April 24, 2011

There’s a river in our presence that is loaded with history and memories.

First of all, it’s associated with Chesopian Indians who hunted the wild lands north of present-day Norfolk and fished its waters, then with an early colonial settler who farmed near its banks, and finally with a teenage general who very likely saved America from defeat.

You guessed it. We’re talking Lafayette River.
This is a good time to review its history because the river, after hundreds of years of absorbing the insults of development, is facing a new challenge, the restoration of its once-pristine health.

On Saturday the 30th at the Lafayette Riverfest on the Colonial Place waterfront, the Elizabeth River Project and Chesapeake Bay Foundation, along with local partners, will unveil a plan to make the Lafayette swimmable and fishable within three years.

Just like it was way back then.

We don’t know what the Indians called it, but the white settlers named the waterway Tanners Creek after an otherwise obscure fellow named Daniel Tanner. And Tanners Creek it was for a couple of centuries, lending its name to neighborhoods, schools and such. Many old-timers still refer to it by that name.

During the Revolutionary War Col. William Woodford, one of the heroes at Great Bridge, wrote to the Virginia Convention, “We have had a party there ten days, upon Tanner’s Creek, who yesterday had a brush with a tender’s boat, attempting to land at Sprowl’s plantation. They beat her off, and killed one man.”

Tanners Creek was pretty much the northern limit of Norfolk’s growth until bridges were built.

In 1854, a local paper described it as a “deep and beautiful branch of the Elizabeth, extending through thousands of acres of timbered land; while along its picturesque margin are some handsome and well cultivated farms.”

The name wasn’t just Tanners. Historian Irwin Berent, who is preparing a comprehensive history of Norfolk, has found that the creek’s northern branch was known as Indian Town Creek, its eastern branch was Queen Graves Creek and its southern branch was Gater’s Creek – not the reptile but a local man.

As for Tanners, it was awfully big to be called a creek – which is just a tad bigger than a brook. One story has it that the locals wanted it to be considered for grant money and it needed to be called a river to qualify.

For a short while it was called the Northern Branch of the Elizabeth River, but then, at the turn of the 20th century, it got hit by a wave of patriotic pride.

It was that Frenchman they thought of, the dashing Marquis de Lafayette, who was infatuated with the notion of liberty and, at the age of 19, took it upon himself to sail to America, to serve under his hero, George Washington, and distinguish himself as the nemesis of Britain’s Lord Cornwallis, who once declared, “That boy cannot escape me.”

But he did, and at the most crucial point in the war, Lafayette advised Washington, “Should a French fleet now come to Hampton Roads, the British army would, I think, be ours.”

As it turned out, the French, under Admiral Comte De Grasse, arrived just in time to block a fleet of British ships attempting to come to Cornwallis’s aid at Yorktown and the war was all but over.

When Lafayette made a return visit to America in 1824, Norfolk put on a three-day party that was remembered as the biggest celebration in the city’s history. It took three quarters of a century, but eventually the many-branched, much-storied river was named after that dashing Frenchman.

In contrast to its mother river, the Elizabeth, the Lafayette is a placid tributary, the kind of river a young boy – who would one day become a famous author – would remember throughout his life.

In his book QB VII, Leon Uris, who grew up on Gosnold Street in Colonial Place, writes about the days he and his brother would go crabbing on Knitting Mill Creek, just off the river.

“Best of all were the times around the creek. We’d get up early I the morning and take our bicycles down to the docks and buy us a watermelon for a nickel…Then we’d bike to the creek. I had my dog in the front basket and Ben carried the watermelon in his. We’d sit on the bank and put the watermelon in to cool it and while it was cooling we’d walk to a small pier and fish for soft shell crabs.”
Nice picture. Great river.

Photo: A crowd gathered to witness a speedboat race on the Lafayette River in 1928. Courtesy of Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library.

April 17, 2011

He’s sitting erect and looking dignified, but the face of Robert E. Lee seems brooding and distracted, as though looking inward.

It was sometime in the late1860s as Lee, the former general who had become a hero to the South for his role in the Civil War, was nearing the end of his days.

During this period, Lee sat for a handful of portrait photographers, among them
William M. Davies of Richmond. Using albumen, or egg white, to capture the image, the studio turned it into a carte de visite, a playing card-sized photo that was popular then for handing out to friends and admirers.

Almost a century and a half later, Doug York, a Chesapeake minister and avid collector of Civil War memorabilia, obtained a batch of Lee photographs that had been in a family album. One of them looked similar to another he had seen, but a few details set it apart.


