Sept. 26, 2010

Rail Car # 103, which became Cuba’s #1000, a sumptuously furnished rail inspector car operated by the president of the line. As of 1983 it was still in service. Courtesy of Norfolk Southern Railway Company Historical Society.
I have a modest suggestion for Virginia Beach if the city isn’t sure about what to do with the former Norfolk Southern right of way: put down tracks and run…rail buses. Yes, rail buses, and I know where these curious vehicles might be had for a song. Or maybe a few pesos.

A little Latin music, please. But wait! A quick history. In 1883 the Norfolk-Virginia Beach Railroad and Improvement Co. built a narrow-gauge rail system between the two cities. It was mostly to serve the sumptuous Virginia Beach – later Princess Anne – Hotel and communities that sprang up along the route. The line went bust and numerous rail lines merged, with Norfolk Southern eventually surviving. The narrow gauge became standard gauge, and the trains were electrified.

These “Interurban” trains started losing out to cars and the Great Depression put a damper on rail service. There wasn’t enough business to sustain the service the way it was. So Norfolk southern came up with a unique solution: one-car trains dubbed rail buses. All they needed was someone to drive them and someone to collect tickets. These were apparently hugely popular.

Recently a letter writer, Kirkland Tucker Clarkson, called them to my attention. “My father and I took the rail bus every day to Norfolk,” she writes. “He was tall, and he loved the leg room. I could do most of my homework en route to the Graham School, a small girls’ school in Norfolk.”

Most of her friends went to Oceana High School, but in the late 1940s, county schools in Virginia had only 11 grades and her parents didn’t think that was enough preparation for college. Some of her friends took the rail bus to Maury High, for which they paid tuition.

“The rail bus usually ran from the North End down Pacific Avenue to 12th Street, then west to Norfolk on the Norfolk Southern tracks. It stopped at Oceana, London Bridge, Lynnhaven, Euclid, Rosemont and Ingleside, and others. Almost the same businessmen and students rode it every day. It was a relaxing commute, just what we need today.”

“About 1947, the rail bus was sadly discontinued because the “road bus” required only the driver, and the rail bus required a motorman and a conductor to take up tickets. It had been a unique and important part of Va. Beach, and it was sorely missed. The “road bus” on Va. Beach Boulevard just could not take its place.”

I looked up rail buses on the site of the Norfolk Southern Railway Company Historical Society and found a schedule showing 11 daily trips to downtown Norfolk and back at a one-way cost of 50 cents or 75 cents roundtrip. Most of the west-bound rail buses left from the Cavalier Hotel, with one daily northern run to Cape Henry. The timetable had an aerial photo of the Cavalier and the promise of “real surf bathing.”

And then there’s this, a 1983 National Railway Bulletin, “Rail Cars to Tidewater,” with a photograph of what had been Car 103. “All of the remaining railcar fleet was sold to several Cuban railroads in June 1948. Car 103 became the president’s personal inspection car on one Cuban line and was elaborately furnished and maintained as Number 1000. It is now Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Cuba and is still in inspection car service.”

So I researched railcars in Cuba and guess what? They have dozens of them in daily service, running all over the island. They don’t get very high marks for being on time, but they work. I don’t know if they’re the originals, but the way cars last in Cuba, you never know. Some may have survived.

Which brings me to my point. Now that car traffic in the states is really horrible, and we’re looking for more alternatives, and all that stimulus money is still waiting to be spent, and relations with Cuba are thawing, maybe we could buy a few of them back.

Sept. 19, 2010

Last night’s ODU-William & Mary football game was a historical reprieve of a contest that took place 80 years ago.

It was Oct. 15, 1930. ODU, then called the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary, had just opened in the old Larchmont Elementary School on Hampton Boulevard. There were 206 students. Football began almost as an afterthought, and many of the members of the first team, including the quarterback, had never played for their respective high schools. And yet their record, even though compiled mostly against local high schools, was not all that bad.

They might have been inexperienced but were fast and scrappy and had something else
going for them, a highly regarded coach. In their book, “The Legacy Renewed,” Peter C. Stewart and Thomas R. Garrett wrote that Tommy Scott’s “influence and calm demeanor had an impact on every student he encountered."

The game that everyone had waited for was the matchup in Williamsburg between the fledgling team and the parent school.

The thing that got me about that contest was not so much the game itself but the context in which it was played.

