Our Stories by Paul Clancy

February 12, 2012

2012-02-13T08:41:00.004-05:00

Angolan musicians and dancer, from a 1690 drawing by Antonio Cavazzi. Courtesy of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

As you walk into the exhibition hall at Jamestown Settlement you’re suddenly plunged into a village in the small African kingdom of Ndongo, surrounded by sounds of the forest and greeted by the serene figure of a woman smoking a long-stemmed pipe.

There’s a circular hut and, just beyond, a woman tending a field with a hoe, a baby nestled into a sling on her back. There’s a man stripping bark from a baobab tree, which was to be hammered into fibers and woven into a fine, soft cloth.

If you pick up an audio stick you hear the cheerful voice of a native speaking in Kimbundu. Chances are you won’t understand a word, unless you’re familiar with the languages of West Central Africa. And I’ll wager not many of us has ever been to this region of the world.

But it’s very much part of our culture, and may now be, because of the historical importance of Fort Monroe, more relevant than ever.

Old Point Comfort, where the fort is located, is the spot where Dutch privateers, who had captured a Portuguese slave ship in the Caribbean, stopped in 1619 and traded the slaves for provisions. These 20 or so residents of Ndongo, now part of Angola, are considered to be the first slaves brought to America.

As the American colonies and the Caribbean sugar plantations grew more and more dependent on forced labor, the Europeans obliged by setting up a massive slave trading industry, with headquarters on the western African coast. Port cities like Norfolk and Charleston were gateways for this massive human cargo. The slave population in Virginia grew from those original 20 to 472,494 in 1860, according to the group Slavery in America.

It’s fair to say that many blacks in the U.S. today can trace their origins to these West African villages.

The Jamestown Settlement, the state-supported facility next to Jamestown Island, has a major exhibition hall that depicts “The World of 1607,” with equal attention to the English, Native Americans and Africans. During Black History Month in February the staff has highlighted parts of the exhibit with gallery guides titled “From Africa to Virginia.”

That African culture, both before and during the slave years, was richer than I realized – and the reason I’ve returned to see the exhibit.

West Central Africans lived in rural villages, towns and cities. Ruled by kings and queens, they prospered from extensive trade networks. They had developed the technology to make tools and weapons from smelted steel.

Ndongo religious practices were a blend of Christianity that was imported from Portugal and indigenous beliefs that included a high god called Nzambi and territorial deities and other lesser spirits. Daily religious life revolved around ancestors, and priests who – not unlike European counterparts – offered spiritual advice, problem-solving and healing.

They played a wide variety of musical instruments – drums, tambourines, flutes, guitars and lutes; they perfected crafts like weaving and wood carving; and they danced frequently, even adopting European-style court dances for special occasions.

One of the striking parts of the African exhibit is a life-size, bronze-like statue of Queen Njinga, the ruler of Ndongo for nearly 40 years who spent much of her reign battling the Portuguese who had sought to enslave villagers they had captured.

She was evidently a shrewd leader, aligning herself with powerful African military factions to defeat the Portuguese, then, later, converting to Christianity and signing a peace treaty with them. Still later, with help from the Dutch, she fought off the Portuguese again, often leading troops into battle.

Then the inevitable happened. After her reign, the English set up the Royal Africa Company. English-made goods were sold to Africa for gold, ivory and slaves. The slaves, hundreds every year, were shipped to Virginia and sold to planters – who used them to produce tobacco, which in turn went back to England. It was a vicious triangle that lasted for almost two centuries.

There you have it, Among the baobab trees, farm fields and thatched mud huts, awaits a whole lot of history and culture.

February 5, 2012

2012-02-05T13:10:00.003-05:00

One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”

One of the former Alcohol Beverage Control agents I interviewed recently mentioned a moonshine maker who supercharged his car so he could make fast getaways when the “revenuers” showed up.

“He used to brag about how he could out-run ‘em and out-smart ‘em,” the agent said.

It turns out that this moonshiner was right smack in the middle of a hell-fer-leather tradition that ran deep into backroad traditions of the rural South. You might have thought the movies “Thunder Road” (1958) and “The Last American” (1973) and the TV series “The Dukes of Hazard” (1979-1985) were fantasies, but they were straight out our not-very-distant past.

Stock car racing and its grandchild, NASCAR, came straight out of those traditions.

I’m not sure why, but the whole business of white lightning and wide-open car chases, with moonshiners outracing hapless law enforcers in souped-up cars (think Deputy Cletus Hogg in Dukes of Hazard) has an element of pure comedy about it. The folks who made the likker and stomped on the gas when cops showed up came across as good old boy entrepreneurs. Just tryin’ to make a living, don’t you know, without all them bothersome reg’lations and taxes.

Sure, people got killed, and some who drank bad “corn” got plum sick, but these guys, some of them at least, were just about heroes.

Witness Tom Wolfe’s trailblazing piece in the March 1965 Esquire, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”

The article, which established Wolfe as one of the first masters of “new journalism,” made Robert Glenn Johnson Jr., a former moonshine runner from North Carolina, famous. And Wolfe, too.

In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a rich stock-car racer. . . .

It was Junior Johnson specifically . . . who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were two close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on down the road exactly the way you came from. God!

Wolfe’s article was turned into a 1973 movie, “The Last American Hero,” staring Jeff Bridges.

NASCAR itself has acknowledged its indebtedness to moonshine runners, and included a whiskey still made by Johnson in its Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Johnson himself, the winner of 50 NASCAR races before he became a race car owner, helped assemble its barrels, condenser and so forth.

The best of the moonshine runners felt the urge to compete. In the late 1940s, one of those legendary fellows gathered racers, car owners and mechanics in Daytona, Fla., where they established rules for racing, and the next year staged a race on the beach.

I have no doubt that some of the drivers dubbed their cars “White Lightning,” and maybe “Corn Likker. “ Those early race cars were directly linked to those early supercharged cars.

There were many not-exactly-high-class tracks around here. William Petty of Virginia Beach writes that there was a dirt track racetrack at “Chinese Corners’ – can anyone tell why it was called that? – at the corner of Witchduck Road and Virginia Beach Boulevard. There must have been many others.

They and the big daddies of them all, the tracks in places like Langley, Richmond, Charlotte and Darlington owe their heritage to this illegal, but definitely good-old-boy, activity.

The legend lives on. One legal product you can buy in liquor stores is “Junior Johnson’s Midnight Moon Carolina Moonshine.” And online stores sell t-shirts with slogans like the one I saw the other day in Norfolk: “Moonshine. If it wasn’t so good, they wouldn’t chase us.”

Photo: Junior Johnson after winning pole position for a race in Atlanta in 1954, averaging 146 mph. AP file photo.

January 29, 2011

2012-01-29T15:03:00.003-05:00

The Monitor is launched at the Continental Ironworks in Brooklyn, N.Y. on January 30, 1862. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

It was a brisk and stormy morning. But that didn’t stop a crowd from gathering, 150 years ago tomorrow, outside a brooding warehouse-shaped building on the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront. They knew all about the strange vessel that was about to be launched, or at least thought they knew. It wasn’t going to float; they came to watch it sink.

It was preposterous, really: a ship made entirely of iron, and what’s more, designed to operate mostly underwater. “Sub-aquatic,” as its controversial inventor, John Ericsson, had described it. The freeboard – the part above the water – was a mere 13 inches, and it surely must have been top-heavy from the massive revolving turret sitting on its deck.

“Ericsson’s Folly,” the critics called it. But the inventor had another name: Monitor.

Well, we know it didn’t sink and we’ve read all about the battle of the ironclads – I guess I’ve written about it ad nauseam – but this is the year for this sea-changing event to receive special attention, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads.

It was on March 8, 1862, that the CSS Virginia, the South’s iron-covered warship, sailed out into Hampton Roads and decimated the old wooden ships that were blockading the waterway. And the next day when the two adversaries met, fought to a thunderous draw and abruptly brought down the curtain on the era of wooden warships.

The Mariners’ Museum, home of The Monitor Center, will put on a major three-day event the weekend of March 9-11. There will be encampments, reenactments, speakers, tours and, new this year, an opportunity to play at being a spy for the Union or Confederacy.

But it’s the launch of the revolutionary warship that set the stage for the conflict. And the Yankees will be the ones to observe the event.

Today in Greenpoint, Brooklyn – where there’s a Monitor Street and Monitor School – locals are staging a parade through town to the entrance of the Continental Ironworks where the ship was built and launched. There’ll be a ceremony they and then a trip across the East River to Battery Park for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Ericsson statue there.

No doubt references will be made to the audacity of the ship and its inventor; how crowds of naval officers and their wives braved the cold, wet weather to glimpse the vessel that a navy board had described as like “nothing in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth.” And to watch it slide down the ways into – and possibly under – the water.

The cocksure Ericsson, along with some of his associates, stood defiantly at the bow for the ride down the rails, and no doubt burst into smiles as the iron ship settled comfortably in the choppy water.

It was a desperate time for the Union. Reports of the conversion of the sunken frigate Merrimack to the iron-sided Virginia had struck terror into the hearts of President Lincoln and his cabinet. Hurried calls went out for designs for an ironclad and, with great apprehension, Ericsson’s battery was chosen and built within 100 days of the signing of the contract.

And almost before the launch, the call went out from Washington: “Hurry her for sea as the Merrimack is nearly ready at Norfolk and we wish to send her there.”

There would be faulty sea trials and a near-catastrophic trip down the Atlantic, with crew dropping like dead men from boiler exhaust and the ship nearly foundering as torrents of water poured into its engine room.

As the unlikely vessel rounded Cape Charles on the afternoon of March 8, the crew could hear heavy explosions in the distance – the devastation caused by its deadly opponent.

January 22, 2012

2012-01-26T16:07:00.002-05:00

MY RECENT STORY ABOUT FENTRESS, the one about the general store and post office, prompted an interesting response.

Joe Bell of Great Bridge passed along a story that his late father, Joseph S. Bell IV, told him. After returning home from World War II, Mr. Bell worked as a salesman for the family business.

“He said there was a customer in Great Bridge– I think it was at the intersection of Battlefield and Mt. Pleasant– who had a standing order for the maximum amount of sugar they could purchase without having to report it to the government (seems like it was 300 pounds.).

“As I remember, the proprietor had a brother who had a store going south on Battlefield, I think still in Virginia. Everyone knew all of this sugar wasn’t going for cookies!”

Oh my goodness! Could it be that our fast-growing suburban cities were once, back when they were mostly woods and farm fields, hotbeds of moonshine?

You won’t find it in official histories of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Isle of Wight – you name it, just about every rural area of what used to be called Tidewater – had thriving illegal whiskey operations during the bad-old – some might have called them good-old – days when these scrappy entrepreneurs made whiskey while the moon shone.

It was, as one writer put it, a “bootleggers paradise.”

Or, as a former Alcohol Beverage Control agent describes the 1940s, “It was the wild west.” One of the first Norfolk County police officers killed in the line of duty was shot by a bootlegger.

