March 27, 2011

As you approach Franklin from the east, the still-dominant paper mill seems to be merely resting, taking a breather before again cranking up those steam-belching machines.Franklin’s Camp Manufacturing Co. plant ca. 1950, showing the delivery of pulpwood bolts by truck and train. The photo was taken shortly before Camp merged with Union Bag and Paper to form Union Camp Co. Courtesy of International Paper Co. (Click to enlarge)

And charming old downtown Franklin seems none the worse for the city’s having lost what was once virtually its only industry. Conversation at Fred’s Restaurant on Main is more about the great flood of 1999 when waters of several converging rivers inundated the town.

Even so, we’re a couple of weeks shy of the first anniversary of the day International Paper Co. took the plant down and ended an era that began when Franklin was in its infancy.

Some assume the town got its start with its first sawmill in the 1830s, but there was already enough of a community for a fellow named Booth to have opened a store in 1825. What made Franklin an obvious place for a town was its location, at the end of Chowan and the beginning of the Blackwater rivers. Not to mention the Nottoway and Meherrin rivers snaking in from the west. With the coming of a rail line from Norfolk in 1835, it was a perfect place to load and unload potatoes, cotton, peanuts, lumber and all the rest. And for numerous steamships to call.

At about this time, an enterprising fellow built a steam-powered saw mill on the banks of the Blackwater, and the town’s mill era began.

The story of the lumber and paper plant, from birth to demise, is told in a recent book, The Mill, by two former Pilot staffers, photographer John Sheally II and writer Phyllis E. Speidell, published by International Paper. Woven into the history are the effects on the town of the Civil War, the Great Depression, the world wars and the conversion from lumber to paper.

It was 1855 when brothers J.R. and William Neely from Pennsylvania bought the mill. At the time, the mill depended on the timber brought in by a logging family, the Camps.

By 1886, Paul Camp, with brothers James and Robert, realized that a sawmill would be more profitable than logging. They bought the Neely mill and greatly expanded it over decades. The Camp Manufacturing Company provided jobs and prosperity to the area for the next 125 years.

The story includes what was once a vast primeval forest, the Great Dismal Swamp, and a 31-year-old entrepreneur named George Washington. In 1763, he and a group of investors bought 40,000 acres of swampland with the idea of harvesting the trees, draining the swamp and converting it to farmland.

Washington held the land until his death in 1799 and his heirs eventually sold it to William Camp. Camp Manufacturing conducted logging operations in the swamp and then on Feb. 22, 1973 – Washington’s Birthday – Union Camp (the company’s name after it merged with Union Bag Co.) turned it over to the federal government to create the Great Dismal Swamp Wildlife Refuge.

Through all the years of the company’s presence, loggers felled trees through a vast area that included the Dismal Swamp, Nansemond and Southampton counties. Skidders first powered by mules and later by steam hauled logs out of the woods to a central location where they were picked up and either barged, trucked or brought by train to the plant.

After a financial crisis in 1907, the company benefited from the looming clouds of World War I and the need for lumber to build Army camps. In his book, The Timber Tycoons, Parke Rouse Jr. wrote, “Tiny Franklin had become a booming wartime village.”

The company built Camptown adjacent to the mill and Camp Two six miles south, both communities of small, almost identical, wooden houses which were rented to workers for as little as $1 a week. Company stores sold groceries and hardware to workers. Milk and ice were delivered to homes by horse-drawn wagons. Workers could even depend on a wake-up whistle to sound early enough to get them going. Many walked or rode horses to the mill.

In 1936, the company expanded into paper making and, for a time, produced both timber and paper. Union Camp merged with International Paper in 1999 and paper production reached more than 2400 tons a day nine years later, and then, suddenly, due to decreased demand, it was all over.

The other day, I stopped at Barrett’s Landing where there’s a polished stone marker dedicated to the people and organizations that helped restore the town after the flood. It says:

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

March 20, 2011

Whenever a historic structure goes down we lose a vital connection to our past. It still happens, although not as frequently as it did during what was essentially a throw-away era.

As buildings outlived their usefulness, we placed dynamite in strategic locations and threw a switch. And stood and watched as the past crumbled to dust. Goodbye to history. Goodbye to memories that went with it.
When the hotel burned in January 1918 the weather was so cold that water from fire fighters froze on contact. Courtesy of Norfolk Public Libreay. Click to enlarge.
I’d heard about one such treasure, the Monticello Hotel, once known as the South’s grandest hostelry, but never had the pleasure of an introduction. Never dined in its elegant fifth floor café, where fresh breezes and a view of the river greeted you. Or danced in the Starlight Room overlooked by rows of hand-plastered Grecian goddesses. Or stood on the mezzanine, under arched ceilings, and watched guests arriving.