It was the Depression. Stories in The Virginian-Pilot and The Norfolk Landmark reported that labor groups were calling upon President Hoover and local governments to ease the employment crisis. A bank in Raleigh was offering depositors 50 cents on the dollar as it expired. Norfolk County was considering reopening an alms house because of the growth of indigent residents.

There were diversions. Full-length movies with sound, known as “talkies,” were coming into their own. “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a harrowing account of soldiers in World War I, was playing at the Newport Theater. On stage at the Norva, “Those Three French Girls” starred local actors Reginald Denny and Fifi Dorsay who sailed through their roles “without sacrificing a single giggle.”

Saturday evenings, there was dancing at the Monticello Hotel.

Mutt & Jeff, Tillie the Toiler, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps were in the funnies, but not very funny.

Aircraft flight records were broken almost daily. One fellow marveled that it took only two and a half days to fly cross-country. Prohibition was on its way out, with “wet” candidates showing up in numerous races. Church groups were upset.

Mobster Jack “Legs” Diamond was shot three times in his New York hotel room and was “sinking” fast, the paper said. When asked who did it, he managed to tell an investigator, “I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

And in Williamsburg that day, students who had made their way there by ferry and bus, sat at the edge of their seats. W&M got off to any early start and enjoyed a 7-0lead until the third quarter when a couple of running plays brought the score to 7-6. A field goal missed.

Then, with two minutes left in the fourth quarter, halfback Billy Walker raced downfield, caught a pass from quarterback Terry Maxey and carried it 30 yards for a touchdown. The 13-7 victory was cause for celebration at a pageant that night at the college.

ODU abandoned its football program during World War II and didn’t resume until last year. On the slim chance that the Monarchs didn’t trounce the Tribe last night at Foreman Field – this was written days ago – I thought we could at least revel in the past.

Photo: Tommy Scott, coach of the Braves, ODU’s first football team. He was an outstanding athlete at Maury High and VMI. Courtesy of Norfolk Public Library.

Sept. 12, 2010

THE OLD HOUSE ON HOLLAND ROAD near Kellam High has many stories, some contained in letters that were stashed in a plaster wall, some in the small graveyard that rests under oak trees just a little ways north.

The house, built in the early 1800s, is now part of Buyrningwood Farm. It was for many years the dwelling place of the Burroughs family. Elzy Burroughs, famed builder and keeper of lighthouses, had lived there. His son John J. Burroughs, the long-serving clerk of the court, raised a large family there and reaped a considerable share of grief.

The long-forgotten letters, discovered when the house was being renovated many years ago, revealed intimate details about the courtship of Burroughs’ daughter Mollie by a homesick soldier during the Civil War. As I wrote last week, Oscar Styron was badly wounded but lived long enough to marry her and father a child. He was only 26 when he died.

Near his grave is that of Mollie’s oldest brother. Edgar Burroughs grew up on the farm, known as Cedar Grove Plantation. He became a Methodist minister, married and moved to a farm in Back Bay. And, like his brothers, when the war loomed, joined the Confederate Army and went off to fight.

But now a strange story begins.

Edgar, a major, resigned from the Fifth Virginia Cavalry in 1862 because of family illness and went home. To do this – Princess Anne County was under Union control – he had to pledge not to take up arms again. But he couldn’t sit by and let others do the fighting. He commanded a group of partisan rangers known as “the Burroughs Battalion” that caused grief to the occupiers. He was arrested and sentenced to death but at the urging of his family took an oath of allegiance to the United States. He was spared but remained in prison.

John Burroughs must have been a well-connected man. Three of his sons were fighting against the North. (Among the discovered letters is one from John Jr. “Give my love to all and remember me to the darkies,” he writes. “Jack” and his brother William would survive the war and become prominent Norfolk lawyers.) And yet Burroughs was able to keep his court position. And while Edgar languished in prison, his father went to Washington and managed to meet with President Lincoln. Was he incredibly prominent, or incredibly persistent?

In a letter to his sons, Burroughs wrote, “After two days I got an interview with Mr. Lincoln. He had not, he said, heard of that case before, and sent immediately to the Judge Advocate General’s office and had the whole proceeding brought in ... It was severe, and the President seemed to imbibe its spirit and spoke harshly, but he said he would lay it by and give it a careful examination and determine what he might deem right....”

Burroughs pointed out to the president that his son had taken the oath of loyalty to the Union. “O[h],” Lincoln replied, “he did that to avoid the penalty.” Burroughs did not say what he replied, but didn’t deny this obvious fact.

“I asked if I should wait in Washington for his decision. He said no. And whilst he treated me politely, yet he left me under an unfavorable impression as to the final decision.”