All of this is not so shocking when you consider how hard the rural South was hit by the Depression. Combine this with a defiant, independent spirit, an abundant supply of corn and sugar and many secluded streams, plus the enormous profits that were possible – and you have just the right ingredients for a thriving industry.
The process, as far as I can tell, involved mixing a“mash” of corn meal and hot water with sugar and yeast, then letting it ferment until it began to bubble furiously, then condense into a potent colorless liquid.

A generation of agents tromped through and camped out in the woods to find and catch moonshiners.

Finally, tough enforcement, the high price of sugar and the availability of cheap store-bought liquor just about killed the home-grown industry.

“As hard as it may be for old-timers to comprehend, not one local law enforcement agent, bootlegger, or free-lance distiller, knows of an operating still in the Chesapeake-Virginia Beach-Suffolk area, Pilot reporter Bob Geske wrote in 1977.

“Gone is a Tidewater industry once considered as permanent as agriculture, and much more lucrative.”“ ‘ Hell, you can’t make a dollar a gallon anymore, and with the sentences as stiff as they are, I just won’t mess with it anymore,’ said a 60-year-old bootlegger who served the Homemont area of rural Chesapeake for 35 years.”

A few days ago, I spoke with Tommy Hart, who joined the Norfolk County Police Department in 1963 just as the changeover to Chesapeake City was occurring. He spent a 22-year career as an ABC officer.

He didn’t keep records on how many moonshiners he caught, but only one, he says, ever outran him. They’d spend time in jail, go right back into business and get arrested again. Describing one such repeat offender, Hart said, “I felt bad. That’s all he knew how to do.”

But there are no hard feelings, “To this day, he sends me a pecan pie every Christmas.”

And it isn’t laced with moonshine.

Photo: Undated: former Norfolk County police officer Wilmer “Snooky” Jones after uncovering a 5-gallon jug of illegal white lightning. Courtesy of Raymond L. Harper.

January 15, 2012

2012-01-13T09:39:00.001-05:00

Am I the only one in Hampton Roads who didn’t realize that this area had – and lost – one of the greatest basketball players of all time?

I was flipping through my new copy of the 2012 Norfolk Historical Calendar, published by the Norfolk Public Library Foundation, and found the accompanying photo of Julius Erving snagging a rebound in a Virginia Squires uniform.

The Julius Erving? Dr. J? The Virginia Squires?

Lots of folks around here remember, of course. There’s even a still-standing “Unofficial Homepage” of the Squires put up on the Web by admiring fans. And like the other stories I’ve found about the team, it’s tinged with nostalgia and, maybe, regret.

It’s a convoluted history that begins in 1967 with a team called the Oakland Oaks of the fledgling American Basketball Association, partly owned by singer Pat Boone. They were quite a team, winning the ABA championship during the 1968-69 season, with the help of superstar Rick Barry.

Trouble is nobody went to their games, and Boone and company were forced to sell the team to Washington D. C. lawyer Earl Foreman – who promptly moved them to D.C. and renamed them the Washington Caps.

There they remained for only one season, 1969-70, because Foreman was more or less forced out of town when the Baltimore Bullets of the NBA were moved to D.C. Foreman decided to make them a regional team that would play in Norfolk, Richmond and Roanoke – and renamed them again, this time the Virginia Squires.

There was one unfortunate incident before the team arrived. Barry, who made the cover of Sports Illustrated that year – in a red Squires uniform – told the magazine he didn’t like the idea of his kids growing up saying “y’all.” There were other disparaging comments about Virginia and he was quickly on a plane heading north.

But there was still great potential for the team, which recruited some of the best players from the UNC Tar Heels, discovered George “Iceman” Gervin and signed Erving, a star from U Mass. The team played Norfolk home games in 1970-71 at the ODU Fieldhouse, then moved to the just-completed Scope Arena.

During the 1971-72 season, Erving became an instant sensation, scoring more than 27 points per game, many of them in high-flying acrobatic fashion. He would often launch himself into the air somewhere around the free throw line, ending 15 feet later at the boards with a resounding slam dunk.

“Dr. J” – he had been given the name in high school – helped legitimize the ABA. He went on to collect four MVP awards and become the fifth highest scorer in professional basketball history, finishing with over 30,000 points.

But Erving’s career as a Squire was all too brief. After a 1972-73 season, in which he scored 31.9 points per game, the cash-strapped team sold him to the New York Nets. He’d go on to fame and fortune with the Philadelphia 76ers. The decision to sell him for cash appears to have been the beginning of the end of the team.

It seems that every time Foreman, the owner, needed money to pay the bills, he’d sell off one of his most important assets, a star player. In 1974 it was Gervin, to the San Antonio Spurs. It backfired, of course, so angering the team’s fans that attendance plummeted.

Fans were not the only ones disgruntled with the team. At one point the city ordered Scope gate receipts withheld because the owner wasn’t paying rent on time. Virginia National Bank was suing for money owed. Some players found that their paychecks bounced.

A group of investors took over in November ’75 but couldn’t save the team. The Chamber of Commerce sponsored a drive to sell tickets. “In my opinion, the time has come for the public to decide if the Squires stay or go,” Chamber president W. MacKenzie Jenkins Jr. said. “If the people aren’t for the Squires, then the team ought to fold.”

But by then the public and the league had lost interest. In May of 1976, the Squires were no more.

Photo: Julius Winfield Ervin, “Dr. J,” clears the boards in the uniform of his first professional team, the Virginia Squires. Virginian-Pilot photo.

January 8, 2012

2012-01-09T07:46:00.004-05:00

It’s hard to realize how different things were.

It was 1940 and Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey often performed at the Cavalier Beach Club and the Surf Club at the Oceanfront. Young people could go to the Beach almost any night of the week and listen to the big bands playing at the boardwalk night spots. And, like Sinatra, get away from it all.

But in Norfolk there was no escaping the war that was about to engulf the country. A young teenager watched as more than 100,000 sailors began pouring into the city and changing it, fast, from reputable to disreputable.

“It was a pretty seamy place,” says Brad Tazewell, who grew up on Pembroke Avenue in Ghent. “Main Street had some of the country’s finest brothels and certainly some of the finest and seediest bars, and my father thought this was probably not a good place for a 14-year-old to grow up in with all those things going on.”

Tazewell was sent away to a private school in Alexandria. Then, three years later, like almost everyone else he knew, he went to war.

Maybe it wasn’t because of the heat in Texas where he trained, but Tazewell soon decided to apply for a position with what would become the famed 10th Mountain Division’s Ski Troops. After training in Colorado, they sailed for Italy in December 1944 and soon found themselves snowshoeing up treacherous hills against Nazi troops.

In a series of daring assaults, the division pushed the Germans back, but at a cost of heavy casualties.

“I was a radio operator, which was a mixed blessing,” says Tazewell. “The good side was you always knew what was going on. The bad side was you had to carry this radio in a backpack, which weighed about 25 pounds. You were always right next to the company commander, and in World War II they all had their insignia painted on the front of their helmets.
The commander was usually up front – we’d go on patrol and we’d often get shot at. In fact I had two company commanders get shot right next to me.”

They began a major assault on April 13, 1945 – the day after President Roosevelt died – and on that day, as they advanced up a hill, a machine gun opened up on them, killing the commander and a nearby sergeant.

Tazewell, now 85, is sitting in a conference room at Clark Nexsen, an architecture and engineering firm in Norfolk, wearing a crisp blue shirt and UVA tie. He points to his left arm near the elbow.

“I got shot in the arm and the hip. I was lucky that the people that picked me up turned out to be from MCV [Medical College of Virginia]. They patched me up in a field hospital and I went home in a hospital ship.”

Tazewell was back in the states still recovering from his wounds when the war ended and got home shortly after VE (Victory in Europe) Day.

He went to the University of Virginia under the GI Bill and would become one of the most prominent architects in the region, helping change the look of that once seedy place.

Sailors celebrating VJ Day on Granby Street in 1945.

January 1, 2012

2011-12-31T15:32:00.002-05:00

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.
.
“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

2011-12-25T09:37:00.006-05:00

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

2011-12-18T13:17:00.003-05:00

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

2011-12-11T14:17:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-04T08:44:00.001-05:00

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.

November 27, 2011

2011-11-27T15:15:00.005-05:00

Hear ye! Hear Ye!
On Saturday next, drums will roll, muskets will boom, plaques will be unveiled and wreaths laid. Re-enactors in British uniforms will charge across a bridge and fall as though dead. Militia counterparts will shout huzzahs. And solemn ceremonies will honor veterans and patriots, faithful and true.

This will be a sort all-day patriotic double-header. Lineal descendents, daughters and sons of those who served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, will flock to Great Bridge, the site of a one-sided battle, and then to the historic churchyard at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where their ancestors lie.

And John Marshall, better known as the most influential Supreme Court chief justice of all, will get his due as a soldier.

Actually, both John Marshall, who as a lieutenant in the Culpepper Minutemen fought at Great Bridge, and his father, Maj. Thomas Marshall, who served during the war, will both be honored by a monument to be dedicated Saturday morning at Great Bridge Battlefield Park.

And now, hear ye further:

A wreath-laying ceremony will precede a re-enactment of that Dec. 9, 1775 morning when Lord Dunmore’s forces advanced on patriot breastworks near what is now the southern end of the Great Bridge Bridge.

“The British began their march across the narrow causeway with fixed bayonets in perfect parade array to the beating of two drums,” writes Chesapeake historian E. Preston Grissom in the current issue of Patriots of the American Revolution.

The American commander ordered his men to hold their fire until the enemy was within 50 yards, Grissom continues. British Captain Charles Fordyce, leading his grenadiers, was hit in the knee, “brushed it off as if nothing had happened, and then raised his tricorn and shouted, ‘The day is our own!’ ”
“Within a few feet of the breastwork, Fordyce went down, his lifeless body riddled by no fewer than 14 bullets. At least 14 grenadiers fell dead in the volley. . . [and] another 19 were wounded; two or three of them reached the breastwork only to fall against it.”

It was a total rout, with more than 100 British losses, compared to a single slight hand wound to one patriot. The humiliated Dunmore retreated to his ships in Norfolk Harbor and then, on New Year’s Day, 1776, bombarded the city’s waterfront, soon sailing away and ending British rule in Virginia.

There’s almost no connection between Great Bridge and St. Paul’s except that one of Dunmore’s errant cannon balls lodged in the church’s wall.

And now this:

That afternoon, under brooding magnolia, willow oak and live oak trees in St. Paul’s churchyard, several groups representing both sons and daughters of the Revolution and War of 1812 will lay wreaths and dedicate plaques to patriots and veterans of both wars who lie there.

Years of painstaking research have matched names either with obituaries or service records. Lt. George Chamberlaine of Warwick County has one of the most colorful biographies. At about the age of 22 he was captured and imprisoned in England only to escape and return to service, commanding several ships during the war.

The patriots were not only soldiers and sailors but others who helped the cause. At the south side of the church yard is a marker for both George and Miriam Abyvon. George served as mayor before during and after the war. Miriam is recognized for providing the troops “three gallons of rum.” Another’s name was added to the plaque for contributing to the cause a gun and a horse.

