October 30, 2011

In a clash that nearly precipitated war with Britain, HMS Leopard attacks the USS Chesapeake off Cape Charles. (The Mariners' Museum)
It’s kind of early to talk about the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, I realize. Or is it?

The “second war of independence” didn’t start until June 1812, but the smell of gunpowder is already in the air. Witness the recent special on PBS and the upcoming lecture series, starting Nov. 8 at Nauticus, on the naval side of the war. Right up our alley, of course.

And you’ll soon be hearing about OpSail 2012, one of the most ambitious ingatherings of tall ships – and modern warships – ever undertaken, next June. The celebrations will take place in New Orleans, New York, Norfolk, Baltimore and Annapolis.

Of course, much will be made of the birth of the Star Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry outside Baltimore, but the Norfolk/Portsmouth events leading up to and during the war were arguably just as important.

For a quick education about all this, check out the displays at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum at Nauticus.

First of all, there’s an explanation of the infamous Chesapeake-Leopard affair, one of the powder kegs that ultimately led to war – again – between the U.S. and Great Britain.

The Chesapeake was one of six frigates – along with the Constitution and the Constellation – that were approved by Congress in 1794, mainly to deal with Barbary Pirates and other insults to our growing national pride.

The Chesapeake, launched in 1799, had gone out of Hampton on June 22, 1807. The ship was rushed into leaving and not prepared for what was to come. The British ship Leopard, lying in wait at Lynnhaven Bay, hailed the Chesapeake and demanded the right to inspect her crew for possible deserters.

When James Barron, the American commander, refused, the Leopard responded with a pointblank broadside that killed four sailors and left the Chesapeake dismasted and unable to do more than run up the white flag. A boarding party took off four sailors and left the wounded Chesapeake to limp back into port.

The result was a virtual state of war, at least as far as Hampton Roads was concerned. Anger over the incident spread around the country and, even though Britain apologized, was never forgotten.

There’s a cool Chesapeake model at the museum – it contains a piece of wood from the original ship.

Out and out war didn’t begin until 1812, andd the scene now shifts to the other major incident in our waters, the Battle of Craney Island.

The British were determined to capture Norfolk and the prize across the
Elizabeth River in Portsmouth, Gosport Navy Yard. They also wanted to take as a prize one of the other frigates, the Constellation, which had ducked into the Elizabeth to escape from their superior fleet of warships.

But General Robert Taylor of Norfolk had quite a surprise waiting. He strung gunboats across the river and threw up hasty fortifications at Craney Island, then 50 acres of sand and scrub pines at the mouth of the river.

The British knew they had to crush this upstart outpost to carry out their plan, and on the morning of June 22, 1813, a party of 700 soldiers and marines landed new Hoffler Creek and attempted to wade across a narrow waterway. They were met by withering fire from the defenders, including members of the Constellation gun crew, and fell back in disorder.

Then the attack by water. An armada of 20 barges loaded with sailors and marines attempted to storm ashore on the island.

As the museum’s display highlights, the American commander, a merchant seaman from Portsmouth, Robert Emmerson, called out to his men, “Now my brave boys, are you ready?”

When they opened fire it was like shooting ducks in water, splintering the barges and killing an estimated 200 attackers. The Battle of Craney Island was over, with not a single American casualty. The British, under the haughty Right Honorable Sir George Cockburn, “the terror of the Chesapeake Bay,” turned their attention on Hampton, sacking the city and committing numerous outrages.

Then they sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to Washington and burned the city. One result was the Americans’ decision to avoid future attacks by building coastal fortifications, including Fort Monroe.
And there you have it. Now my brave readers, are you ready for the War of 1812 onslaught?

(OpSail 2012 is sponsoring a lecture by Ian W. Toll, author of Six Frigates and the Founding of the U.S. Navy, Tuesday, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Nauticus Theater.)

October 23, 2011

The Hill sisters decked out in 18th century costumes and wigs, Elizabeth, left, Evelyn, center, and either another sister or a friend. Elizabeth aspired to be an actress. Courtesy of the Hill House.

One a pretty Sunday morning in April 1918, five sisters from Portsmouth, with their brother Willie at the wheel, drove out into the flat, scrubby Princess Anne countryside. Their destination was a farmhouse for sale on the Lynnhaven River.

“As we neared,” Evelyn Collins Hill recalled, “I will never forget our drive through the beautiful lane of dogwoods, veritably laden with snowy blossoms, a sight to enchant any city dweller. As we entered the farm we saw a house standing in a field absolutely alone. . . .”