But last week I wrote about short-lived Tripoli Street, named in honor of naval hero Stephen Decatur. The name was changed to Monticello Avenue in about 1898 when the hotel was built.

And I wanted to know more.

Newspaper clips at the Sargeant Memorial Collection of the Norfolk Public Library – in the historic old courthouse building on Plume Street – reveal a fascinating story.

The Monticello, with three towers rising six stories and offering 198 rooms, was taken over shortly after it opened by Col. Charles Consolvo, a flamboyant businessman and bon vivant whose personality matched the hotel. The late George Tucker wrote that he was “an elegant white-haired dandy who sported an impressive pair of black-rimmed pince-nez attached to a flowing black ribbon around his neck.” When the hotel burned to the ground in 1918, he quickly rebuilt it, adding two stories but retaining every elegant feature.

Consolvo, who was related to Spaniards who settled in Princess Anne County in the 1600s, ran away from home at age 15 and joined the circus. He was briefly a circus acrobat and became close friends with many famous performers. Among the hotel’s guests would be Buffalo Bill, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, Jane Wyman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. And quite a few presidents.

But 10 years after Consolvo’s death in 1947 the hotel’s decline commenced as motels and convention centers began stealing tourists and traveling salesmen. The owners were unable to keep up with needed repairs and stopped making payments to the mortgage holder. It was sold for a mere $161,000 – a fraction of its outstanding half-million-dollar debt. The end was near. Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority took it over and pretty much condemned it, offering the land to the federal government for a new office building, the one that now sits on City Hall Ave. between Monticello and Granby streets.

There was a lively market for hotel artifacts as people snapped up “M-H” doorknobs, bathtubs, sinks and light fixtures. And then all that was left was falling plaster brisk and chilly gloom.

As Lawrence Maddry put it, “All the windows have been punched out, so the cold air permeates the place. The workmen can see their breath when they exhale, cold patches of vapor like the old memories still lingering in the halls.”

Thousands of spectators gathered near the statue of Gen. MacArthur on Jan. 25, 1976, stamping feet and shoving hands into pockets to ward off the chilly cold. Some stood for nearly 12 hours to catch a glimpse of the hotel’s demise.

The hotel that had stood for so many years was gone in seconds.

As one writer observed, as the first of nine rounds of explosives “tore through its belly,” the 78-year-old giant quavered. And then, as explosion after explosion followed, “the midsection roof buckled. Central support columns snapped in sequence and the exterior walls folded inward. Within seven seconds, the 8-story, block-long structure had bowed out of the Norfolk skyline.”

In its place was 35 feet of rubble. Soon that, too, would be gone, the stuff of memories.

March 13, 2011

We have a historic link to the beleaguered city of Tripoli.
On the night of Feb. 16, 1804, a young navy officer steered a captured ship, renamed Intrepid, into that city’s harbor. Disguised as a British merchant ship, the Intrepid was allowed to pass.
The daring raid, which Lt. Stephen Decatur volunteered to lead, was aimed at
destroying the Philadelphia, an American ship the Barbary pirates had captured.
The intruders attached a line to the Philadelphia and joined the ships side by side.

Then Decatur gave the order and he and a boarding party of marines, armed with swords, pikes and knives, swarmed over the side and landed on deck, completely surprising and overwhelming the Tripolitan defenders. Then they fired the ship and safely retreated, ending what famed British Admiral Horatio Nelson called “the most bold and daring act of the age.”

What started this state of hostility between the fledgling new country and the Barbary states, including Tunis, Algiers, Morocco and Tripoli, was brazen piracy. American merchant ships attempting to ply the Mediterranean were routinely seized and their crews held for ransom. At one point, the pashas and sultans of North Africa’s Barbary Coast were brazenly demanding tribute to refrain from seizing ships – and getting it.

The Barbary pirates so infuriated America that Congress finally authorized the construction of six warships, including what were to be christened the Constitution and the Constellation. It was this action that historians call the true beginning of the American Navy.

There were further assaults on Tripoli, mostly inconclusive, but the turning point occurred the following year when a mixed force of marines and mercenaries marched across the desert from Alexandria, Egypt to attack the Tripolitan city of Derna. This was the first time the American flag was raised in victory on foreign soil, inspiring the lines “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marines’ Hymn.

Our young hero, Decatur, went on to distinguish himself during the War of 1812, He frequently put in at Norfolk, and on one such visit was smitten by the beautiful and vivacious Susan Wheeler, daughter of Luke Wheeler, the city’s mayor. They married, built a mansion in Washington, D.C., and moved there.

Decatur was subsequently killed in a duel with James Barron, a one-time associate whom he criticized for botching a confrontation between the frigate Chesapeake and the British warship Leopard off the Virginia Capes.