Among the War of 1812 veterans is Pvt. Charles Donaldson, a native of Scotland who, after the war was for “many years the proprietor of a Beer and Porter Cellar in this Borough,” according to an obit in a local paper. He died in 1825 “after a tedious indisposition.”

Then there’s Midshipman William C. Hall or Queen Ann County, MD, who, on March 9, 1814, while on board the frigate Constellation near Craney Island, “fell from the mizzen-topmast head of that ship and was instantly killed.”

The plaques, with more than 40 names between them, will be placed on the south side of the church tower. They have been given by so many sons/daughters organizations it would be impossible to name them all, so let’s give them all one rousing huzzah.

For more information, go to www.norfolkchapter.org

Photo: Graves of several Revolutionary War and War of 1812 patriots and veterans lie in the churchyard of historic St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. (by Paul Clancy)

November 20, 2011

2011-11-18T13:23:00.007-05:00

A rainbow of colors pouring through stained and painted glass windows splashes across the altar of Portsmouth’s historic Trinity Episcopal Church and drenches its pale gray walls and white pews.

These windows, including half a dozen Tiffanys and several equally prized Whitefriars, nearly all bear inscriptions to loved parishioners and ministers – or, in the case of the “Confederate Window,” one that raised the hackles of Union occupiers and nearly got the shipyard and naval hospital closed down.

The window, dedicated to Confederate officers who gave their lives defending their homes “against the invasion of the U.S. forces,” was removed in 1868, then restored two years later with a less-offensive dedication.

The stories behind the windows are recounted in detail in a new book by Portsmouth historian Dean Burgess in honor of the church’s 250th anniversary – A Picture History of Trinity Church, Portsmouth, Virginia.

The Colonial-era church, with its Greek revival exterior touches and barrel-vaulted ceilings, is the second oldest in South Hampton Roads. The parish church was formed in 1761 and the church building rose at the corner of High and Court streets the following year.

With its windows, churchyard and baptismal font held by a lifesize stature of an angel, Trinity is as close to being a history museum as you’ll find. Louis Comfort Tiffany was partial to the window depicting an angel speaking to a centurion about alms.

“In the pencil list Tiffany noted that persons wanting to see an example of his work should see this window,” Burgess writes.

Of all the windows, there’s one without an inscription, but that’s about to change.

It’s the Emmerson Window in memory of Arthur Emmerson II, the fourth rector of the church (1785-1801), and his son, Arthur Emmerson III, a one-time ship captain who helped save Norfolk, Portsmouth and the shipyard from invasion by the British in the War of 1812.

The younger Emmerson raised and trained a light infantry militia squad as the war broke out. Then, in June 1813, facing a landing of far more numerous British forces at Craney Island, he uttered a stirring cry that was to ring down through a couple of hundred years of local history:

“Now my brave boys, are you ready?”

A Trinity Church committee has agreed to commission a memorial at the base of the window with those words inscribed on it.

The wide glass panel at the base of the window will also include art work depicting the British Union Jack and the Stsr Spangled Banner. On one side it will show the battle on the island; on the other, Trinity Church – symbolizing the community the soldiers were protecting.

The brave boys of 198 years ago were indeed ready and answered the command to open fire with a devastating barrage that splintered landing craft and sent the attackers back to their ships with heavy casualties. Not a single patriot was injured.

The Battle of Craney Island, one of the few American land victories of what has been called the Second War of Independence, has been all but ignored by historians outside of Hampton Roads. It is not even included in the Star Spangled Banner National Historic Trail – which lavishes attention on Maryland and, of course, Fort McHenry, the inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s oh-say-can-you-see lyrics.

Never mind that the red glare of British rockets had pierce the dawn’s early light over Hampton Roads more than a year before, or that a tattered flag – with 15 broad stripes – was still there after the invaders’ resounding defeat.

Armed with a copy of Burgess’s book and accompanied by J. Brewer Moore, a retired Portsmouth planning director and avid local historian, I got a tour of the church last week.

Moore has long sought recognition of that long-ago American victory, only to be told that it was only of local, instead of national, significance. The window is to debut on Sunday, June 24 during OpSail Virginia’s massive War of 1812 celebration.

Pausing before the window, he said, “I have high hopes that it will attract people and bring attention to what happened here.”

Well, we didn’t have a lawyer-poet to memorialize the victory, but we did have this unsung hero.

Interior view of Trinity Episcopal Church shows the Emmerson Window, near right. Courtesy of Dean Burgess.

November 13, 2011

2011-11-13T12:12:00.010-05:00

One of the most interesting parts of writing a history column is finding illustrations to go with them. Sketches, often from Harpers Weekly and other Civil War-era magazines, are frequently available online. And photos? What a joy it is to find the right historical photo.

Among the best places to look for old photographs are the Norfolk Public Library’s digital photo archives and the Virginia Beach Public Library’s Edgar T. Brown postcard collection. Another is the Library of Congress, especially for Civil War photos and, curiously, child labor conditions.

A tremendous resource for nautical pictures is the Mariners’ Museum, and for old Navy ships and planes, the Naval Historical Center in Washington is the place to look.

Now there’s a new source: Two years ago, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority decided to drag dusty boxes of photographs, negatives and slides out of storage vaults and digitize them. It was a huge job, sometimes requiring the images to be restored first. But when it was over, more than 14,000 photos had been scanned and made available online. Furthermore, the images are in high-resolution format, and they’re searchable.

In other words, you can search for all photos of, say, Atlantic City, Ghent, downtown or, more generally, slums. These last pictures, before Norfolk’s massive slum clearance projects, are extensive and heartbreaking. There are lots of shots of the old waterfront, including this one of the Oyster Dock, once the center for ship stores and imported goods, taken in 1875:

Norfolk's population surged from 137,500 in 1939 to 305,121 in 1943 as a result of World War II. Here, in the fall of 1945 is a war-ending victory celebration on Granby Street:

Norfolk’s slum housing conditions, prior to massive urban renewal efforts in the 1950s,
were described as the worst in the nation. This undated photo shows a girl emerging from a house on Smith Street in Young Park.
Photos courtesy of Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

November 6, 2011

2011-11-06T20:14:00.004-05:00

Postcard showing how Granby Street looked in 1868 before the area that is now City Hall Avenue was filled in. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Collection.

It’s an odd coincidence. Here I am in the local history rooms – the Sargeant Memorial Collection – at the Norfolk Public Library, looking up the city’s oldest history: the Indian settlements, the arrival of white folks, the first land purchases – and the library is closing down.

Temporarily, of course.

The Downtown Branch, tucked into a former federal courthouse and post office on Plume Street, is about to expand into new space and reopen two years from now as the Col. Samuel L. Slover Main Library. In the meantime, much of its historic resources will be moved out to the Pretlow Anchor Library at Ocean View.

While I’m here, local history staffers are explaining to patrons and callers that this is the last day and the collection won’t reopen until mid-January. Meanwhile, there’s an almost constant sound, from somewhere downstairs, of plastic wrap being stretched around stacks of boxes that will go into storage.

So I’d better read fast, cram in as much local history as possible before the region’s most authoritative local history operation takes a (temporary) powder. Come to think of it, Portsmouth’s local history room is also temporarily closed due to a fire at the Main Library.

In a way, history has taken a holiday.

Meanwhile, what about the origins of Norfolk? The library staff kindly laid out about eight books for me, some no bigger than a pamphlet, others as fat as cinder blocks. And so here I present a hurry-up early history of the city:

Somewhere on the eastern side of the Elizabeth River – probably around Lambert’s Point – there’s a Chesapeake Indian city called Ski-co-ak. For farming, fishing, pleasant climate, not to mention “multitudes of bears,” great woods of sassafras and walnut trees, it is “not to be excelled by any other whatsoever,” a 1585 scouting party from Roanoke reports.

Now along come the English, establishing Jamestown, Elizabeth City, Lower Norfolk County, etc., etc. A fellow named Capt. Thomas Willoughby, who helped drive the Indians out, gets 200 acres of land near Ocean View in about 1636.

The Virginia Assembly, hoping to stimulate commerce, passes an act in 1680 providing for towns. Nicholas Wise, a house carpenter, sells the authorities 50 acres of land for 10,000 pounds of tobacco.

“Norfolk Towne” at this point is almost an island. Bounded on the south by the Elizabeth River, the north by Back Creek (now City Hall Ave.) the west by Foure Farthing Pointe (now where Nauticus sits) and the east by Dun-in-the-Mire Creek (near the present Harbor Park).

(Quick trivia: To draw dun – a stuck horse – out of the mire, is to lend a helping hand to one in distress. Shakespeare’s Mercutio: “If thou art dun, we’ll draw thee from the mire.”)

A surveyor, John Ferebee, lays out a town, including Main Street, “The Street that leadeth Down to the Waterside,” “The Street that Leadeth into the Woods,” and other curiously named thoroughfares. A sea captain named Peter Smith, buys the first land, three one-half acre lots, around 1683.

Norfolk becomes a hustling seaport town, its waterfront lined with warehouses “huge, sprawling, ugly – and innocent of paint,” observed one writer. “Wild men and desperate women were always alert for human prey. Low dance halls and music halls, saloons and vicious taverns were scenes of endless fights, quarrels, brawls, robberies and even murders.”

There’s more, much more, but that’s as far as I get before the Sargeant Memorial Collection, with its thousands of books, maps, photographs, deeds, newspaper files and all the rest, takes a history break.

The library says much of the collection will reopen about January 17 at the Pretlow Branch. Ground is to be broken for the new Slover Main Library next spring, with a late fall 2013 opening planned. Meanwhile, we can ask questions of the staff at localhistory@norfolk.gov.

Now let’s see, where were those “vicious taverns?”

October 30, 2011

2011-10-29T17:37:00.003-04:00

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

2011-10-23T14:09:00.004-04:00

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

2011-10-16T07:58:00.003-04:00

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

2011-10-09T22:42:00.007-04:00

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

2011-10-02T22:02:00.002-04:00

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.

September 25, 2011

2011-09-25T08:12:00.003-04:00

Talbot Hall, built in 1799, was given to the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia in 1954. /Virginian Pilot photo.

You’re standing on the veranda of one of Norfolk’s most historic houses, looking at one of the most stunning vistas in the city. Between giant magnolia trees a sprawling lawn falls away to the shores of the Lafayette River, framed by trees that were planted to describe the arc of the setting sun from the shortest to the longest days of the year.

It’s quiet here, quiet enough to hear the footfalls of history.

The land was originally granted to the Tanner family by the king of England for transporting settlers to the new colony (the Tanners of Tanner’s Creek, before it became the Lafayette River). There were Langleys and Harwoods and then, in the late 1700s, the Talbots, a well-connected Norfolk family. One of them owned a shipyard further up the creek.

Solomon Talbot built the Georgian-style house as a country place for his son, Thomas, beginning in1799. It was made of bricks fired from clay found on the property and cemented by mortar of sand and oyster shells. Originally, there were about 2,000 acres, stretching from the Granby Street Bridge to Wards Corner.

