacity and Kermit Hobbs decided to stand. He hardly minded since that meant that many more people could share his enthusiasm for the brief but intense period in Suffolk’s history, the Civil War.

“It’s been a passion of mine for 50 years, ever since I was a boy playing in the trenches near my house,” he said. We’d see those trenches shortly.

And Al Farrenkoph, wearing a Confederate cap while he drove the bus, didn’t mind being kidded that he was historic enough to know the story from personal experience. He’d drive that bus from Suffolk’s Seaboard Station Railroad Museum over the back roads of the city’s historic area all day if asked to.

Suffolk may be a booming Hampton Roads city now, but once a year, when the Suffolk Nansemond Historical Society puts on its History and Heritage Weekend, its downtown takes on the trappings of a war zone.

Imagine this: On May 10, 1862, when Norfolk and Portsmouth fell into Union hands, Confederate forces that had been quartered in Suffolk for the past year withdrew 20 miles west to the Blackwater River. Two days later, a regiment of mounted Union troops rode into town and a tense standoff began. By the fall, greatly expanded northern defenders had completely encircled the town with forts, batteries and trenches, and gunboats patrolled the Nansemond. Union Gen. John Peck took over the spacious Riddick’s Folly mansion as his headquarters.

Then, the following April when Confederate Gen. James Longstreet arrived with two divisions, Union forces dug in even more and the Siege of Suffolk, as it’s sometimes called, began. Longstreet, hoping to retake Suffolk, made several probing attempts, aided by a couple of other southern heavy hitters, Gens. John Hood and George Pickett, but they never found a soft spot in the Union defenses and declined to attack. Then, suddenly, with Longstreet’s forces marching off to a place called Gettysburg, the siege ended

In all, the period spanned slightly less than a year, but Suffolk would never be the same. And thanks to Hobbs, a farm equipment executive who leads these tours every year and has authored books on the subject, it won’t soon forget.

The first stop was the parking lot of River Point Condominiums bordering the Nansemond on the eastern edge of downtown. And there, hugging the river, is a long, meandering trench line. Some may not know its history, but Civil War buffs through the years have amassed a treasure of buttons, bullets, bottles and badges.

“I like to find out what the average person lived like,” said Randy Turner, a local homebuilder and memorabilia collector who’d come along for the ride. “You find out what they were throwing away, you find out what they had.”

Nearby, Hobbs said, was Union Town, a collection of log cabins, a church and meeting house set up by one-time slaves who had fled to freedom behind Union lines.

We rambled along backcountry roads, over train tracks and beside horse pastures. We stopped at an S-turn in the river near the spot where Union gunboats had been roughed up by shore batteries. We paused under a pecan tree west of town, near a spot where Union and Confederate cannon had turned the adjoining farm into a killing field. And finally, at a home site off Carolina Road, we learned of a family that was caught in a crossfire between opposing forces. When they made a desperate dash for the woods, the woman, Judith Kilby Smith, was struck in the neck.

“’Husband, I’m killed,’” Hobbs quoted her as saying as she died in his arms.

Soon after Longstreet withdrew, Peck and his soldiers did, too, and Suffolk was left to pick up the pieces of shattered lives and a destroyed economy. Had there been an all-out attack instead of just a siege, it might have been devastating. Instead, little changed, especially not the course of the war, and Hobbs has no illusions.

“All of it was pretty much useless,” he concluded.

Illustration: Wartime Suffolk from Harper's Weekly, May 1863.
Photo of Kermit Hobbs leading a tour of Civil War sites in Suffolk. Courtesy of Glenn Nelson.

April 19, 2009

On May 15, 1801, President Thomas Jefferson put this question to his cabinet, “Shall the squadron now at Norfolk be ordered to cruise in the Mediterranean?”

The answer was unanimous. The small fleet of ships should be dispatched “to superintend the safety of our commerce.” It was to be only a “squadron of observation,” but if they met with hostilities, the ships were authorized to retaliate. Promptly, on June 1, the squadron, including three frigates and a schooner, sailed for the Straits of Gibraltar.

This was the beginning of the end of a long, sad chapter in the new nation’s humiliating experience with piracy on the high seas. In this case, it was state-sponsored piracy that enriched the pashas and sultans of North Africa’s Barbary Coast, Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis – not the lawless gangs of Somalia. But to historians, the similarities are jaw-dropping.