“On account of the heavy brush we could only see glimpses of the Lynnhaven River in front of the house, but to the north, we had a good view of our battleships which happened to be anchored that day in the Lynnhaven Roads, it being then 1918, war time. We thought the location beautiful, and decided right away to buy the place.”

They closed on the deal the next day and named the place “Sea Breeze” because of the intoxicating winds sweeping the waterfront.

Here begins chapter two in the complex, compelling – and to my mind just a little bit sad – story of the Hill family, the inheritors of an extravagantly decorated 1807 home in Portsmouth who migrated to the countryside, turned it into a horticultural showpiece that gave the neighborhood its name.

You’ll recall that the Portsmouth Historical Association is seeking to restore the Hill House on North Street in Olde Towne and reopen it as a museum. The Hill sisters gave the house, with all its furnishings, it to the association about a half century ago. They were now country ladies.

After seeing the framed picture of three of the sisters cavorting in 18th century fancy-dress costumes and wigs, I had to learn more.

The other day I had a chance to go out to Sea Breeze, which has been handsomely preserved and restored. It’s now owned by Jon and Susan Gorog, who have made some major changes but preserved the character of the almost-100-year-old house. They’ve also deeply researched its history.

The farm of some 200 acres was part of the “glebe” that was once owned by the first Lynnhaven Parish – now Old Donation Episcopal Church, the Gorogs say. Ernest Browne of Norfolk bought the land in 1912 and built the house for his son. The property was sold in 1918 to William Collins Hill, who had recovered the family’s waning fortune by selling cotton to northern textile mills. He turned it over to his five sisters.

None of the six children ever married, and a memoir by Marian Harris, a recent owner of the house, explains why. One of the sisters, she said, was not “quite right,” a mental illness that had kept her more or less confined to an upstairs room when they lived in Portsmouth. All six of the Hills, she wrote, “believed that it might be hereditary and chose not to marry. They devoted the love not bestowed on husband and children to plants and flowers.”

Indeed, the five sisters – who each had her own garden house on the property – turned the place into a horticultural paradise. As Evelyn Hill once put it, “each blade of grass, each petal and blossom, had endeared itself to us as cherished friends.” They received numerous awards for their gardens, and worldwide fame brought gardeners from around the globe to this spot on the river.

Time of course took its toll. As the sisters died and became frail the house and garden, with no heirs, were neglected.

After the last of the sisters died in1965, the land was sold at auction to Seay Development Co., and subdivided into what is today known as Sea Breeze Farm.

But the old house needed attention. Lots of it. Harris wrote about “the despair and desolation that looked through its broken windows, hanging gutters and the jungle or vines and weeds that engulfed it” when she and her husband bought the property. The house had become a party place for teens. Furniture and even stair railings were vandalized.

There were rumors of ghosts there after the Harrises, William and Marian, chased away intruders. They had lay awake at night and then, when the youths appeared, “I went racing through the house screeching, ‘Shoot them, William. Shoot them,’” while her husband, who had snuck around the house, fired a gun into the air. The vandals never returned.

The ghosts and ladies are gone, but there’s lots of history there, including street names, like the one leading to the old house, Five Hill Trail. The reference isn’t to hills, but to Hills.

October 16, 2011

The house has many stories.

And original furnishing, stretching over a century, to go with them.

It’s no wonder the Portsmouth Historical Association is looking forward to restoring and ultimately reopening as a museum the Hill House, a four-story, early classical revival home on North Street in Olde Towne.

Loaded with massive gilt-covered mirrors, gold Romanesque busts, four-poster lace-canopied beds, gas lanterns, room-sized oriental rugs and china cupboard – the place is a museum waiting to be rediscovered.

The house, with its English basement entrance, was built by John Thompson, an entrepreneur, slave owner, brick-maker and builder shortly after he purchased the property in 1807. He didn’t live there, but a succession of flat-out fascinating people did.

For starters, there was the first occupant, John Adams Chandler, whose portrait hangs in the house’s music room. After serving in the War of 1812 and surviving an Indian attack out west, he returned to Portsmouth where he studied law, became commonwealth’s attorney and served a term in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which spread fears of more slave uprisings, Chandler argued for gradual abolition. As he told the House of Delegates on Jan. 17, 1832, he believed “the people of Norfolk County would rejoice, could they, even in the vista of time, see some scheme for the gradual removal of this curse from our land.”

Chandler was a close friend of John Thompson, who adopted the orphaned child of his next-door neighbor. The child, John Thompson Hill, married Chandler’s daughter.

Have we got all this straight so far? It becomes more complicated as the families interweave.