Over the mantel in the parlor of Talbot Hall is a bas relief federal seal, complete with an eagle, “E Pluribus Unum” and 17 stars – indicating that it was installed sometime after March 1, 1803, the date when Ohio, the 17th state, was admitted to the Union.

Now the footfalls you’re hearing are those of Union troops on the march. Having landed at Ocean View on May 10, 1862, they circled the head of Tanner’s Creek and pushed toward downtown. At one point, according to legend, they invaded the deserted Talbot property and, with lighted torches in hand, were on the brink of burning down the manor house.

But then, the legend continues, an elderly slave called their attention to the seal and the commander, assuming the Talbots to be Union sympathizers, gave the order to extinguish the torches.

So the house survives as one of the few old-style plantation houses in Norfolk. There’s a softness about it now because the old bricks, which had started to crumble, were covered by stucco sometime around 1930. The ceilings in the downstairs part appear to be 11 feet high, with dentiled plaster trim embellished with carved daisies. According to Louise Venable Kyle, one of the best historians of this period, doors throughout the house were paneled with representations of a cross and open Bible to keep the house free of witches. The window panes were of hand blown glass with clearly visible wavy imperfections.

Minton Wright Talbot, born at Talbot Hall in 1868, had a small nursery on the property where he grew trees. He became friends with Norfolk horticulturalist Fred Heutte and planted many crape myrtles, live oaks and Lombardy poplars in the area near the mansion. He planted live oaks on either side of the Granby Street Bridge and gave the camellia bushes that flank the green houses at City Park.

Talbot turned the third floor of the house into a museum where he displayed his shell collection, his boyhood specimens of snakes and bird eggs, as well as ledgers, documents and objects of art collected by family members on trips abroad.

Carol, the only child of Minton and Cornelia Talbot, married William Egelhoff who, in 1954, decided to go into the Episcopal ministry. At this point, she gave Talbot Hall and the 8.5 acres surrounding it to the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. Since then the George P. Gunn Conference Center and a home for the bishop of the diocese were built nearby.

Kyle wrote, “Talbot Hall will remain an enduring home for the Diocese with a rich heritage from the past.”

But now, 57 years later, the diocese is considering the sale of Talbot Hall. A properties committee recommended to the diocese’s executive committee this month that it be sold and the offices moved to “a more demographically central location,” referring to the diocese’s territory stretching from the Eastern Shore to Danville. There are several questions yet to be answered, however, including whether or not the sale and move are feasible.

Old Talbot Hall may be a bit musty now, and there are one or two cracks in the plaster walls. But those are minor things when you look down that long, long historical road or stand on the veranda and trace the setting sun.

September 18, 2011

2011-09-18T08:10:00.003-04:00

If you have a tattoo, thank a sailor.

The story goes that famed British explorer Capt. James Cook came across elaborately decorated South Pacific Islanders in the late 1760s and his sailors, taking a liking to the body art, took it home with them. They even adopted the islanders’ word tattow – meaning skin puncturing – for this new art form.

It didn’t take long for tattoos to catch on, especially with British and then American sailors.

Among the letters at the Mariners’ Museum as those of George Geer, a first class fireman aboard the ironclad Monitor. As he wrote to his wife, Martha, in early 1862, “I wish you could see the bodys of some of these old saylors. They are regular picture books, (and) have India ink pricked all over their bodys, one has a Snake coiled around his leg (and) some have splendid done pieces of coats of arms of state American flags and most of all have the crucifixion on some part of their body.”

Many traditional tattoos related a sailor’s journeys: an anchor if he had crossed the Atlantic, a clipper ship if he had rounded Cape Horn, a standing turtle for crossing the Equator, a golden dragon for crossing the International Date Line.

Tattooing reflected status: a rope around a sailor’s wrist marked him as a a deckhand. Divers were partial to the old fashioned dive helmets. Some who went aloft had the letters HOLD on the knuckles of one hand and FAST on the other to help keep them safe.

There were and still are dozens of superstitions: crosses on the soles of their feet to ward off sharks; a pig and rooster on the top of their feet to symbolize the animals that were kept below in wooden crates that were known to float when ships went down. Some wore religious tattoos to be sure they’d receive proper burials if they died in foreign lands.

And much more, as the public can learn at a free program this Thursday at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum. The 6 p.m. event, “Skin Deep, Sailors Tattoos in Norfolk,” features Tom Moore, photo curator of the Mariners’ Museum who will show examples of some of the many traditions and symbols. And a Virginia Beach couple who own the new and growing Trinity Tattoos will show examples of their work.

Tattooing became a big business in Navy towns like Norfolk, with parlors interspersed with bars during the city’s bad old days in the early 1900s. And legends, like August Bernard “Cap’n” Coleman – who had a thriving business on Main Street – were born.

According to the Mariners’, Coleman worked as a seaman and as a tattooed man for circus side shows before settling in Norfolk. “His slight build contrasted with his salty attitude and his remarkable flesh, which featured flags, daggers, anchors, a battleship, flowers, a naked woman, and a permanent pair of ‘socks.’ ”

Norfolk, hoping to clean up its image, banned tattoo parlors in 1950, but gradually they’ve come back as the art form has moved upscale.

Coleman became a legend among tattoo artists.

“He was my great grandfather, I guess you’d say,” said Dave Lukeson, the owner, with his wife, Melissa, of Trinity Tattoo on Bonney Road. “He moved the trees away for us; he made the forest a lot cleaner.”

Lukeson, whose body is covered with tattoos that mark events of his life, as well as metal piercing and a Jack Sparrow-type mustache, has several sailors for clients. But there are many others, including professionals, many of whom are women.

He said of the markings, “These are things on the outside that symbolize what’s inside. It’s a way to share without speaking.”

We spoke while he was outlining a galaxy of stars for Ashley Wolford next to snowflakes on her arm – all symbolizing works of God, she said. Her inspiration, a biblical verse that goes something like, “God makes the stars and the sky and he calls them each by name.”

Danielle Weier waited in another studio to have the words tattooed on her back: “Nothing is more powerful that beauty in a wicked world.”

Some of the designs, like the ruby crested hummingbird I saw on another woman’s back, are quite artistic. And you’re tempted, you know: something small perhaps….

Photo: “Cap” Coleman next to his shop on Main Street in Norfolk during the 1930s. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

Sept. 11, 2011

2011-09-11T08:19:00.001-04:00

A September morning in Hampton Roads – sunrise: 6:46, partly cloudy with an expected high of 80 degrees. A nice day. Large swells associated with a hurricane far out at sea appear at the Oceanfront.

Eastbound traffic at the Downtown Tunnel begins to pick up after an all-night lane closure.

Norfolk libraries have scheduled “Meet Arthur,” a children’s story hour about that lovable aardvark who always seems to say the right thing. At the same time the Newport News Barnes & Noble expects young visitors for “A Mouse in the House” story session.

The Virginia Marine Science Museum is showing “Reptiles: The Beautiful and the Deadly.”

An Olde Towne historic lantern tour is planned for this evening. So is “Back in the Saddle Again,” a concert by Aerosmith at Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater.

A teacher in world geography and history at Lansdown High is planning a writing assignment on crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.

A Brittany spaniel named Bogie in the North End and a reddish-brown mutt named Zoe in Kempsville have gone missing.

A large photograph showing NC Highway 12 being relocated at Hatteras Island appears in the newspaper. Also in North Carolina, Elizabeth Dole has scheduled a press conference in Salisbury to announce her candidacy for the Senate.

Closer to home, Virginia Beach is planning to replenish sand at Ocean Park and Aeries on the Bay from sand dredged from Lynnhaven Bay. The opening date for a Wal-Mart next to Chesapeake Square Mall has been postponed.

Volunteers are needed in many places, including Lake Taylor Hospital and the South Hampton Roads YWCA. Volunteer music performers are sought by The Ballentine, an assisted living facility in Norfolk. Meals-on- Wheels in Chesapeake needs people to deliver prepared food to homebound elderly persons.

Maersk plans to announce that it will be opening a major container port on the Portsmouth waterfront. Blockbuster says it will reduce the number of VHS tapes it rents in order to stock shelves with more popular DVDs.

A Dilbert cartoon shows a hapless worker boasting he is going to a special cubicle where he’s bound to be promoted – but there isn’t any such cubicle. “The first round of layoffs is always the cruelest,” one of the regulars says.

On the classified pages, Norfolk announces several surplus cars are being auctioned, along with “many more items too numerous to mention.” In items wanted, a man advertises for a 410 double barrel shotgun he wants to buy for his grandchild.

In sports, Isaiah Hunter, a 6-foot-4 point guard for Independence High in Charlotte, plans to announce that he will commit to playing for Old Dominion. The U.S. Open Billiards Championship resumes at the Chesapeake Convention Center. Several local high school field hockey games are scheduled.

Also in sports, a controversy over whether Redskins coach Marty Schottenheimer will play quarterback Jeff George or Tony Banks after having pulled George during Sunday’s 30-3 loss to San Diego.

And speculation over whether the legendary Michael Jordan, who was “99.9 percent” certain he’d never play another NBA game, will make a second comeback at 38 by signing with the Washington Wizards. A full day of baseball is scheduled as teams move towards clinching playoff berths.

At 8:35 a.m., drive time, commuters tuning in to WHRO hear Dwight Davis on “Morning Classics” segue out of the news into a light classical piece. On WHRV, “Morning Edition” takes us through the top stories of the day. Pop stations weigh in with hot singles, including Alicia Keys’ smoky “Fallin.’ ”
It’s 8:46 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001.

Now 8:46:26.

And our lives change forever.

September 4, 2011

2011-09-04T21:44:00.002-04:00

John Parker pauses before an immense sandstone-colored brick house on lower Colonial Avenue. It’s big enough for three townhouses, with two rounded turret-shaped bulges in front.

It was built by Frank S. Royster who made his fortune selling guano, or bird-droppings, once used as fertilizer.

“William Royster, his son, got the first speeding ticket in the city of Norfolk,” Parker says. “He got it on Colley Avenue and he told the policeman – I think he was going 15 miles an hour – that he’d gone that fast on Broadway in New York and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t go that fast in Norfolk.”

This is the kind of detail that Parker has uncovered about his neighborhood, the original section of Ghent. The former head reference librarian at Kirn Memorial Library has turned 30 years of research into a self-published book, “Thirteen Blocks: A Social History of Ghent in Norfolk, Virginia.”

It’s dedicated to his late wife, Rose Marie Norwood Parker, who was a long-time librarian at Kirn.

“I was born in Norfolk,” he says. “I went to school in Norfolk; when I got back from Vietnam I got a job in Norfolk; I found Rose Marie in Norfolk. So this is my attempt to give something back.”

It’s a gorgeous day for a stroll around the sometimes ostentatious neighborhood that sprang up around 1890 after a bridge linked downtown Norfolk to what had been sprawling farmland, streams and swamp to the north. And Parker, seemingly bursting with details about the original occupants, can’t wait to show it off.