“When I first read about the Somali pirates,” Perdue professor Frank Lambert told The New York Times, “I almost did a double take and turned to my wife at the breakfast table and said, ‘This is déjà vu.’”

Piracy in the Mediterranean had been practiced since the beginning of recorded history, says Ian W. Toll, author of “Six Frigates, the Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy.” It was so blatant that most European countries routinely paid exorbitant tribute to the Barbary rulers to guarantee that their merchant ships wouldn’t be hijacked.

The U.S., no longer protected by Britain, was suddenly vulnerable.

In July 1785 two American ships were seized by Algerian corsairs. Twenty-two crewmen were thrown into dungeons along with other captives, given meager rations, routinely beaten and virtually turned into slaves. Negotiations for their release were a joke, with Algeria demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars. Negotiations dragged on and the prisoners lingered in captivity.

There were similar incidents in the years to come, and finally, in March 1794, Congress authorized the government to buy or build six warships to protect the American commerce. The act set in motion a massive naval building effort that resulted in some of the most storied ships in history, including the Constitution, the Constellation, the United States and, here at Gosport Navy Yard, the Chesapeake.

But in the meantime the outrages continued, with the U.S. shelling out millions in cash and gifts, including silver snuff boxes, diamond rings, gold watches, silk, firearms and a small frigate to Algiers. Upon hearing of this, the ruler of Tunis informed Jefferson that it would be “infinitely agreeable to me if you also made me a present of a vessel of war.” The straw that broke the camel’s back, though, was the capture of the ship that was sent to deliver money and gifts to the thug rulers.

A blockade went into effect, but the cumbersome American warships had little luck with the fast xebecs and other shallow-draft pirate vessels. In October 1803, the commander of the frigate Philadelphia, William Bainbridge, made the mistake of chasing a pirate ship into the harbor at Tripoli and ran hard aground. His ship was captured and he and his crew were taken prisoner.

In a daring nighttime raid, Lt. Stephen Decatur sailed into the harbor, boarded the Philadelphia, cut down the defenders and set it ablaze. He and the raiders escaped, but the prisoners remained in captivity and the war lingered until a contingent of U.S. Marines and hundreds of mercenaries captured the Barbary pirate fortress at Derna (“to the shores of Tripoli”) and eventually forced a treaty.

There’s an ironic ring to the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips. The Navy ship on which the Seals operated was the Bainbridge, named for the unlucky commander of the Philadelphia.

Illustration: Stephen Decatur battles Barbary pirates. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

April 12, 2009

As you enter the bell tower of the historic church on Jamestown Island, notice that there are flecks of shell imbedded in the mortar between the smooth, weathered bricks. This tower, built somewhere around 1650, is evidence of the strong religious faith that guided the affairs of the first English settlers.

It was, already, the fourth church in which they worshipped.

Immediately after their arrival, Rev. Robert Hunt, whom John Smith described as “our honest, religious and courageous divine,” led the men and boys in thanksgiving and prayer, and apparently within days, “we did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or four trees to shadow us from the Sonne.” They sat on unhewn logs before an altar of wood “nailed to neighboring trees.”

Soon after, the god-fearing settlers built the first church within the fort, “a homely thing, like a barn set on cratchets [logs with natural forks at the end], covered with rafts, sedge and earth.” In this drafty, leaky structure, Rev. Hunt led the colonists in twice-daily prayers and delivered two sermons every Sunday. This building burned down in January 1608 and was replaced by another as crude as the first, but good enough for the wedding of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.

But in the meantime, the colonists had endured a near-holocaust of starvation and disease, with only 60 of the first 500 of them left by the spring of 1610. They almost pulled up stakes and departed, but the newly arrived Lord De La Warr whipped them into shape with harsh discipline.

His new laws, “divine, moral and martial,” required that “every man and woman duly twice a day upon the first tolling of the bell shall repair into the church to hear divine services,” and this was to be augmented with private prayer at home. Failure to comply meant loss of provisions, whipping and, on third offense, death. How’s that for separation of church and state?

According to Preservation Virginia, the organization that owns most of the settlement, Gov. Samuel Argall had the inhabitants build a new, wooden church, “fifty foot long and twenty foot broad,” on a cobblestone foundation. This is where in 1619 the first legislative assembly in the New World, patterned after the English Parliament, was convened.

