January 1, 2012

Before the last echoes of 2011 tremble and die out let me just say it was an amazing year, history-wise. Especially because of a war we solemnly observed while we modern folk watched another war come to a halt.

There were other highlights of the year for me, softer ones: a series of columns about a Portsmouth musician and would-be Hollywood starlet whose letters were found abandoned in an attic; another series about the four sisters who left intact a mansion that has become home to the Portsmouth Historical Society. And a simple tale about a man named Fentress who ran a general store and post office in old Norfolk County a century ago.

But always, always you come back to the 150th anniversary of that dreadful tragedy, the Civil War, and the fateful steps that were taken. For folks here in Hampton Roads the first drumbeats could be heard as early as January 1861 when the state legislature decided to call for a secession convention.

This region was dead set against it, and yet in Norfolk a local paper, the Southern Argus, was railing about northern aggression and applauding South Carolina for quitting the Union. A “Minute Man” organization had sprung up, claiming “the inalienable right to resist unconstitutional aggressions by the Federal Government.”

Elizabeth Curtis Wallace of Deep Creek, for one, was sick with worry.
“I am oppressed often with fearful forebodings, and indefinable apprehension that some dire calamity is about to overtake us as a family,” she wrote in her diary in late February.

The convention in Richmond had just begun, with all of the states in the upper South watching. For months it appeared Virginia would vote against parting with the Union, and in fact in early April the first vote went down to defeat two-to-one, with both Norfolk delegates joining the opposition.

But then on April 12, the Confederate batteries opened fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The nation was at war, but, still, if President Lincoln hadn’t ordered the southern states to help raise an army to put down the rebellion it might have been a different story. The Richmond convention reconvened and this time voted overwhelmingly to secede.

That was the thunderclap that shook loose the foundations of the Old Dominion. As I wrote in May, delegates from the counties beyond the Appalachians – they were all part of the sprawling state – marched out of the convention hall, vowing to form a new government that was loyal to the Union.

“We are determined to live under a State Government in the United States of America and under the Constitution of the United States,” one of the loyalists said. “It will require stout hearts to execute this purpose; it will require men of courage.”

At first, a reorganized government was formed, claiming to be the only legitimate one, and President Lincoln recognized it. So at that point there were two Virginias, one a part of the Confederacy, another part of the United States. This lasted only briefly. The leaders of the “New Virginia” hammered out details for more than a year and then, in 1863, West-by-God-Virginia was created.

In August the unthinkable happened. Confederate soldiers faned out through historic Hampton and set fire to virtually every building in sight, leaving, in the view of one observer, ”a forest of bleak sided chimneys and walls of brick houses tottering and cooling in the wind, scorched and seared trees and heaps of smoldering ruins. . . .”

The Pilot quoted extensively from letters and diaries written by both northern and southern soldiers, many full of bravado at first.

But after hundreds of miles of marching, after wet, miserable winter days and incessant fighting, the stark reality – and brutality – of war comes through in diary entries of George Ferebee, a Princess Anne County farmer.
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“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.

Lastly, I wrote about a collector who had come across photographs of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jeff Davis, taken after the war. Both looked gaunt and careworn as they neared the end of their days, the fire in their expressions long since gone out.

These are oldies – but not-really-goodies – from last year’s time machine. Bring it on, 2012.


Photo. Hampton after it was burned to a crisp in August 1861. Library of Congress.

December 25, 2011

Kecoughtan Christmas feast. Don Hulick portrays Smith. The others, from left: Anthony Fortune, Christopher Jones, Lindsey fortune, Monique Jones, Carson Hudson. Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

“We were never more merry,” Capt. John Smith related, “nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-Foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England, than in the dry smoaky houses of Kecoughtan.”

Smith’s rambling account of the hospitality he and his crew were shown by the Kecoughtan Indians – at a place we now know as Hampton – is considered the first written account of Christmas by English settlers in America.

It wasn’t because Smith and his crew in the winter of 1608 chose that spot – about where the Veterans Administration hospital now sits – but because they found themselves stuck there.

There followed days of what was apparently non-stop gluttony, ironically begun as a rescue mission for starving colonists.