Pausing before a seven-room, elaborately shingled house on Pembroke Avenue, he says, “This is John Wale’s house, and his wife Mary’s. He was the only person in the United States who was a bank president and also an Episcopalian minister. You see, he’d got it all together; he was going to do the mortal thing and the spiritual thing.”

Ghent owes its name to Richard Drummond who owned a fleet of sailing ships and brought back a copy of the Treaty of Ghent, the agreement that ended the War of 1812. He built a house on Smith’s Creek – later the Hague – and named it for the treaty. Seeing potential for growth, a group of investors calling themselves the Norfolk Company bought up nearby land and, led by a visionary civil engineer, John Graham, began developing it.

Another book on the historic neighborhood, Ghent: John Graham’s Dream, Norfolk, Virginia’s Treasure by Amy Waters Yarsinske, was recently published.

Parker, 67, has dug up details about seemingly all the early settlers in old Ghent, their servants, garden parties and foibles. There’s even a news report about a pet dog, “Tom,” killed by a trolley.

Parker is a tenacious researcher. The library had deeds of all the houses. He went to cemeteries to learn dates of owners’ deaths, then to bound volumes of local newspapers to find obituaries. Then, having pored over the papers for anecdotes, the challenge was to make it all interesting to readers.

We stop on Fairfax Avenue (It used to be, for reasons unknown, Mary’s Avenue) to view the former home of Edmund and Cordelia Ruffin. Edmund’s grandfather had fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, and his son had proudly named the boy Edmund Sumter Ruffin – even though grandpa, “having decided that he had no desire to live in the United States of America, loaded his musket, inserted it into his mouth, and blew off the top of his white-haired head.”

No tour of Ghent would be complete without a stop at Parker’s house on Warren Crescent. The Queen Anne structure was built by Leonard Pascal Roberts, a successful grocer.

“He kept a notebook in the grocery store and when people would tell him jokes he’d write the jokes down in the notebook and the day after his funeral a whole bunch of relatives gathered on the back porch with that joke book and they sat and read those jokes. I really like that image.”

Parker’s house is loaded with framed pictures, maps, movie posters, a bust of Charles Dickens and pinups – Rose Marie even bought some for him. There must be thousands of books, from classics to mysteries. And neatly arranged on a shelf, are ten of his own so-far-unpublished novels. They’re about the adventures of a family in Chapel Hill. “My Sister the Witch” is one of them.

It’s hard to tell whether Parker prefers digging around in historical details or in the minds of fictional characters, but you have the feeling they’re developed with as much attention to detail as the lives of his long-gone neighbors.

Parker before his house on Warren Crescent. By Paul Clancy

August 28, 2011

2011-08-27T16:15:00.002-04:00

As Fort Monroe ends its long tenure as a military base next month, it is likely to take on new life as one of the most important historical spots in the country.

As the date for the transition approaches we are beginning to realize what an incredible position the fort and the adjoining Old Point Comfort occupies: the place where slavery in America both began and ended. That’s right, right here in Hampton Roads. And not many people realize this.

Much has been disclosed recently about how three escaped slaves sought protection at the fort and were deemed to be “contrabands of war,” and how thousands followed to Freedom Fortress, ultimately tilting the nation towards emancipation.

But what has escaped notice is the other part of this amazing story, complete with Colonial Era political intrigue.

It seems that Samuel Argall, one of the original Jamestown settlers and, at the time, governor, was part owner of a privateer, a ship that essentially had a license to steal. That ship, Treasurer, was seizing Spanish and Portuguese merchant ships and bringing the loot to Virginia to sell illegally.

Argall’s part in the get-rich scheme got him deposed and put on a fast ship to escape with his neck intact. He was replaced by one George Yeardley, he of Flowerdew Hundred – named for his wife, Temperance Flowerdew – a sprawling plantation along the James.

The Treasurer had lain in wait in the West Indies for a ship to pounce on when another privateer, the Dutch-flagged White Lion, happened upon the same waters and the two captains decided to share whatever booty they came across.

Now along comes the Portuguese slaver Sao Jao Bautista, loaded with human cargo from Luanda, a village in Angola. They capture it, grab the slaves and head for Virginia. The White Lion, with the fiercely competitive Captain John Jope (nicknamed “the Flying Dutchman”) in command, arrives at Old Point Comfort on Aug. 20, 1619 – four days ahead of the Treasurer.

Jope succeeds in trading the “20 and odd” – John Rolfe’s description – slaves for badly needed provisions. At the time, English law forbade slaves, so the arrivals were deemed to be indentured servants – even though some were indentured for life!

Guess who bought them? None other than old George Yeardley and a wealthy merchant named Abraham Piersy. Two other slaves who had received the Christian names of Antony and Isabell were acquired by William Tucker, commander at an early fort at the Point. Their son, William, is likely the first black child born in present-day Hampton – if not in America.

But the Treasurer, probably with an equal number of slaves, doesn’t finish unloading its human cargo. In fact, when the captain finds out that Argall, has fled, he quickly weighs anchor and sails to Bermuda – where he is able to dispense with the people on board.

How do we know all this?

Ever since Rolfe – the tobacco planter who married Pocahontas – observed the Africans being landed at Old Point, it’s been clear that that was the spot. But some historians have insisted that Jamestown was the actual location. Furthermore, who they were, how they got there and what became of them has been shrouded in mystery.

But recent research by California historian Engel Sluiter turned up Portuguese shipping records that tell the story in great detail – including the Point Comfort landing.

You’d think this was worthy of recognition. But so far, few Americans know about Hampton’s part in this crucial chapter in our history. All you’ll see on the Fort Monroe waterfront is a state highway marker with the sketchiest information. There should me more, a museum, perhaps, and certainly a monument. Who would not want to visit here?

That’s where Project 1619, a group headed by Calvin Pearson, the city’s former parks and recreation director, comes in. They sponsored a symposium at the American Theater in Phoebus and a ceremony commemorating the landing at Old Point last Saturday. Among the guests were several descendants of Antony and Isabell, those first arrivals. And the ancestors – at least figuratively – of every African American.

By the time of the 400th anniversary of the landing, the group plans to have a monument to the landing erected at this now lonely stretch of waterfront.

From the earliest arrivals, thousands more were brought to Virginia to labor in the tobacco fields. They gradually went, in the eyes of state lawmakers, from servants to slaves for life.

It would take several lifetimes – more than 200 years – during which, as Pearson observes, these unwilling immigrants had no legal status as citizens. “They lived here but it was not their country.” And then, finally, with tremendous courage, began throwing off their shackles.

It all happened right here.

“It was a sad beginning,” Pearson agreed, but not a sad ending.”

August 21, 2011

2011-08-22T12:33:00.003-04:00

Painting by J.O. Davidson of the battle between the Monitor and Virginia. Courtesy of the Mariners' Museum. (Click to enlarge)

Here we go, up the aluminum ladder, through a hatch and into a round iron space. There’s a dank, rusty, metallic smell and something else – but it’s hard to place at first. Be careful as you climb in with those rubber boots; the floor is lined with railroad rails and you could lose your balance and stumble against something fragile.

There on the circular wall are large dents made by cannons during an unfortunate gun trial, and close by is an inward bulge made by . . . .

And now you realize what it is you sensed as you entered – chaos and fear.

This is the interior of the turret of the ironclad Monitor, briefly open as conservators at the Mariners’ Museum hammer away at the last bits of concreted material before returning it to a bath to remove more than a century’s worth of salt. July and August afforded the rare opportunity to see inside after thousands of gallons of water that had bathed the turret were removed.

I got a chance to step inside where crew members of this improbable ship underwent their baptism by fire on a fine Sunday morning in March 1862 as their iron ship clashed with its southern counterpoint, the Virginia.

Let me try to recreate what it might have been like.

First of all, it was a claustrophobic space, with almost no view of land or sea or sky. It was hot and crowded, with a score of men stripped to the waste, dripping with perspiration, bodies black with gunpowder and lungs full of smoke as they bent to the job of loading giant guns – ramming gunpowder and shot – running them out portholes and firing.

Each shot resulted in a tremendous, ear-ringing explosion and clouds of smoke in that confined space. Welcome to the new age of naval warfare in which sailors fired at each other from behind heavy armor and wondered if this, their first experience in this half-submerged contraption, could be their last, if this was to be their iron tomb.

When the turret received the first direct hit there was a sudden intake of breath as the shot struck eight inches of iron and, instead of penetrating, ricocheted off. So perhaps they would not be killed after all, at least not right away.

One sailor had the experience of a shot striking a few inches from his head. “The shock was so fearful that I dropped over like a dead man,” he would write. He had to be taken below until he recovered. Another man had been bracing his knee against the turret wall and found himself flying through the air “clean over both guns to the floor of the turret.”

Conditions on the Virginia gun deck were much the same. In one instance, when the Monitor fired at close range, gunners near the impact were stunned nearly senseless, eardrums bleeding from the concussion. The Monitor and Virginia battled for four hours before withdrawing. Miraculously, no one was killed and only a few were wounded.

A very different scene was enacted on the little ship off Cape Hatteras on the next-to-last day of that year. It was, as one officer remarked after climbing to the top of the turret and seeing men swept to their deaths, “a panorama of horror.”

In their haste, as they climbed around the guns and to the top of the turret, some of the crew shucked off boots and jackets so that, in case they landed in the water, they’d have a better chance of swimming. Some may have grabbed precious belongings, like engraved silverware, only to discard it at the last minute. A few who witnessed the scene below were frozen by fear and unwilling to venture down to the heaving deck.

And then there were two who had either gone below to retrieve personal effects or taken too long to seek safety; or who had stayed at the pumps too long and were staggering from lungs full of poisonous gas and smoke; or were passing up parts of a makeshift lifeboat – and were trapped as the ship suddenly rolled over and plunged to the bottom of the sea.

And indeed became their iron coffin.

The complete turret will be visible at the Mariners’ Museum for the next two weeks, after which the tank will again be filled with water. Those who can’t make it can watch through webcams at www.mariner.org.

August 14, 2011

2011-08-14T11:19:00.002-04:00

I should’ve written this last month when Mal Vincent introduced his classic movie festival at the Naro. But I was on vacation then and missed the chance to muse about one of my all-time favorites, “The African Queen.”

Or I could wait until next year when the 100th anniversary of the beat-up old boat of the same name rolls around, but 99th is just about as good, right?

Besides, I just couldn’t wait. You see, fourteen years ago when she was in our presence, I got to ride in the wonderful, funky “Queen,” on the same seats Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn occupied in that “savagely thrilling,” Oscar-winning 1951 movie. In fact to steer her!

It was the very same boat, originally named S/L Livingstone, that was built by the British in 1912 to haul passengers and cargo on Lake Albert in East Africa. The legendary John Huston decided the it was perfect for his film and renamed it African Queen.

She was temperamental, of course, with a balky engine that Bogart had to kick to keep running, but seaworthy or lucky, enough to make it down some terrifying rapids and through leech-infested muck before delivering a torpedo to the belly of a powerful German patrol boat.