After much research and discussions with experts, York realized that he apparently had an original unpublished photo of the southern icon, as well as one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, looking emaciated but with a defiant glow in his eyes and sporting whiskbroom-like chin whiskers.

It was a collector’s jackpot.

“To have something no one else has or has even seen, that’s a big deal,” York said as he showed the photographs. “From a collector’s standpoint, one who has a love of history, it greatly excites me.”

York believes the photos were made at the time Davis was in Richmond defending himself against charges of treason, which were ultimately dropped. At that time he and Lee may have been photographed together.

York sent copies of the images to the Museum of the Confederacy and the Valentine Museum in Richmond, as well as Dave Eicher, a historian and author of “Robert E. Lee, a Life Portrait.” All confirmed that York has an original, albeit a slight variation from others already known.

John M. Coski, director of the library and research at the Museum of the Confederacy, says the discovery of the photo was “not earth-shattering” as far as history goes, “but for people who are collectors it’s pretty darned significant.”

Lee was considered a brilliant military tactician, winning numerous battles in Virginia, but historians conclude that he blundered in invading the North. His defeat at Gettysburg in 1863 is considered the turning point of the war.

After surrendering at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lee rejected suggestions that the South continue the war as a guerilla campaign and called for reconciliation between North and South. That fall, he accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, which later became Washington and Lee University.

York feels that Lee carried a burden for the rest of his life because of all the soldiers who were killed during the war, and that this shows in the regretful look in his portrait.

Eicher feels the image “definitely shows a careworn ex-general who was just a year or so from the end of his life. The previous ‘fire’ has now gone; he took pride is his work at Washington College, but had failed at a great aim of producing memoirs about the war due to the scarcity of remaining wartime papers, the majority of which had been destroyed in the flight from Richmond. So, yes, sadly, he was by then a tired and worn old man.”

Photos: Carte de visite, or cdv, prints of Robert E. Lee, left, and Jefferson Davis by William M. Davies of Richmond, taken in the late 1860s, possibly while the ex-Confederate president was awaiting trial on the charge of treason. Courtesy of Doug York.

April 10, 2011

It begins placidly enough.
“September 12, 1863.
“Having been absent from camp for the past 18 or 20 days on furlough, visiting my sister at Oxford, N. Ca., I returned safely this morning, found all quiet and in good health and in as good condition for general campaigning as usual.”

But then, as days and months and years roll by, after hundreds of miles of marching, after wet, miserable winter days and incessant fighting, the diary of George Emory Ferebee shows the stark reality – and brutality – of war.Confederate breastworks in front of Petersburg, April 3, 1865. The small mounds with chimneys are underground soldiers’ quarters. Library of Congress. (Click to enlarge.)

“The ground is thickly strewn with bleeding, dead-and-dying,” he wrote after heavy fighting in July 1864. It was just days after his 30the birthday.

Ferebee, a Princess Anne County farmer, made almost day-to-day entries, one time even in-between taking shots at enemy soldiers from his forward position. His diary, hand-copied by one of his daughters, is one of dozens of personal accounts of the Civil War that were dug out of storage by Pilot readers and shared with the newspaper.

These real-time reflections hugely enrich our understanding of that 150-year-old monster in our historical closet. They put faces on the people who lived through the war and clothe them with human emotions.

Ferebee was born in Currituck County, N.C., in 1834. At some point his family moved to Princess Anne County where he married a woman named Sarah who was three years younger than he.

But the war postponed their plans to start a family. He enlisted as a private in the 6th Virginia Infantry and literally marched off to war.

In one entry he writes of slogging 30 miles, from 2 a.m. until the following night, as his brigade fought skirmishes and pitched battles throughout central Virginia. At one point he wrote of fighting, more or less constantly, for 42 days in a row.

Except for occasionally being sick, he seems to have survived combat without a scratch, even the at places like Spotsylvania Court House, where thousands died, even during frequent assaults when “the many balls as usual sing battle notes around us.”

During horrific fight around Petersburg, he wrote what must be one of the most blood-curdling accounts of a soldier at war.

“Aroused from sleep a little before day by an explosion, and the immediate rapid fire of artillery,” he wrote on July 30, 1864. “Formed line in breastworks to receive a charge if necessary, received orders about 9 0’clock to prepare to move quickly.”

Learning that Union troops had taken a former Confederate position, they march to within 300 yards of enemy lines. “Their flags float proudly and triumphantly above our works, and before our eyes Negroes and whites mingle together in battle array before us, and throw their taunts and shouts in our teeth. Their battle cry is ‘No quarters! No quarters!’ and tumbling over our works they strengthen their line every moment.”