According to Dennis Montgomery, an editor for the Journal of Colonial Williamsburg, Smith and 46 men set out from Jamestown with a boat and barge on a falling tide and made it as far as Warraskoyack, an Indian enclave on the Pagan River near modern-day Smithfield.

They had intended to round Point Comfort, sail up the Chesapeake to the York River and make their way to Chief Powhatan’s Werowocomoco stronghold. But the following morning a nor’easter began to blow – right from their intended direction. But the undaunted Smith and a much smaller company, now some 12 men, started out anyway and made it as far as Kecoughtan before the now-raging winter storm forced them to seek shelter.

It should more accurately be considered the first New Year’s Eve celebration because the journey actually began on about Dec. 29, but the English, with their customary Twelfth Night tradition, stretched Christmas into the new year. Smith’s narration says the foul weather forced them to “keep Christmas” among the “salvages.”

But if you wondered where the first English Christmas in America was actually observed you might conclude it was Norfolk. That’s because a contingent of Sir Walter Raleigh’s would-be settlers on Roanoke Island had made their way north and spent the winter of 1584-85 in the vicinity of the eventual port city.

Certainly they would have observed Christmas, but the pity is they mentioned not a word of it in their report of the sojourn. They didn’t stay, retreating back to Roanoke and setting sail for England.

So Hampton gets the bragging rights, if you can call it that. It doesn’t have a very nice ending.

The place where Smith and his band feasted was once home to the thriving and independent Kecoughtans. They were blessed with abundant resources, from wild game and plants to crabs, oysters and fish. They also grew several varieties of vegetables, including corn, beans and squash, on thousands of riverbank acres. “Kecoughtan is an ample and faire country indeed, an admirable portion of land comparatively high, wholesome and fruitful,” wrote English observer William Strachey.

The Kecoughtans ranged throughout the lower peninsula, hunting and fishing in areas they well knew. Their houses were like garden arbors, with rows of saplings bent over and lashed together at the top to make a barrel-shaped roof, then covered with bark or mats made from reeds.

These weren’t exactly the same natives who greeted the English colonists when Smith and his storm-weary bunch arrived. Chief Powhatan had recently subdued them and sent one of his sons to run things. But they were still a thriving, if no longer independent, tribe.

Just two years later, the English attacked and either killed or drove off the Kecoughtans, taking over their garden plots and setting up the beginnings of a town and a series of forts. The town was called Kecoughtan at first, but the victors considered it a heathen name and changed it to Elizabeth City and eventually Hampton.

It isn’t clear whether Smith’s successors were ever quite so merry.

December 18, 2011

Main Street in Norfolk, 1917. (Library of Congress)
I was scrolling through microfilm a couple of years ago, looking for Virginian-Pilot stories about one of the biggest projects ever in Hampton Roads, the development of Norfolk Naval Station in 1917. And I found a curious piece. Filed it away. Thought there’d never be an excuse to use it.

But there is, the recent story about Norfolk and usually rival sister cities getting together to discuss ways of sharing services. If that sounds familiar, here’s the echo:

GREATER NORFOLK NEW CITY’S NAME. It was the headline in the Pilot on July 4, 1917, followed by a subhead: Common Council Adopts Preliminary Ordinance Looking To Consolidation

What a radical thought: Norfolk actually taking the initiative to reach across the Elizabeth, apparently confident its sister city would jump on the idea.

There was even a five-member “consolidation committee,” with W. H. Sargeant, acting as chair.

“I believe we are nearer consolidation than ever before,” said the confident Mr. Sargeant. “I have strong assurances from some of the leading men of Portsmouth that they will favor the union of the two cities and I am hopeful that it can be accomplished.”

Yeah, right.

It was then boom time in old Norfolk. A decade past the Jamestown Exposition, the nation had just declared war on Germany. One of the headlines that day said American troops were already in Paris. “Vive les Americains,” the crowds cheered.

Those soldiers had probably come from Norfolk, already a major embarkation point. Thousands of troops were pouring into and out of the city. And construction was about to get underway at the exposition site at Sewell’s Point.