Bogart had played an uncouth, gin-swilling, cigar-smoking drifter named Charlie Allnut who, improbably, falls in love with Rose Thayer, the prim sister of a missionary in East Africa, all the while sailing to their fateful encounter.

Many assume the boat sank because it does so in the movie, but through a series of auctions James Hendricks, a Key Largo hotel owner, got hold of it and set it on display next to his inn.

That’s where Raynor Parker, owner of Tidewater Crane and Rigging Co. on Newtown Road, found her while on vacation in Florida. He convinced Hendricks to bring the boat to HarborFest in 1997 and paid all expenses.

After firing up the wood burning steam engine, which burped and belched contentedly, they took me for a ride on Cristal Lake.

There I was, Rosie, old girl, reliving every bit of your movie, especially the part where you take the Queen down the rapids and later, with a quavering voice, you exclaim,

“I never dreamed that any experience could be so stimulating!”

I hadn’t either, even on the placid waters of Crystal Lake. The next day they took the Queen to downtown Norfolk and offered rides to festival goers.

They took her elsewhere, including the Connecticut neighborhood where Hepburn lived. Parker says she was thrilled to pay a visit.

But that was just about her last journey. The African Queen is back in Key Largo, covered by an awning and resting on a cradle above the water. You can stop and see it for free, although a static display is a pretty sad affair. As one writer on Tripadvisor put it, it’s nothing special unless you’re a movie buff.

Another, writing in German, said it was inconspicuous, as one might expect. The headline is “Humphrey Bogart war nie hier,” which I think means he was never here. But you could argue that he was indeed.

Even though the boat’s not yet a centenarian, it’s the perfect time to begin planning for next year when the mother of all boating events, the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, rolls around.

What a great spot for a joint celebration.

August 7, 2011

2011-08-07T13:34:00.003-04:00

Solitary man standing amidst the ruins of Hampton after Confederates destroyed the town. Library of Congress.

In the dark of night a century and a half ago…

It was pitch black with a fresh wind out of the south as the few remaining residents of the old village were awakened by startled shouts and the tramp, tramp of marching soldiers. They were carrying torches.

Hampton, the oldest English inhabited place in America, had been a bustling port and population center in its heyday – the most important in Virginia – with tobacco warehouses, a custom house, taverns and blacksmith’s shops. The town declined when Norfolk took over as the major port, but, before the war was “a pretty little town,” as an admirer put it.

Until that night.

To the Confederate leadership, the problem was that menacing presence next-door, Fort Monroe.

The moated fort, now bulging with federal troops since President Lincoln sent them there, was considered impregnable. Furthermore, all along the outskirts of Fort Monroe were makeshift camps populated by former slaves who had taken refuge behind Union lines.

Hampton had been mostly evacuated after it became clear that the Union army would not be dislodged. Just a few months before, troops had ridden into town to disrupt the balloting on the question of secession. The intimidation hadn’t worked but townsfolk realized how vulnerable they were. They had fled, leaving only a handful of Union sympathizers and newly liberated slaves.

At this point thousands of Confederate soldiers, under Brig. Gen. John B. Magruder, were massing within a mile of town, cruising for a fight, probing for information about the Yankees and their intentions. Magruder had wanted to burn Hampton and got his excuse.

On the pages of a northern newspaper he saw what purportedly were plans by his adversary, Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, for the town: to fortify if and allow the former slaves to occupy the houses where they had once worked for their owners.

In explaining his actions, Magruder wrote, “Having known for some time past that Hampton was the harbor of runaway slaves and traitors, and being under the guns of Fort Monroe, it could not be held by us even if taken, I was decidedly under the impression that it should have been destroyed before; and when I found from the above report its extreme importance to the enemy, and that the town itself would lend great strength to whatever fortifications they might erect around it, I determined to burn it at once.”

Now here’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Magruder claimed that he put the idea to “the gentlemen at Hampton, many of whom are in the army under my command,” and that they “seemed to concur with me” about the wisdom of torching their own town. In picking those to do the job, he chose companies of men who lived in Hampton and nearby Warwick County.

Maybe they went willingly to this task, but there must have been deep sadness as the hometown soldiers met at the corner of Queen and King streets and fanned out into the four quarters of the town. “And now the quiet of the night was broken by loud yells, the houses were entered and fired,” a Union soldier wrote. “And soon the whole town was enveloped in flames, casting a bright light over the bay, and revealing to our soldiers the forms of the enemy as they moved about the streets...”

When it was over, about 500 houses were gone, and except for a few charred remains, including the walls of St. John’s Church, nothing survived “but 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…” according to an observer. “A more desolate sight cannot be imagined than is Hampton today.”

Within a few hours, the visible history of America’s oldest town had vanished.

Hampton would come back, thanks to oysters and crabs, NASA and the Air Force, but that other dimension was forever lost.

Ironically, the very town that was incinerated to prevent escaped slaves from occupying its buildings is now gaining recognition as the nurturing ground for “freedom’s first generation,” those who inherited the ashes and made a life for themselves.

At 5 p.m. today, the Hampton Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee, St. John’s Church and the Hampton History Museum will present “Ruin and Rebirth: The Burning of Hampton,” including commentary by an actor portraying Lincoln. It will take place at St. John’s.

July 3, 2011

2011-07-05T08:48:00.002-04:00

There’s nothing quite like a swamp, especially a dismal one, when you’re darkly, romantically heartsick.

That was the state that young Robert Frost found himself in when his high school sweetheart, Elinor White, rebuffed his advances and responded coolly when presented with a slim volume of his poems. No wonder, the poems are filled with self-doubt: “Why am I first in thy so sad regard…”

Not only would Elinor not leave college to marry him, but she hinted there might be others seeking to win her heart.

Frost, moody by nature already, was distraught. Here he was, poor, jobless, unpublished, a college dropout and now rejected. Black thoughts turned to a place that Longfellow and several others had identified as the heart of darkness if ever there was one: our own Great Dismal Swamp.

On Nov. 6, 1894, after ripping up his own copy of the book, Frost boarded a train in Lawrence, Mass., his hometown, and traveled to New York. There he embarked on a merchant steamer bound for that rough-and-tumble seaport, Norfolk. Then, mostly walking, he covered the seven or eight miles over back roads to Deep Creek, near the swamp’s edge.

The 20-year-old poet had had plenty of time to think about his misery and was still resolute enough to keep going. It was an early November night and he, wearing little more than a light overcoat and city shoes, plunged into the boggy, dark, briar-barbed swamp.

It isn’t clear if this was to be suicide, but biographers have suggested that Frost preferred oblivion to living day by day without Elinor, knowing that she was with someone else. He stumbled along a path beside the Dismal Swamp Canal, light from the moon guiding him past treacherous sink holes.

The further he went, the darker it got. About 10 miles into the swamp, surely cold and miserable, he came upon a rowdy group of duck hunters who warmly greeted this strange intruder.

As he wrote in a poem many years later,

Getting too befriended,
As so often, ended
Any melancholy
Gotterdammerung
That I might have sung.
I fell in among
Some kind of committee
From Elizabeth City,
Each and every one
Loaded with a gun
Or a demijohn.
(Need a body ask
If it was a flask?)
Out to kill a duck
Or perhaps a swan
Over Currituck.

The hunters, apparently drunk as skunks, never bagged a feathered creature but proved to be both gentle and sentimental, “One drank to his mother/While another wept.” Eventually, they bundled up their new friend and took him back to Elizabeth City by boat. From there he went to the Outer Banks and eventually, after wiring his mother for money, made it back home.

Unbeknownst to him, near to the day he wandered into the swamp, a newspaper, The Independent, agreed to publish – for $15 – “My Butterfly,” the first Robert Frost poem to see the light of day. And not long after, Elinor relented and agreed to marry him.

Although unsuccessful at ending his life, Frost was deeply influenced by his brush with death, and his poetry is laced with woodsy brooding. As this one, “Into My Own,” begins,

One of my wishes is that these dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ‘twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

Frost became one of the greatest American poets, winning four Pulitzer Prizes and the adoration of millions of readers. He wrote lyrically of birches, apples and blueberries, of grindstones, woodpiles and axes.

And of course, as we all know, of those woods: lovely, dark and deep.

hoto: Yankee poet Robert Lee Frost was named after the southern general by his father who was originally from the South. WPclipart.com.

June 19, 2001

2011-06-19T13:59:00.003-04:00

Sketch of “Osman” by David Hunter Strother for Harper’s Weekly magazine. From the book The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.

In his journeys through the pre-Civil War South, Frederick Law Olmsted came across a strange classified newspaper ad:

“BLOOD-HOUNDS – I have two of the FINEST DOGS for CATCHING NEGROES…They can take the trail TWELVE HOURS after the NEGRO HAS PASSED, and catch him with ease.”

What Olmsted was examining was the phenomenon of slaves who had escaped and hidden out in the Great Dismal Swamp, a wild and forbidding morass that intrigued so many writers of the day. But what it attracted besides runaways was resourceful men who were determined to capture them.

A new biography by Justin Martin, Genius of Place, The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, shows him not just as a gifted designer of public and private parks – his first was Central Park in New York and his last Biltmore Estate in Asheville – but as a journalist who sent weekly dispatches to the early New York Times on the steamy, slavery-steeped South.

The dispatches, later published in book form, covered Dixie, including Tidewater, like the dew.

The vast Great Dismal Swamp, much larger in 1853 than it is today, was so dense and forbidding that escaped slaves hid there. But, as the author learned, they were ever in fear of being caught by bands of slave hunters with their guns and bloodhounds.

Olmsted’s dispatches added to the lore of the Swamp that others like David Hunter Strother wrote about and sketched for Harper’s Weekly magazine, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sang about in verse.

In dark fens of the Great Dismal
The hunted Negro lay:
He saw the fire of the midnight camp,
And heard at times a horse’s tramp
And a bloodhound’s distant bay.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin had inflamed abolitionists, wrote her second novel, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, based on Strother’s character, Osman, shown in the adjoining sketch.

The ever-inquisitive Olmsted was fascinated by the overt, as well as the covert, swamp. A number of slaves were hired out to work in the swamp, felling trees, shaping shingles and other wood products, and bringing them to market. They set up crude camps and worked nearby, semi-autonomously. As long as a swamp worker produced enough to pay off the owner, he “lives measurably as a free man, hunts, fishes, eats, drinks, smokes and sleeps, plays and works” for most of his working life, Olmsted wrote.

Some were allowed to keep part of their wages and eventually buy their freedom.

But in the covert world of runaways in the swamp, freedom was a kind of hell. Children were born, bred, lived and died there, Olmsted wrote.

“Joseph Church (the man he met on the road from Portsmouth to Deep Creek) told me he had seen skeletons and had helped to bring bodies recently dead. There were people in the swamps still, he thought, that were the children of runaways and had been runaways themselves all their lives.

“What a life it must have been: born outlaws, educated self-stealers trained from infancy to be constantly in dread of the approach of a white man as a thing more fearful than wild-cats or serpents, or even starvation.”

Bounty hunters were ever after them.

