May 20. 2012

Union troops march up Bank Street between Main Street and Cove Street (now

City Hall Ave.) Courtesy of Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library.

(Click to enlarge.)


THE PHOTOGRAPH IS AMAZING. 

Here’s the city, still under Union occupation just after the Civil War, and federal troops are marching up Bank Street.

Not much is going on, although it appears to be mid-day. There are a few bystanders, maybe shopkeepers, on the sidewalk, and in the distance a lone horse and cart are approaching. The troops, blurred by the camera’s slow shutter speed, appear ghostlike as they hustle over the rock-littered street.

You can almost hear the sounds of their tramping boots and maybe the shouts of an officer. Perhaps even feel the unease among both the occupied and the occupiers.

It was just over 150 years ago that the once-hustling, once-prosperous, port city fell to Union forces. On May 10 1862, under the direction of President Abraham Lincoln, 6,000 troops landed at Ocean View and marched into the city where Mayor Charles Lamb and other officials met them and surrendered.

For free blacks and suddenly freed slaves, it was one of the happiest days they could have imagined. Crowds filled the streets and celebrations went on through the night. A day of public thanksgiving soon followed, with a parade, speeches, bonfires and the peal of church bells.

But soon widespread food shortages began to take a fearful toll. The city was flooded with refugees whose only hope of survival was begging for food. Women and children were reported to be dying daily from starvation.

For many whites – those who hadn’t fled the city – occupation turned out to be a time for bitter resentment.

As Wm. Troy Valos [cq] points out in the current issue of Sargeant’s Chronicles, a publication of Norfolk Public Library, the occupying force was at first cordial to the local populace, “but with time, residents began to deeply despise these troops.”

One author says that Norfolk, still under a blockade and unable to obtain provisions, had been “transformed into a city mainly of paupers.” Another writer quotes a visitor describing Norfolk as “a city of the dead.”

It didn’t help that the first Union commander, Col. Egbert Viele, was replaced by Gen. Benjamin Butler. Although lauded as the man who began the flood of “Contraband” slaves to freedom, it seems he was greatly despised by just about everyone else.

In “Norfolk, Historic Southern Port,” Thomas J. Wertenbaker wrote that the Butler regime “was as corrupt as it was oppressive. No man could do business without a permit from the military authorities, and permits were distributed to those who offered the highest bribe.”

Liquor distributorships were given to Butler’s friends from Lowell, Mass., as were profits from the local gas works. Dogs for whom a $2 fee was not paid were ordered to be shot. Marriage licenses were withheld from couples who were known to hold southern sympathies.

Ministers who dared sermonize against the government were sacked. Provost marshals were directed to see that pulpits were “properly filled, by displacing when necessary, the present incumbents, and substituting men of known loyalty.”

Many homes were deserted and left vacant. Some were seized and used as quarters for troops or northerners who had migrated to the city to fill jobs from which unrepentant southern whites were barred.

As one visitor saw it:

“Sadness and gloom, if not despair, have settled upon both people and houses. Broken glass, crumbling walls, opening roofs, creaking floors, and general dilapidation follow disappointed hopes. . . .I left Norfolk as sad as the large company of women, both white and black, standing in front of the commissary’s office to receive rations for the support of their families . . .  as sad as the winds which howl through the deserted habitations of the hundreds of secessionists.”

Prosperity did creep back into town after the war, and there was, as Thomas C. Parramore, Peter C. Stewart and Tommy L. Bogger write in “Norfolk, the First Four Centuries,” there was a general “unbuttoning.”

After Butler left, they write, the city turned into “a roistering, carousing, gun-slinging, mining camp of a town.”

In other words, from everything I’ve heard and read, its old self. 

May 13, 2012

Walt Whitehurst was telling stories about his great-uncle Oscar Mosely, who lived out back of the home where he grew up.

We sat sipping apple juice and ice tea in their comfortable house on Princess Anne Road. His wife, Betty, was in the kitchen fixing a three-salad lunch.

“The funniest one is about the lawyer,” she called out from the kitchen.

“Oh, the lawyer,” he said, warming to his task. “Uncle Oscar happened to come upon some sort of conflict, and so he was asked to go to court. So when the lawyer was interviewing him, he said, ‘Do I understand that you said such and such about it?’

“Uncle Oscar replied, ‘I can’t know what you understand, but if you did you ain’t got no understanding at all.’”

Stories about Oscar and many other folks from the little community of Pungo in southeastern Virginia Beach inhabit the new book, Pungo Tales Two: Some Old, Some New, by Walter A. Whitehurst.

As the name suggests, this is the second book about the unincorporated town probably best known for the Pungo Strawberry Festival – or is it the Witch of Pungo? – that Whitehurst has authored. Some of the stories are those told by friends, others stem from eulogies he delivered over the years as pastor of Charity United Methodist Church.

Some are funny, some droll, some as flat as the farm fields that stretch out in all directions in that part of the world.

There’s the story, as told by Chet Dorchester, of the time he and his wife, Faye, had a baby while living in Milwaukee. He tried to call her parents in Back Bay with the news, but it was midnight and he couldn’t get through to them, so he called a neighbor. The neighbor was too sleepy and by the next morning couldn’t remember any of the details.

But the telephone operator – in those days of hand-cranked phones, operators sometimes remained on the line – didn’t miss anything.

When the new grandmother called her, she said without hesitation, “Faye had a baby last night and it was a boy and they named him Chester Donald Dorchester and he weighed 8 ½ pounds.”

Then there’s the story of William “Tug” Jones, as told by Joe Burroughs, a lifelong friend of the author. Joe was then farming strawberries and each spring Tug Jones would arrive with an old school bus packed with laborers to help pick them.