The Hills had two sons, John T. Hill Jr. and Chandler W. Hill. They must have been quite close because when one of them lost an arm during the Civil War, his older brother gave up his place in college – his mother could afford just one tuition then – so he could get an education. Not only that, the brothers married the nearby Collins sisters and all four moved into the North Street house and occupied adjoining bedrooms.

The side-by-side bedrooms on the third floor of the house, with identical four-poster beds, attest to this brotherly closeness.

The Collins sisters were daughters of Dr. William Collins who, while attending victims of the yellow fever epidemic in 1855, contracted the disease and died. His widow came to live in the house and cared for her grandchildren.

In the china cupboard in the living room is a delicate cup and saucer that is said to have been used by Dolley Madison, wife of President James Madison, when Dr. Collins and his wife took tea in Washington with the first lady.

The Hills lost much of their fortune during the Civil War and lived quite frugally for a time, selling off some of the furniture, including a square grand piano – the items eventually migrated back – to make ends meet. Meanwhile, along came the six children, five girls and a boy, of John and Elizabeth Hill. None of the six ever married, and one story explains at least part of it.

It seems the father had told the girls that when they married they would not inherit any of his remaining wealth because they’d be taken care of by husbands. The five daughters were having none of that and refused to marry, outliving their brother.

I sort of doubt that story because it was the brother, William Collins Hill, who revived the family fortune as a cotton broker and mill owner, allowing the sisters to live in the style to which they’d become accustomed. In 1918 he bought a large tract of land on the Lynnhaven River named “Old Glebe” and built a house there, naming the place Sea Breeze Farm.

And they all left Hill House for good, including much of its furnishings. In 1956, the two surviving Hill sisters, Elizabeth and Evelyn, gave the house and its contents to the Portsmouth Historical Association.

I hadn’t been in the house until recently when some of the association’s members invited me in for a tour. It’s quite impressive. You can almost see the transition from gas lamp to electric, from detached to attached kitchen, from privy to bathroom, from piano to victrola. And feel, as you descend the long stairway from fourth to first floor, the sweep of hands down the long polished banister.

The museum closed when the economy took a sharp downturn, but the association is determined to restore and reopen it. It may take a while, but in the meantime the house will be open during this year’s Olde Towne Candlelight Tour of Homes on Dec. 9-10.


Illustration: Portrait of John Adams Chandler, the first occupant of the house, who argued for the abolition of “this curse from our land” – slavery. Courtesy of Hill House.

October 9, 2011

THIS IS ABOUT FORGOTTEN GRAVES. Well, almost forgotten.
Apparently grave markers don’t last long, especially those in old family cemeteries where the land has changed hands or gone to other uses. The effects of weather and age rub out their inscriptions. They topple over. Descendants forget or lose track of where relatives were buried.

Take the Langleys.

They go back almost to the first settlers. They served in the House of Burgesses. They populated Norfolk County in the 1700s and bought up large tracts of land along Mason’s Creek just north of what is now Wards Corner. They were active church members, judges, farmers and owners of large tracts of land on both sides of Hampton Roads. They married, had children, made fortunes – or not – and died.

And many of them were buried right where they had grown up. The Langley family cemetery, one of the largest in Norfolk County, was the final resting place of dozens of Langleys and their descendents.

But then the farm passed out of family hands. The last to own the land was George S. Bunting, and he ended up selling 165 acres to the city of Norfolk in 1906 for the creation of Forest Lawn Cemetery. And the Langley grave site – a cemetery within a cemetery – was mostly forgotten.

Until recently.

Beth Langley Uiterwyk of Hampton has long had a passion for family history. She knew where just about all of her ancestors were buried. But one of them, a great-great-great grandmother, was a mystery woman.

“She had disappeared off the face of the Earth,” Uiterwyk says.
Then, not long ago, Uitewyke got a phone call from a friend who was documenting historic graves in Norfolk.

“I think I found the lost grave of your third great grandmother,” the friend told her.
Sure enough, Elizabeth Langley Herbert, who departed this life in 1840 at the age of 30 – shortly after childbirth – was laid to rest in the Langley cemetery. Her marker is the most legible of the 10 you can see there. The inscription, chiseled by a meticulous stonemason, extols her virtues and moral worth that her many friends would cherish “until they too shall slumber in the mansions of the dead.”

The elliptical cemetery was well cared for – but not for long. Rogers Dey Whichard, noted Norfolk author and historian, wrote in his “The History of Lower Tidewater Virginia” in 1959 that the plot was “formerly well-tended, surrounded by a hedge and containing ornamental trees and shrubs.”

But in recent years, he wrote, “the hedge and trees have disappeared, and the stones, considerably the worse for wear, are laid level, flat on the ground.”