“How do they know them,” Olmsted asked Church.

“Oh, dey looks strange.”

“How do you mean?”

“Skeared like, you know, sir, and kind o’ strange, cause dey hasn’t much to ear, and ain’t decent (decently clothed) like we is.”

Some managed to survive on the generosity of the slaves who worked in the swamp, secretly helping to harvest logs and shingles.

And when cornered by slave hunters, they often chose flight and risked death rather than give up the thin straw, the sweet misery of freedom.

Why, he asked.

“Some on ‘em would rather be shot than took, sir.”

June 12, 2011

2011-06-12T06:29:00.002-04:00

In 1852, when a fledgling newspaper, the New York Daily Times, went looking for a writer to travel the South and write regular dispatches, its editor was introduced to one of the most unlikely candidates.

He was Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who would become the father of landscape architecture in America, but then was searching for an identity. He’d tried farming and grew bored with it. But then, after a walking tour of England, he wrote a book about his travels and proved to be an engaging writer.

Olmsted was hired on the spot. And what followed was more than a year’s worth of in-depth and objective weekly reports throughout the southern states, including some from our region. He had an ear for dialogue, an eye for capturing images and an insatiable curiosity that enlivened his writing.

The story of this American original, who designed New York’s Central Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds and dozens of other public places, rolls through the pages of a fascinating new biography, Genius of Place, the Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, by Justin Martin.

Martin includes one incident in which Olmsted was leaving Norfolk by ferry. “Midway across Norfolk Harbor, the ferry simply stopped running and drifted for fifteen minutes. Apparently the fireman had fallen asleep and stopped feeding coal into the ferry’s engine.”

So, where, I wondered, could I find Olmsted’s original dispatches? In the archives of The New York Times – his employer’s successor? No. But – isn’t the Internet amazing? – in an electronic edition of the book Olmsted eventually wrote, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, available through the Institute for Museum and Library Services of the University of North Carolina.

And, oh how Norfolk takes a beating!

“Jan 10 [1853]. Norfolk is a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, nearly divided by a morass….It has all the immoral and disagreeable characteristics of a large seaport, with very few of the advantages that we should expect to find….No lyceum or public libraries, no public libraries, no public gardens, no galleries of art…no public resorts of healthful and refining amusement, no place better than a filthy, tobacco-impregnated bar-room or a licentious dance-cellar, so far as I have been able to learn, for the stranger of high or low degree to pass the hours unoccupied by business.”

There’s much more, some of it deserved. But Norfolk, according to City Historian Peggy Haile McPhillips, was then making improvements, including a new courthouse, gas lights and paved streets. There wasn’t a public library yet, but a few private ones. It was, of course, a seaport, with numerous creeks where mosquitoes hatched – and it was just two years short of the calamitous yellow fever outbreak.

In Olmsted’s book, updating his dispatches, he mentions the “dreadful visitor,” which he felt, because of the town’s “undrained and filthy condition,” “certainly did not come uninvited.”

Olmsted, at least at first, was not an abolitionist. In his 14 months traveling through the old Slave states, he encountered many slaves and their owners, and in some cases witnessed slaves working under decent, humanitarian conditions. He would later change his mind after witnessing just the opposite.

What he mostly concluded, though, was how the slave system robbed both the owned and the owner of initiative. It wasn’t just slaves, but white folks who hated to work.

An example from Norfolk:

“I had an umbrella broken. I noticed it as I was going out from my hotel during a shower, and stepped into an adjoining locksmith’s to have it repaired. He asked where he should send it when he had done it. ‘I intended to wait for it,’ I answered….

“ ‘I can’t do it in less than half an hour sir, and it will be worth a quarter.’

“ ‘I shouldn’t think it need take you so long, it is merely a rivet to be tightened.’

“ ‘I shall have to take it all to pieces, and it will take me all of half an hour.’

“ ‘I don’t think you need to take it to pieces.’

“ ‘Yes, I shall – there’s no other way to do it.’

“ ‘Then, as I can’t wait so long, I will not trouble you with it.” And I went into the hotel, and with the fire poker did the job myself, in less than a minute, as well as he could have done it in a week, and went on my way, saving half an hour and a quarter of a dollar, like a Yankee.”

Olmsted, rather indolent himself as a farmer, had suddenly discovered his own industrious ways.

Next week: Slaves in the swamp.

Portrait: Frederick Law Olmsted, about 1860. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

June 5, 2011

2011-06-05T07:39:00.003-04:00

Last week I wrote about a young, talented woman from Portsmouth who went off to Hollywood, fell in love with and married a Navy flyer and died at an early age, leaving a box of letters in what became an abandoned house.

Those letters rested undisturbed for more than 30 years before a friend – who had helped rewire an old Portsmouth house in the 1970s – asked if I could help solve the mystery. Fortunately, several relatives contacted me and filled in some gaping holes in her story.

Eloise Merrell Rawles was born in Portsmouth in December 1920 to Joseph A. and Marian Whitehurst Rawles. At Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1938, she was obviously popular. Many of the letters she received during junior and senior years were from former schoolmates who confessed their love to her.

The yearbook’s description of Eloise as “biggest bluffer” was apparently accurate. A cousin said she was known for teasing boys into making fools of themselves.

What the yearbook doesn’t mention was how talented she was.

Growing up across the street on Webster Ave. in the Park View neighborhood, Warren Rawles, was in awe of his older cousin. Having a mother who taught music in her home, she was surrounded by musical instruments: xylophones, miniature harps, a grand piano.

“Eloise could play just about anything you put in her hands,” Rawles said from his home in Florida. Her mother, he said, was so proud of her that she invited neighbors every Sunday to recitals.

There was much more. “She was the kind of person that made you feel welcome, made you feel important,” Rawles said. “She was always interested in what I was doing. She just had a warmth about her.”

Another cousin, Margaret Ann Cuthriell Cummings of Deep Creek, who went to the movies, rode bicycles and played paper dolls with Eloise, said she “had a sweet temper. She was a kind, gentle person.”

Eloise went to Coker College in Hartsville, S.C., but dropped out in May 1940. At this point her letters now bear a Hollywood, CA, address. The talented Miss Rawles, president of the dramatic club in high school and gifted musician in college, was hoping for stardom.

“She escaped to live her own life rather than be a protégé of her mother,” Warren Rawles said. “It caused quite a stir.”

Her mother told friends that she was associated with the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse, but she never made it to the next step. Among her papers are letters of regret from several Hollywood big shots who didn’t have the time to grant her auditions.

Suddenly, in 1944, the scene shifts back to Portsmouth and she’s writing love letters to Lt. John J. Wilkinson in care of a Navy seaplane base in New York. One letter to her was addressed to Mrs. Wilkinson.

A search of genealogical records shows that they were married on May 29, 1943, at Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.

The letters end abruptly and there’s little to indicate what happened to Eloise. An alumni directory at Wilson High indicates that by 1963 she had already passed away.

There’s a yawning void here that has now been filled by relatives and a small community of ardent genealogists who rose to the challenge.

While Wilkinson served in the Navy during World War II, she returned to Portsmouth at least for a few years and, possibly with her mother, gave piano lessons. It appears that, after the war, the couple moved out west.

He got a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1949 and the following year they moved to Alamogordo, N.M. They had two children, a girl and a boy.

But news reached relatives in Portsmouth that Eloise had become sick. Breast cancer, one of her cousins said. And on Aug. 3, 1958, at the age of 37, she died in Santa Fe.

Records for the Portlock section of Oak Grove Cemetery in Portsmouth suggest she was buried there alongside her mother and father. But a stroll through the historic graveyard last week showed a memorial plaque, not a grave marker. She was buried in Alamogordo.

The couple that brought me the letters was right: I wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge of learning more about this bright, ambitious, talented woman.

With the help of many others, I feel I’ve finally, in my mind at least, laid her to rest.

Photo from a family album shows Eloise Rawles as a teenager. Courtesy of Margaret Ann Cummings.

May 29, 2011

2011-05-26T21:32:00.002-04:00

The old cardboard box staring at me from across the room for almost a year finally got to me. It was crammed with mildewing newspapers, magazines and letters.

And long-forgotten memories.

It had been there since friends Preston and Sherry Callaway, who were downsizing from a house to a condo, brought it to me in hopes I’d be able to solve the mystery of its ownership. In the 1970s, during summer vacations, he had helped rewire some old houses in Portsmouth and came across that apparently abandoned cache. It gathered dust for almost 40 more years.

Taking it outside to minimize the effects of the dust, I carefully went through its contents and began to stitch together details of a vibrant and fascinating life.

Eloise Merrell Rawles was born in Portsmouth in about1920 to Joseph and Marian Rawles. She was obviously vivacious and popular at Woodrow Wilson High. The 1938 yearbook’s senior superlatives dubbed her and classmate Emmett Story “Biggest Bluffers.”

She was makeup editor of the yearbook and president of the Dramatics Club. She had lots of admirers. Several of the letters were from former classmates, then in college, who professed they were in love with her.

Eloise went to Coker College in Hartsville, S.C., getting decent grades, including a’s in phys. ed. and piano, a transcript shows. But she dropped out in May 1940 after only one year and went to Hollywood.

Among her papers is a flyer about a 1941 summer course for dancers and actors at a Hollywood studio run by a teacher who had studied under noted New York dancer Martha Graham. There’s also a bill from a vocal studio for voice lessons, as well as a Los Angeles Public Library card.

She tried for auditions, but without success. Among her papers is a letter from the secretary of Rudy Vallee, a “megaphone crooner” and bandleader of the 1930s, saying he had no time, “as much as he would like to,” to give auditions.

Before leaving for the west coast, she told friends she had no desire to be a movie actress, but one of them later wrote, “I guess being out there with the real flesh and associations with them has changed your mind.”

The only clipping about herself was one from a Los Angeles newspaper saying she was writing and directing background music for an original play put on by her acting school.

There were many letters from home. Her mother, who taught piano and voice in Portsmouth, had definite opinions about her career and love life, occasionally scolding her daughter about her choices.

By 1943 Eloise had begun corresponding with Lt. (j.g.) John J. Wilkinson, care of a Navy seaplane base in New York. Presumably he was stationed overseas during World War II. One of them, which begins “My Precious Darling,” goes on to say how terribly she missed him.

The letters suddenly end at this point.

It’s inconceivable how a box of letters containing the intimate details of a young woman’s life could be left in the attic or basement of an old house. Did tragedy strike, or were they simply forgotten?

What happened to her? The Internet seemed to offer no clues. No obituaries in either L.A. or Portsmouth. But wait: Her parents turn up on a site that includes grave markers at the historic Cedar Grove Cemetery. And then, on the same site, if you type in “Wilkinson,” another marker shows up. “Eloise Rawles Merrell Wilkinson.”

So they had married after all. For some reason there are no birth or death dates.

Then, in another Internet search, this time for Eloise Rawles Wilkinson, another piece of the puzzle emerges in the strangest place – a mention about the early life of a man best known for writing music for several Walt Disney films, including Davey Crockett and Peter Pan – and the Mickey Mouse Club theme – (all together: M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!)