Another headline: JAMESTOWN WORK STARTS TOMORROW

“Work on a larger scale than has ever been undertaken in this section will start with a rush in the new Jamestown tomorrow morning,” the paper said. “Contracts for operations that will convert the old exposition site and Pine Beach into the greatest naval base on the continent have been signed.”

There were other distractions.

The Anti Saloon League was holding a convention in Virginia Beach to propose an amendment to the Virginia Constitution prohibiting the sale of alcohol products. This was just before national prohibition and the atmosphere must have been, shall we say, intoxicating. A chap named Garland Potter, a candidate for governor, was there seeking the league’s support. It didn’t help. Westmoreland Davis was elected that year.

At any rate, further mention of Greater Norfolk seems to completely disappear, at least it could not be found for weeks afterward. Maybe it was the name that turned Portsmouth off and caused it to drop like a hot (political) potato.

The issue has surfaced at least a few other times. In May 1983, ideas of a Hampton Roads megacity that might rival New York surfaced again, with the Pilot jumping on the bandwagon. “Imagine one city with more than a million residents, with a unified water system, one economic development program and one delegation voting as a bloc in the . . . legislature, and it becomes obvious why serious men and women entertained thoughts of a regional merger,” the editors said.

The editors did not identify the serious men and women.

And again, the silence was deafening. Things weren’t exactly booming then the way they were in 1917. In fact, wasn’t there a recession just a few years before? But it wasn’t deep enough or long enough, I guess.

Now, with belts tightening painfully, maybe the mother’s milk of politics – money – will at last bring some togetherness. Just don’t call it Greater Anything.

December 11, 20011

The old general store back when Fentress was a thriving community. Courtesy of the Great Bridge Cyclery.

The news that the Fentress Naval Auxiliary Landing Field is taking a nine-month breather for repairs sends me out for a drive into old Norfolk County history.

What I don’t realize is that making my way out old Fentress Road is following a route that farmers and their families took centuries ago, wagon wheels crunching on oyster shells as they went to town or carried their crops to market. It goes back to the 1700s, to pre-Revolution America.

And the fascinating thing, thanks to the Navy’s touch-and-go landing field, is apparently not a whole lot has changed. There are miles and miles of wide open acres and a few narrow roads.

I’d heard there was a Post Office and maybe the remnants of a train station, so it’s great finding, right at the triangle formed by Centerville Turnpike, Fentress Road and Blue Ridge Road, what, sure enough looks like an old general store, with a sign: United States Post Office, Fentress Station.

This hundred-year-old building, the last commercial structure in what was Fentress Village – with its entrance on a wide porch still shaded by a hipped roof – is now home to Great Bridge Cyclery, a full-scale bicycle shop.

Inside, at the back, is a wide postal counter where Robert Parker, the store owner, and his assistant, Steven Shils, are busy sorting, weighing and stamping packages. It’s that time of year.

“I lived nearby as a kid and we used to come in for candy and stuff, but it was pretty dinghy even then,” says Parker. He’d heard there was a pot-bellied stove in the oldest days – he’s traced the building to 1920, but thinks it might be older than that.

A customer comes in who asks if he can repair the wheel of a bike that got run over by a car. Sure, no problem, he says. Then Barbara Wright enters with a package. She was the librarian at Hickory Middle School, and drove by here every day.

“It’s great to having this here because if I had to go to the main Post Office I’d be there all morning,” she says.

I take a minute to walk behind the building to where the old Elizabeth City and Norfolk Railroad Station once stood. There’s nothing left but a four-foot high concrete slab where goods were loaded and offloaded from a siding, now overgrown with weeds.

Back inside, Parker shows me the few things that are left of the old building: the green-painted, square wooden pillars, the original ceiling a walk-in freezer that now stores bike handlebars, and the bars on the front windows.

The place was pretty shot when he bought it, the floor sagging and porch falling down, and then Hurricane Isabel can-opened the tin roof. So be it. Hating the sameness of shopping center stores, he brought it back to life. And then bid for and got the Post Office franchise.

Fentress was the closest thing to a bustling village you might find in the late 1800s, according to the application for the Centreville-Fentress Historic District, which I found on the City of Chesapeake’s Web site, thanks to local historian Raymond L. Harper who pointed me in that direction.