“Tug’s wife, Florence, was also an entrepreneur. She prepared food and took it to sell in the places where the laborers were working. Among the many things she sold, pig’s ear sandwiches were the most popular. . .”

“Joe had a pet dog named Andrew Jackson, who loved to hang around the field as strawberries were being picked. He soon learned that there were lunches on the bus, and he would sneak on the bus and smell the lunch bags. Whenever he found one that had pork shops, he would grab it and run. Then someone would shout. ‘Get that dog. He’s got my lunch.”

Or one about an alligator, a chicken and a goat, as told by Janet Simons.  Her husband, Billy, was close friends with David Kellam, who at one time or another owned all three of these animals as pets.

One day the alligator, which had grown to three feet long, disappeared down the furnace piping in the den of the Kellam house near Princess Anne Courthouse.

“Then a repairman came to do some repairs on the house, and it was necessary for him to go under the house. All of a sudden the people inside the house heard loud shouts and a ‘bump bump’ sound, after which the man reappeared with his head skinned and bleeding from hitting the beams as he was rushing to get out as soon as possible. The alligator had been found!”

There is also: Goldie Bartee, who fulfilled a lifelong dream of  riding a motorcycle – on her 100^th birthday – in a church parking lot.

And, are you ready? The chorus of The Pungo Song, “Crossroads of the World,” by Roland Lakey:

         

         

Meet me at the stop light down in Pungo,

          Be there by 8:30 if you can;

          You’ll find this country girl

          At the crossroads of the world,

          Where Indian River crosses Princess Anne.

Walt and Betty spent several years as missionaries in Latin American countries. She taught English and Spanish to elementary, secondary and college students. When they moved to Pungo it was to a house on the farm where he grew up.


(Whitehurst will sell and autograph copies of his book at the Pungo Strawberry Festival May 26 and 27.)

Photo: Betty and Walt Whitehurst during the Pungo Strawberry Festival, 2008. She was Honorary First Lady and Witch of Pungo and he was Honorary Mayor of Pungo. Courtesy of the Whitehursts.

May 6, 2012

The air was electric with alarm and outrage. A warship of the British Navy had savaged an American vessel just off the Virginia Capes and forcefully removed enlisted sailors. Suddenly, without warning, a state of war seemed to exist. And because no one really knew if this was true or not, confusion reigned.

Into this crisis stepped a one-time Revolutionary War soldier who was regarded as a strong leader and statesman.

Thomas Mathews was born in 1742 in St. Kitts, an island in the British West Indies, and in his mid-20s made his way to Norfolk where he married a local woman, Molly Miller, and settled down to study and practice law.

But war soon intervened, and Mathews signed up for the patriot cause. He rose to the rank of major and served in an artillery regiment commanded by John Marshall, the future chief justice. Marshall’s regiment spent the Winter of 1778-79 at Valley Forge, and it’s likely there that Mathews became friends with George Washington.

                                                                                                      

In 1779, he was put in charge of a garrison of 150 men at Fort Nelson where the present-day Portsmouth Naval Medical Center now stands.  In a surprise attack, the British landed down-river and approached the fort from the rear, forcing its evacuation. He’d remember it ruefully.

After the war he went to Richmond as a delegate to the state Constitutional Convention. He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1788 and was immediately chosen speaker of the House. There he played a major role in convincing legislators to approve the amendments that are known as the Bill of Rights.

In 1791, as a favor to colleagues, he introduced a resolution to form a new county consisting of the Kingston Parish of Gloucester County. In thanks for his support, the new entity was named Mathews County.

Mathews might have thought he was done with public service, although he kept up soldiering, accepting a position as brigadier general in the local militia. Lawyer, soldier, and by now, at age 65, elder statesman – he might have been ideal for the job he was suddenly handed.

On June 22, 1807, the frigate Chesapeake was mauled by the British warship Leopard, killing four and wounding many others. When the badly damaged ship made it back to port, citizens of Norfolk and Portsmouth were outraged.

Two days later local leaders unanimously called Mathews to chair an emergency meeting. It isn’t certain whether the words of the resulting resolution were his, but they ring with revolutionary fervor. The sailors, they declared, were “basely and insidiously murdered.”

In order to deal with “this awful crisis,” they resolved “to be in readiness to take up arms in defense of those sacred rights which our forefathers purchased with their blood.”

In the meantime, they would cut off all communication and interaction with the large British fleet, most of it anchored in Lynnhaven Bay. That applied to provisioning, repairs and even diplomatic contacts – and they urged other local governments to do the same. Anyone violating the ban “shall be deemed infamous.”

In one of the toughest resolutions, the committee declared “this unprovoked, piratical, savage and assassin-like attack upon the Chesapeake, with the horror and detestation which should always attend a violation of the faith of nations, and the laws of war, and we pledge ourselves and our properties to cooperate with the government in any measures which they may adopt, whether of vengeance or retaliation.”

They resolved also “to hold in readiness an armed force for the purpose of defense.” That meant bolstering the defenses at Fort Nelson. “If they attack us,” Mathews wrote to Gov. William Cabell, “I expect they will land as many marines and seamen from the ships as they can spare, and make an attempt to take Fort Nelson. . . .”

That surely would have been the case six years later had not the British been stopped cold at Craney Island.

By then Mathews was gone. After leaving the legislature, he evidently spent a pleasant retirement for there were reports that was frequently seen on the streets of Norfolk, tipping his hat to passersby.

He died in early 1812 – just before the war. An obituary in The Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger described him as “kind, affectionate, polite and benevolent.”

Portrait of Thomas Mathews/Courtesy of Mathews Memorial Library