Some of these flat stones have either been overrun with grass or damaged by lawn mowers rolling over the gravesites, she contends, and she has begun a campaign to have them replanted upright.“I just want the stones preserved,” she said.

Recently, the Friends of Norfolk’s Historic Cemeteries – an organization that repairs and restores historically important grave markers – has taken up the cause and commissioned archaeologists to determine how many other graves might lie just beneath the surface.

The Langley site lies in a traffic circle at the northwest corner of Forest Lawn adjacent to Granby Street. The oldest of the visible markers belongs to Louisa Langley, daughter of William and Elizabeth Langley. The date of death is worn off but a family Bible puts it at 1802.
But what about earlier family members? They go back at least to 1650. Might there be other long-lost relatives there?

It isn’t surprising that a team from the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research, after digging parallel trenches through the site, concluded about a week ago that at least 15 unmarked graves are there. (Even after hundreds of years, disturbances in the soil still indicate that digging had taken place.)

It was only through hard work, and a little bit of luck, that the Langleys’ almost-forgotten resting places were discovered.

And you wonder: How many others like this remain undiscovered in this region? How many great-great-great grandmas have gone forgotten?
Photo:William & Mary project archaeologist Will Moore, checks for unmarked graves.Paul Clancy

October 2, 2011

We all have our systems for organizing stuff, whether it’s in old fashioned files or modern sky drives. Or just piles of seemingly random junk on our desks. I do a little of each, and I’m constantly amazed I can find anything.

George Tucker, who wrote this column with grace and wit for decades, used large manila envelopes, the ones big enough for 8x10 paper or photos or, almost, shirts from the dry cleaners. Virginian-Pilot envelopes, of course.

Before Tucker passed away six years ago, he turned over many of his files to former Norfolk Historical Society president Louis Guy. And when Guy and his wife were downsizing last year, Louis gifted me with a cardboard box containing these files. (Seems I’m the one people think of when they’re downsizing. Last year it was a box of letters that a Portsmouth woman had left in her attic.)

Now, near what would have been Tucker’s 102nd birthday, I’ve decided to look through these files. And they’re loaded with, well, stuff. Darned interesting stuff.

Tucker was intrigued with old churches. Here's one envelope about the 150th birthday of the Freemason Street Baptist Church. And one about Old Donation Episcopal that includes a column he wrote about rector Anthony Walke (1788 to 1800) who “preferred foxhunting to preaching.”

It was Walke’s habit to tether his horse, Silverheels, to a tree near the church door, Tucker wrote, “and if during the service he heard the sound of hunting horns, he would immediately leave the chancel, turn over his service to his clerk, Richard Edwards, stalk down the aisle, meet his horse and ride away in the direction of the baying foxhound foxhounds as fast as Silverheels could carry him.”

Now here are photocopies of the hand-written surrender terms by Lee and Grant at Appomattox. In Lee’s hurried handwriting is the demand that “each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws where they may reside.”
Here are files on John Marshall, the great Virginian who became Supreme Court justice; John Ericsson, the inventor of the ironclad Monitor; and J.E.B. Stuart, the revered Confederate general who was killed at a place called Yellow Tavern. And, oops, an old news library clipping folder on Stuart, with a stern reminder: “Important. These clippings must be returned promptly.”

And here’s a file on “Old Abe,” the Union eagle mascot, with a poem:

His broad wings spread in the wavering light,
And his screams rang out with a fierce delight.

His columns were loaded with fine detail, as is one about Roses, which “Dorothy Parker once perceptibly referred to as “heavens masterpiece" and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame, “earlier eulogized as the sweetest thing God ever made and forgot to put a soul in.”

He was intrigued by epitaphs and had a copious file that includes such gems as:

Here lies the body of Mary Ann Lowder,
She burst well drinking a seidlitz powder.
Called from the world to her heavenly rest,
She should have waited till it effervesced.

Here’s a file on Confederate spy Belle Boyd who was a ”charming, explosive and a pleasing sex pot [who] attracted men like flies.” I don’t know if that made it into his column, but the passage was underlined in the photocopy.

There are dozens of other files, but here’s one I love because it includes the first draft of one his columns. He wrote them out in long, loping longhand on legal pads, then fact-checked and revised them in red ink before typing them on manual typewriter (someone at the paper had to re-type on a computer).

It’s about Trapezium House in Petersburg, which a Confederate built without any right angles because a West Indian slave told him they contained evil spirits.

Tucker wrote, “If you acquire a reputation for eccentricity [he crossed this out and substituted “zaniness”] during your lifetime, it’s a safe bet you’ll be remembered long after your conventional contemporaries have been forgotten.”

Either way, that fits you exactly, George.