As battles again rage for control of Tripoli, I’m reminded that Norfolk once had a street by that name. The portion of Monticello Ave. opposite what is now MacArthur Mall was to be named Decatur Street but the young officer, now captain, objected and the city obliged by naming it Tripoli Street.

The name lasted until about 1900 when the grand Monticello Hotel went up at City Hall Ave., Granby Street and what was renamed Monticello Ave. The hotel burned to the ground in 1918 and was promptly rebuilt, then yielded to the present Federal Building in the 1970s.

The city also has bragging rights to one of the most famous patriotic – although sometimes criticized – quotes of all time.

At a banquet in his honor at the Exchange Hotel in April 1816, Decatur raised his glass to fellow naval officers and local officials.

“Our country!” he toasted. “In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”

Illustration: In a pitched battle with Barbary pirates, Stephen Decatur pulls out a pistol before an assailant can strike him. Meanwhile, the sailor Reuben James interposes himself to save Decatur from a raised sword. By Alonzo Chappel, 1858. National Archives.

March 6, 2011

At noon on March 8, 1862, a 13-year-old Irish immigrant, watching from the ramparts at Fort Monroe, noticed a line of thick black smoke creeping along behind Sewells Point toward Hampton Roads.

John O’Brien rushed to his telegraph key and, with his heart in his throat, tapped
out the first warning: the long-feared monster, the CSS Virginia, was coming.

O’Brien, the youngest-ever member of the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, had come down to Fort Monroe, along with his brother Richard and other “immortals,” as some called them, to send and receive war-related messages.

They were part of an elite cadre of telegraph operators who, often in the thick of battle, relayed crucial messages. Their “t-mails” – they were actually called that – were as fast and accurate as today’s text messages.

These messages, decoded from rapid dots and dashes, then written out in longhand and rushed to an intended recipient, read today like blow-by-blow accounts of history.

In a book that O’Brien later wrote about his wartime experiences, he recounts the messages that a colleague sent from a vantage point at Newport News Point:

--“She is steering straight for the Cumberland,” the operator reported, referring to one of the wooden federal warships the Virginia (or Merrimack) would maul that day.

--“The Cumberland gives her a broadside.”

--“She heels over."

--“No: she comes up again.”

--“She has rammed the Cumberland.”

--“God! The Cumberland is sinking.”

--“The Cumberland has fired her last broadside and gone down.”

The next victim was the Congress, another wooden warship. By the time the Virginia was through, its decks were awash in blood.

The official records of the Union and Confederate navies are also packed with telegrams:

“We want powder by the barrel,” one of the generals in charge of the land battery at the point signaled. “We want blankets for the crews of the Cumberland and the Congress. The Merrimack has it all her way this side of Signal Point and will probably burn the Congress, now aground, with the white flag flying, and our sailors swimming ashore.”

These instantaneous eye-witness accounts, more than any carefully considered memoir could be, are among the best records of the famous battle of the ironclads. That night, the Union ironclad Monitor arrived on the scene and the following day the two armored ships clashed for four hours, forever changing the nature of naval warfare.

It’s an event the Mariners’ Museum is observing this weekend on the battle’s 149th anniversary. As it happens, museum specialist Cindi Verser, also an amateur radio operator, has been avidly researching the military telegraphers – John O’Brien in particular – and hopes to write a book on the subject.

“I just really feel like they wanted their story told,” she told me last week as the museum staff was gearing up for the annual Battle of Hampton Roads weekend.

Telegraphy, which used Samuel Morse’s code of dots and dashes to represent different letters – for instance, three dots-three dashes-three dots signals “SOS” – had come into use in the 1830s. It had largely been adopted by railroads by the time of the Civil War and the first wartime operators were recruited from these ranks.

Both Union and Confederate forces used the system, and telegraph lines were stretched over battlefields with the help of mules. The Union’s system was especially elaborate. A cable had been laid from Fort Monroe to the Eastern Shore, and from there to Delaware where it was relayed to the War Department.

Both sides cut the others’ lines and frequently tapped into them to learn secrets. A gifted telegrapher could “read” an enemy’s message by placing the copper wire in his mouth and feeling the pulses. Ciphering came into widespread use.

The good telegraphers were fast and translated dots and dashes as if reading sign language.

John O’Brien was in awe of the technology from an early age. “It seemed a wonderful and fascinating mystery,” he related.

He could send and receive code by the age of 10, thanks to his brother, who “taught me style of touch and accent as a great master teaches a loved pupil to make the piano talk. ‘Tis a great language is the Morse, and I had a good teacher; the best in the world, I think.”

And so John joined Richard as one of the “immortals.”

Photo: John O’Brien, about 16, at the keyboard of his telegraph. Three years before, he officially joined the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps and served through the Civil War. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.