Postcard showing how Granby Street looked in 1868 before the area that is now City Hall Avenue was filled in. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Collection. It’s an odd coincidence. Here I am in the local history rooms – the Sargeant Memorial Collection – at the Norfolk Public Library, looking up the city’s oldest history: the Indian settlements, the arrival of white folks, the first land purchases – and the library is closing down.
Temporarily, of course.
The Downtown Branch, tucked into a former federal courthouse and post office on Plume Street, is about to expand into new space and reopen two years from now as the Col. Samuel L. Slover Main Library. In the meantime, much of its historic resources will be moved out to the Pretlow Anchor Library at Ocean View.
While I’m here, local history staffers are explaining to patrons and callers that this is the last day and the collection won’t reopen until mid-January. Meanwhile, there’s an almost constant sound, from somewhere downstairs, of plastic wrap being stretched around stacks of boxes that will go into storage.
So I’d better read fast, cram in as much local history as possible before the region’s most authoritative local history operation takes a (temporary) powder. Come to think of it, Portsmouth’s local history room is also temporarily closed due to a fire at the Main Library.
In a way, history has taken a holiday.
Meanwhile, what about the origins of Norfolk? The library staff kindly laid out about eight books for me, some no bigger than a pamphlet, others as fat as cinder blocks. And so here I present a hurry-up early history of the city:
Somewhere on the eastern side of the Elizabeth River – probably around Lambert’s Point – there’s a Chesapeake Indian city called Ski-co-ak. For farming, fishing, pleasant climate, not to mention “multitudes of bears,” great woods of sassafras and walnut trees, it is “not to be excelled by any other whatsoever,” a 1585 scouting party from Roanoke reports.
Now along come the English, establishing Jamestown, Elizabeth City, Lower Norfolk County, etc., etc. A fellow named Capt. Thomas Willoughby, who helped drive the Indians out, gets 200 acres of land near Ocean View in about 1636.
The Virginia Assembly, hoping to stimulate commerce, passes an act in 1680 providing for towns. Nicholas Wise, a house carpenter, sells the authorities 50 acres of land for 10,000 pounds of tobacco.
“Norfolk Towne” at this point is almost an island. Bounded on the south by the Elizabeth River, the north by Back Creek (now City Hall Ave.) the west by Foure Farthing Pointe (now where Nauticus sits) and the east by Dun-in-the-Mire Creek (near the present Harbor Park).
(Quick trivia: To draw dun – a stuck horse – out of the mire, is to lend a helping hand to one in distress. Shakespeare’s Mercutio: “If thou art dun, we’ll draw thee from the mire.”)
A surveyor, John Ferebee, lays out a town, including Main Street, “The Street that leadeth Down to the Waterside,” “The Street that Leadeth into the Woods,” and other curiously named thoroughfares. A sea captain named Peter Smith, buys the first land, three one-half acre lots, around 1683.
Norfolk becomes a hustling seaport town, its waterfront lined with warehouses “huge, sprawling, ugly – and innocent of paint,” observed one writer. “Wild men and desperate women were always alert for human prey. Low dance halls and music halls, saloons and vicious taverns were scenes of endless fights, quarrels, brawls, robberies and even murders.”
There’s more, much more, but that’s as far as I get before the Sargeant Memorial Collection, with its thousands of books, maps, photographs, deeds, newspaper files and all the rest, takes a history break.
The library says much of the collection will reopen about January 17 at the Pretlow Branch. Ground is to be broken for the new Slover Main Library next spring, with a late fall 2013 opening planned. Meanwhile, we can ask questions of the staff at localhistory@norfolk.gov.
Now let’s see, where were those “vicious taverns?”