It’s a prime example of a rural farming community that developed a small commercial core, the application tells us. First there was the north-south shell road (“Great Road”) linking Elizabeth City and Great Bridge. At the time, Norfolk County was a “vast garden” for produce of all kinds.

Along came the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal in 1855, then the railroad in ‘81 and the Post Office in ’88. By then you had a flat-out booming crossroads community, with a hotel, fire station, several stores and a dozen or so two-story frame houses.

The first store in the village was owned by a fellow named Jetson Jett, but the one who owned the store that won the postal business in 1888 was Jerome Fentress. He became postmaster and of course it was named the Fentress Post Office – and later so was the village.

Those buildings, the hotel, the fire station and a whole lot of other structures are gone now.

Cars came along, the Great Depression arrived, the railroad stopped running and the station was leveled in 1941. Fentress as a shipping and transportation hub was, as the historic district application puts it, “defunct.”

And the store that now houses the little Post Office would probably have been gone, too. “I’m sure this place would have been bulldozed if we didn’t get it,” Parker says.

December 4, 2011

The story goes back to the mid-1930s when Norfolk looked out over its blighted inner-city neighborhoods and realized they were among the worst in the nation. City Manager Thomas P. Thompson formed a five-member advisory committee to “make a study of the slum districts of Norfolk with the hope of obtaining federal funds to eliminate them.”

This was the beginning of what became the nation’s first urban renewal program – one that demolished thousands of substandard dwellings and replaced them with public housing projects. At the same time the city turned the once-squalled neighborhoods into major components of a new downtown – office buildings, highways, a medical complex, a downtown mall.

This brave new world is chronicled in an extensive history of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, available on its website (http://www.nrha.us/)where you can also go online to view thousands of historic photographs. Among the most prominent in the photo archives are before and after pictures of the city’s slums.

What the history doesn’t mention is how the city, in its rush to remake itself, demolished scores of historic buildings and homes in the process. Its train station, its most famous hotel, a historic church and blocks of stores and houses that reminded visitors of Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown.

Alex Marshall, a well-known writer on urban affairs and a former Virginian-Pilot staffer, put it this way: “The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.”

Norfolk, he wrote, “fell in love with the bulldozer.”

To be fair, NRHA made the rejuvenation of the old city possible. Over the course of decades the authority cleared the way for wide thoroughfares leading to downtown, Brambleton Avenue and St. Paul’s Boulevard among them, for Eastern Virginia Medical School, SCOPE, Chrysler Hall and MacArthur Mall. It created thousands of new housing units for low-income residents and made possible the revitalization of Ghent. It was recognized as one of the nation’s most successful urban renewal agencies.

The Norfolk Housing Authority – it would later add “Redevelopment and” – was created in 1940 to clear out the city’s vast slums and build public housing. But World War II intervened and thousands of military families created an urgent need for more, not less, housing.

During the war years, downtown became a magnet for off-duty sailors and developed a reputation for bars, brothels, tattoo parlors and at least one burlesque theater – another national ranking that embarrassed city leaders.

Even so, there were many fine buildings, including a railroad station-office complex on East Main Street – right where the city wants to build another station. Inside, columnist George Tucker wrote, there was an “imperial serenity” of lofty marble and decorated plaster. It was demolished in 1962 and added to the city’s growing pile of rubble.

The same was true for the late Monticello Hotel, once considered the South’s grandest hostelry and host to the rich and famous. It was imploded by dynamite in 1976 to make way for the federal building on City Hall Ave. between Monticello and Granby.

Another gem to fall was Christ Church, built in 1828 at Freemason and Cumberland streets. The edifice, where Robert E. Lee once prayed, was in such bad condition that no one would buy it, not even for the asking price of $1. It fell to a wrecking ball in 1973.

Old Atlantic City, which had some decent structures among its dilapidated ones, was wiped out to make way for EVMS. East Ocean View was demolished to make way for the more upscale East Beach.

Out with the old, in with the new has been the city’s credo for more than half a century. What is left of the old is – except for these photos – a distant memory.


Photo: “Stairway to the stars” shows what was left of one house on Olney Road in Norfolk’s Atlantic City in December 1953. Originally in The Ledger-Dispatch, courtesy of NRHA.