Meanwhile, Edgar contracted smallpox and was moved to a “pest house” in Portsmouth where he was guarded night and day. There were sharply differing views on what happened next – family members claim he was merely turning over on his cot; guards swore that he was attempting to escape through a window – but one of the sentries shot him in the back. He lingered for a few hours and died. It was Jan. 17, 1865. Edgar was 40 years old.

It was “deliberate murder,” Burroughs told his sons. The authorities ruled that it was “entirely justified.”

Burroughs went the next day to Portsmouth and brought his son’s body home for burial in the family cemetery. He was almost, but not quite, a broken man. His slaves had been taken away, he complained, “except for old Patience and Kedar,” presumably elderly blacks who had long served the family. He had to get his own wood. He had no money except for “greenbacks” – paper money issued by the North. He wondered how long it would be before his land was seized. He had lost his son.

“I will try to stand the storm and look up to heaven for help,” he wrote. “I am like an old oak riven by the lightning and shorn of one of its main branches.”

A Harpers Weekly illustrator sided with the government in believing Burroughs was trying to escape. Courtesy of Elizabeth Vogt.

Sept. 5, 2010

“Dear Mollie,

“The receipt of your letter on yesterday was a most enjoyable surprise,” he begins. “I had indulged the hope but scarcely ventured the expectation of hearing from you; and you can scarcely form a conception of my delight when I recognized the familiar hand writing and realized the fact that it was from old Princess Anne.”

It was June 1862. The sentiments, written to Mary Elizabeth (Mollie) Burroughs by her soldier-sweetheart, are from a recently identified cache of letters that were long hidden in a wall of a farmhouse on Holland Road. They draw back curtains of memory and family history that are at once poignant and tragic.

Mollie Burroughs was one of many children of John J. Burroughs and his first and second wives, Eliza and Ann. He was for many years Princess Anne’s clerk of court, a position he held throughout Union occupation in the Civil War, even while three of his sons fought for the Confederacy. Mollie’s letter-writing beau was Oscar Styron, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man who pined for peace and her companionship but at the same time yearned for honor on the battlefield.

The house remained in the Burroughs family until the early 1930s when it was sold to a family named Buyrn. In the process of renovating it, they discovered letters hidden a leather pouch inside a plaster wall on the third floor. Another 70 or so years went by before Elizabeth Vogt, a distant Burroughs descendant, learned of their existence and recently acquired them. She has transcribed the letters and turned over the originals to the Virginia Historical Society.

“It was very exciting,” she says. “Needless to say, when you read the letters, these people become alive.”

Especially Oscar and Mollie.

He was a student when he enlisted in the Confederate army at Craney Island and enthusiastic for the cause. “Let it come what it will,” he writes in that same June letter from his encampment near Richmond. “I go cheerfully and trust that I shall do my duty. I am still anxious to be in a great engagement before the war ends.”
He often thinks of her, his home and native county, he writes, “and the thought that they are in the possession of the enemy animates and nerves me to fight harder and if necessary die for their delivery.”

The idea of “getting the right kind of wound,” which might result in being sent home, has its appeal. But with his schoolmates, comrades and many of his southern “countrymen” at his side, it would be impossible. He could not go home without the honor of victory.

“Oh happy thought! To return with honor bright and be greeted by the happy faces of loved parents and friends.”

There are chatty letters from Mollie to her Ma, written from Norfolk, possibly while in school there. She writes about going to prayer meetings, witnessing church conversions and deciding whether or not to buy a calico dress.

But sometime late in 1862, wrenching news reaches her. Oscar has been seriously wounded. While lying down, a minie ball struck him at the top of his shoulder, passed between collar bone and shoulder blade and lodged in his lung.

Fortunately, as he wrote with a weak and trembling arm, the ball worked its way to the surface and surgeons removed it. “I bore the operation like a soldier,” he writes. “All around me cheered and complimented me upon my fortitude.”

He had his wound, and indeed it sent him home. Pvt. Oscar Stryon was discharged in March 1863 and he and his sweetheart were soon married. But on March 17, 1865 he died, almost certainly from his wounds. He was 26. It is not clear whether he lived to see the birth of their child.

A census of Princess Anne taken in August 1870 shows an Oscar Styron all right – as well as Mollie – but he’s not the father. He’s a five-year-old child.

Next week: Another family tragedy.

John J. Burroughs, one of Princess Anne County’s longest-serving clerks of court. This portrait hangs in the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Courtesy of Virginia Beach Circuit Court.