Ferebee was warming to the subject, sharpening his pencil with bravado.

As his brigade rose from cover and began to rush at the dug-in Union forces, “a yell, a fierce terrible southern yell now rolls back their insulting taunts, the muscles and limbs are quickly strum to the double quick; and with bayonets fixed we rush to the charge…”

The account continues with much hyperbole. “Thickly flies the leaden hail; thickly fall our bleeding boys; proudly floats the hateful flag; loudly sounds the southern yell; and ‘Onward’ is the word. The space in front grows shorter fast, the enemy’s balls fly wilder; trembling now has seized their limbs, and their heads they hide from terror.”

Ferebee’s brigade won the day, at least this one engagement, but Petersburg, then Richmond, then the war, would soon be lost. And he could at last go back to his Sarah.

The 1980 Census shows them living in what was called Seaboard. They had six children and a 13-year-old black “servant” named Lucy Ackiss, who would have been born just after the war. There’s nothing else about her except that her parents were born in Virginia. You wonder what her status would have been had the war not been fought.

At one point in his diary, Ferebee wrote of setting things down he would want to remember later. You can imagine him, sitting by the fire in later years, thumbing through his well-worn diary. He surely had no idea that a history writer for what would become his hometown newspaper would one day find it fascinating.

April 3, 2011

The long drive out Princess Anne Road, after miles of farmland and country towns, ends in a surprise. First, there’s the Welcome to North Carolina road sign, then a stretch of wildlife refuge and, finally, a lonesome wisp of an island.

If you’ve been there a few times, as I have, you may not know much about Knotts Island, other than its dual state ownership, its few stores, and miles of country roads, with water flooding nearly every view.Hettie Jones Poyner and her class at a southend school about 1900. In 1925, publishing magnate J.P. Knapp, who owned a large hunt club on Mackay Island, donated a modern brick schoolhouse. Courtesy of Knotts Island Scrapbook.(Click to enlarge.)

What is not as easy to know about is the people and how they’ve loved the place and their shared history.

But now, thanks to a flood of letters, photos and historical research that has been pouring into a year-old Website – and now a 1500-page book – the island’s story is being told.

The “Knotts Island Scrapbook” is loosely grouped into categories like island life, schools, churches and transportation.

We learn that the island was discovered by one Capt. James Knott, making his way up what was then called “Caratuck” Sound sometime before 1685, that soon after it was peopled by hard-working fishing and farming families, many of whose names survive today. That there were few roads, most no wider than cow paths. No churches at first, just services held in homes.

By 1900 or so, a Methodist, then a Baptist, church arrived. Jimmy Waterfield remembers that islanders attended the Methodist Church in the morning, ate a shared lunch and gossiped and then “walked to the Baptist Church to suffer through another sermon.”

One day, while a “fire-eating” visiting minister from Gibbs Woods was working the congregation into a frenzy, a huge thunderstorm erupted.

“All of a sudden, fire moved all over the church. Lightning had struck the church. My grandmothers claimed that people were jumping from windows in a driving rain. Pandemonium had taken over. Nobody was hurt, but 2 horses tied to a rail attached to the church were stone dead. My grandmother Annie Spratt (1876-1967) made the following statement about her fellow islanders. That’s one day I saw them move!”

Many of the entries come from interviews that Melinda Lukei, an avid genealogist whose ancestors go back to the beginning of settlement on the island, contributed to the scrapbook. In one 1985 interview, Pauline Munden described the schools. “Farmers like Ferdinand Bonney would hire school teachers to come teach their children. Your folks would pay him so you could go. Mary Mosely, a teacher, was hired by Mr. Bonney and we went to school in a bedroom with an old feather-tick bed in it. We propped our slates on that old feather bed and wrote with our slate pencils. I still have a slate.”

Grace Williams, interviewed about the steamboats that called at the island, said, “You see at that time there was nothing to do on the island unless you did go on that boat to Norfolk.” It left at night and docked in Norfolk the following morning.

One devastating event was the 1933 hurricane. In a scanned hand-written letter, William Bonney wrote to his son Emmett: “You can only picture in your mind just what old K.I. looks like now, with several thousands cords of pine lumber laying flat on the ground.”

Although Lukei and others had been collecting scraps of history for years, the surge in letters and photos and other contributions really began when Gary Montalbine, a retired Navy officer who built his home on Hudgins Lane in 1989, started the electronic scrapbook.

The other day, perched in his study with a wide view of Knotts Island Bay, Montalbine spoke with passion about preserving the stories.

“As the older generation is dying off,” he said, “there’s nothing left. We’re going to lose this unless it gets recorded.”