Finally, by mid-century, the now-numerous and prosperous colonists put up a brick church, adding the 46-foot-high bell tower sometime later. But the entire village of Jamestown, including the church, was destroyed during Bacon’s Rebellion, the rabble-rousing war with Governor Berkeley, in 1676. The only structure left was the bell tower.

A fifth church went up a decade later, but after the colonists migrated to Williamsburg at century’s end, it fell into disrepair and its bricks were used for the wall of the island’s graveyard. But again, the bell tower, with its four-foot-thick walls, endured, although minus its wooden belfry. It’s through the tower that you proceed when entering the present church, built in 1906 by the National Society, Colonial Dames of America.

Speaking of enduring, this morning for something like the 50th year in a row, Williamsburg area churches were planning to hold joint sunrise Easter services before a weathered wooden cross that overlooks the James River.

At the base of the cross is an inscription memorializing the settlers who died during the first years of the colony, ending with a quotation from the Book of Revelations: “These are they which came out of great tribulations.”

Watercolor by Sydney King depicting colonists with Jamestown Church in background. National Park Service

April 5, 2009

Since Mike Gruss’s piece a couple of weeks ago on the absence of Amtrak service in South Hampton Roads, I’ve been curious about the once-fabulous era of passenger trains, how it came and how it went.

Thanks to newspaper clippings – not electronic files or microfilm but the real clips, dusty and fading in the newspaper’s library and the Sargeant Memorial Room at Norfolk Public – and thanks to some pretty terrific reporting and commentary, I’ve been able to recreate at least a couple of scenes and images.

The early part of the last century was a heady time for Hampton Roads. The 1907 Jamestown Exposition had spurred the growth of hotels. Electric and then steam trains were rambling over vast farmland to the oceanfront. Steamboats were calling at downtown piers every day. And then and there, an ambitious new entity was announced: Union Station, a collaboration between railroads, would bring them all together on East Main Street, somewhere near where today’s Harbor Park stands. And a seedy place it was.

According to a story in the early 1960s by George Tucker, the area was “famous for its flop houses, tattoo parlors, beer taverns and a striptease palace.” (If anybody remembers, I’d love to know what a striptease palace was.)

The station was not your typical beaux-arts or neo-classical edifice, like the ones in Washington and Richmond, at least not from the outside. It was an eight-story brick building, trimmed in gray stone. The building housed the offices of the railroads that used the terminal.

But inside the station, Tucker reported, there was an “imperial serenity.” The waiting room was all lofty marble and decorated plaster. Its elaborate stucco ceiling echoed continuously with announcements of arrivals and departures, especially during the world wars when millions of service people passed through. Think of the farewells, the hugs and kisses, and in some cases the last moments people had together.

But the advent of automobiles seemed to doom railroad passenger service. At least that’s what we thought, before Amtrak and light rail and, maybe ten years from now, high-speed rail. Most cities hung onto their train stations, but Norfolk seemed hell-bent on wiping out its architectural past. Union Station lived from 1912 to 1962, then slowly, brick by brick, memory by memory, gave up the ghost.

What struck me most in the clips was an editorial, written during the tenure of Lenoir Chambers, the editor who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his stance against massive resistance. I knew his writing then was logical and precise, but I hadn’t appreciated his gift of observation.

By the time of World War II, the editorial points out, the station “had become shabby. It smelled of disinfectant. The benches were scarred and notched. The ash stands and cuspidors were messy. The oversize radiators hissed and leaked. The premises were like an old stationmaster’s uniform – a little rumpled, a little soiled, very shiny.

“Now it is difficult even reach Union Station. Main Street has been stripped of its gaudy temples of appetite and hovels of exhaustion’ the thoroughfare is broken and barred. And once the station is reached, it stands dim, sad, and doomed. Even the shouts of greeting and the scrape of luggage and the click of loafer heels of girls coming home these days for Christmas from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon and the other upstate colleges are swallowed in the gloom along the tracks and echo but thinly and momentarily against the once-elegant station walls.”

“But if the station is to have a swan song, these shouts must be it,” he wrote, noting that the station would be dismantled. “The pile of Old Norfolk rubble will rise a little higher.”

Union Station under construction, Dec. 1911, by Harry C. Mann. Norfolk Public Library.