He was Portsmouth’s own David Carr Glover, who in the introduction of something called “Boogie Woogie & How to Play It,” mentioned his early piano teachers, including Marian Rawles and Eloise Rawles Wilkinson.

So she had moved back to Portsmouth and, along with her mother, had a brief career as a music teacher.

But, sadly, a check with the school library at Wilson High turns up a 1963 alumni directory saying she was already deceased by then. She had not lived beyond the age of 43 – if that long.

You wonder what happened, but the curtain suddenly falls.

Unless there are people out there who knew her…Were there children? Were there later pictures?

Does anyone know anything more?

Photo: Eloise Rawles, from her Woodrow Wilson High Class of '38 yearbook.

May 22, 2011

2011-05-21T17:42:00.005-04:00

Maps of states are wonderfully complicated, with panhandles, rugged coastlines and seemingly arbitrary borders. And there’s none more curious than the western edge of Virginia. It looks as though an earthquake has ripped out a gigantic chunk of land, leaving a brutally jagged, saw-like edge.

Something like that happened in 1861 when Virginia decided to break away from the Union and go to war against its neighbors to the north. A new state was born.

We’re so used to the map now that it’s hard to picture what antebellum Virginia looked like, joined as it was to a wild, beautiful mountain region on the west. It was peopled largely by Scotts-Irish and Germans, rugged individuals who owned few slaves, played the fiddle and loved their country.Scene outside the Custom House at Wheeling in 1861 where delegates vowed to create a new government. The caption declares that Wheeling is “now the seat of the new government of Virginia.” Courtesy of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. (Click to enlarge)

They had long disliked their eastern brethren who had used their greater numbers, including three-fifths of their slaves, to maintain a tight grip on government. Furthermore, there were those hard-to-cross mountains that made horse-and-buggy trips to Richmond an ordeal. Many had wanted a new state, called perhaps “Westsylvania.” Or “New Virginia.”

So it was no surprise on April 17, 1861 when Virginia’s Secession Convention voted to join the Confederacy that delegates from western counties 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.”

There were two conventions in Wheeling, one before and one after Virginia voters approved an ordinance of secession on May 23 – 150 years ago this week.

At the Second Wheeling Convention in June, the western delegates formed a Reorganized Government of Virginia, claiming it was the only legitimate one – and President Lincoln recognized it. Senators and representatives to Congress were elected. So there were two Virginias at that point, one a part of the Confederacy, another part of the United States.

An editor of the Wheeling Intelligencer declared that “the F.F.V.’s of Eastern Virginia have linked themselves to the slave propagandism of [South Carolina secessionist John C.] Calhoun and his school until their insolence and corruption became no longer tolerable. As a class they are doomed to speedy extinction…Central and Western Virginia will henceforth rule the Old Dominion.”

Said the Morgantown Star, “We have been the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for Eastern Virginia for long enough.”

This two-headed Virginia didn’t last long. That October, residents of the western counties approved the creation of a new state. There was a bit of vote tampering, with Union soldiers, who now occupied the western counties, keeping pro-Confederacy voters away from the polls and actually casting votes themselves. But it probably didn’t matter. The vote was overwhelming.

It took more than a year for all the details to be worked out, and then, in 1863, West-by-God-Virginia was created.

It was a crushing blow to the commonwealth, which tried after the Civil War to get its western lands back only to lose in the Supreme Court.

Virginia had lost a third of its land, an eventual fortune in bituminous coal and, sadly, much of the Appalachian side of its character. It was the only state in the nation to be rudely subdivided like that. To have part of its map chomped off as though by great beasts, the dogs of war.

While Virginia solemnly observes the sesquicentennial of the war this year, its western neighbor prepares to celebrate a similar anniversary – its creation.

May 15, 2011

2011-05-14T08:22:00.004-04:00

Much has been written in recent weeks about Fort Sumter and the attack that ushered in the American Civil War. And much will undoubtedly be spoken – and sung – about Fort McHenry as the place where the Star Spangled Banner was inspired during the War of 1812.

You could name a few other forts in the U.S. that have storied pasts. Ticonderoga, for instance. The Alamo.This drawing, published in the August 17, 1861 issue of Harper’s Weekly, shows former slaves running toward Fort Monroe after hearing they would be sheltered. Courtesy of the Casemate Museum. Click to enlarge.

But you won’t find any that are more vital to the American story than the one that guards the entrance to Hampton Roads, Fort Monroe. Barely a shot has ever been fired at the fort or from its walls, but it stood for and witnessed the beginning of the end of slavery in America.

And hardly anyone knows it.

It’s only in the past few years, since the 1834 stone fortress was scheduled to be vacated by the Army, that its significance has come to light and enhanced its chances of becoming a new national park.

Consider this:

In May 1861, barely after Virginia joined the Confederacy, three enslaved men, Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker and James Townsend, who were working on a Confederate battery at Sewell’s Point, learned they were to be separated from their families and sent further south to build other rebel outposts.

Somehow they summoned the courage to slip away from their guards, scramble into a skiff and row across Hampton Roads to the fort. They must have known the perils. Under the Fugitive Slave Law, Union commanders could easily have sent them back to whatever punishment awaited them. And yet they did what no one had ever done before: They asked for sanctuary.

Gen. Benjamin Butler, who had just arrived as fort commander, was no abolitionist, but his legal training got him to thinking. Since Virginia was now at war with the federal government and the three men were aiding that cause, he was not about to let them go back. “I directed that they be fed and set to work,” Butler was to write.

When Confederate Major John Cary came to the fort under a flag of truce and demanded the runaways be returned, Butler refused, calling them “contraband of war.”

Mallory, Baker and Townsend may have been a special exception, and Butler’s argument cloaked in legalize, but word got out that the Union was now sheltering runaways. Never mind their status. Within days, a trickle of new arrivals turned into a torrent. Whole families and groups of families began making their way along back roads, asking soldiers directions to “Freedom Fort.”

Before the war ended, at federal installations throughout the South, something like half a million “contrabands,” as they were called, were given refuge. Many of the makeshift camps that were established became recruiting places for black workers, cooks, orderlies and soldiers.

In the current issue of Preservation magazine, Eric Wills writes, “The large number of runaways who flocked to Union lines belies the outdated and racist notion that enslaved African Americans simply waited for emancipation by singing hymns and strumming banjos: rather, they seized almost every chance to pursue their freedom, often risking death, and in so doing, helped make slavery a central issue of the Civil War.”

President Lincoln, who had avoided the issue, legitimized Butler’s decision by signing confiscation acts and then granting freedom to those who found refuge behind Union lines. Finally, two years after Mallory, Baker and Townsend stole away to the fort, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

Fort Monroe not only witnessed the denouement of slavery but its beginning.

It was at Old Point Comfort that slaves were first unloaded and taken to Jamestown where they worked on farms. The new arrivals were treated at first as indentured servants. But as the tobacco economy continued to demand cheap labor, the screws began to tighten, and within a couple of decades, thousands of imported Africans were bought and sold as slaves.

Centuries of unimaginable misery followed and persisted until the day those three men did what no white general or president deigned to do. They dared to seize freedom.

The 150th anniversary of their flight to freedom will be celebrated next Saturday, May 21, at the Parade Ground on Fort Monroe. The Contraband Historical Society is planning a parade with re-enactors and contraband descendants, with family activities and puppets. Then on Tuesday the 24th there will be a conference and panel discussion at the Post Theater on the fort grounds.

May 8, 2011

2011-05-08T08:02:00.003-04:00

In the murky depths of the James River just off Newport News Point is a skeletal shape that looks something like a giant overturned horseshoe crab.

For decades watermen had snagged oyster tongs on a wooden structure and brought up the flotsam and jetsam of an ancient shipwreck. What no one seemed to suspect, until archaeologists confirmed its identity, is that the site bears witness to a deadly encounter that signaled the end of a long era in naval history.< >Sinking of the Cumberland, a line engraving from Leslie’s Weekly. The scene shows the crew still fighting as the ship goes down. Courtesy of U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command.

The Cumberland, a 1,726-ton wooden frigate, was built at the Boston Navy Yard in 1842 and began a long and distinguished career as a flagship in several stations around the globe. The first was in the Mediterranean, then the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Among its officers was Commodore Matthew Perry.

In 1855-56, Cumberland was converted to a sloop of war, allowing it to carry fewer but more powerful guns. These changes made the ship what Navy historians described as a “magnificent corvette and fast sailor.” The next two years were spent cruising the coast of Africa chasing down suspected slave ships.

The Cumberland was at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth in early 1861 when Virginia joined the Confederacy and war broke out. Unlike the Union frigate Merrimack, which was burned and sunk, the Cumberland was towed to safety as the yard was abandoned.

The warship took part in the successful Union assault at Hatteras Inlet later that year and joined the blockading squadron in Hampton Roads, capturing vessels carrying cotton, coal and military stores. Pretty successful for a wooden sailing ship, but its days were numbered.

On March 8, 1862, the Cumberland was at anchor off Newport News when its former sister ship, the Merrimack, now converted to an ironclad and rechristened the Virginia, steamed into Hampton Roads, turned to port and went straight for the Cumberland. Shrugging off furious broadsides, the Virginia ran full speed at the Cumberland and buried its iron ram into the wooden ship’s starboard side.

As the Virginia backed away, leaving the ram buried in the Cumberland, gunners decimated the wooden ship, leaving its decks awash in blood and gore. Even so, the wounded ship’s crew continued futilely firing on the iron adversary until its guns were under water.

“We delivered a parting fire, each man trying to save himself by jumping overboard,” Lt. George Morris, the acting commander, reported. But there were many wounded who could not be saved and were among 121 sailors who perished in the battle. One admiring opponent left a fitting epitaph:

“No ship was ever fought more gallantly.”

The Cumberland’s fate was to be the first victim of a new era of naval warfare, a clear demonstration of the superiority of steam-powered ironclad ships. That night the Union’s own ironclad, the Monitor, arrived and the following day engaged the Virginia in a four-hour slugfest that ended in a draw.

Before the battle, the Monitor’s crew saw what must have been a chilling memorial of the Cumberland, three masts, a tattered pennant still dangling from one of them, marking where the ship had gone down.

Almost immediately, Union salvage crews removed the ship’s guns and other valuable items. Other salvage efforts continued for several years until its location was all but forgotten until 1981 when divers rediscovered it.

Nearby were the remains of the notorious Confederate raider Florida, which spent two years wreaking havoc on Union merchant shipping. In late 1864 a Union warship seized the Florida at a harbor in Brazil and towed it to Hampton Roads where, mysteriously, it was rammed by a barge and sent to the bottom.

The Hampton Roads Naval Museum at Nauticus has several artifacts from the two ships, as well as sections of iron from both the Monitor and Virginia. Now, collaborating with the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Naval History and heritage Command, the museum is participating in a cutting-edge survey of the Cumberland and Florida.

Using new technology, the survey will show three-dimensional views of the two wrecks that can be used in classrooms and other educational venues.

To kick off the effort, the museum is planning a program with Navy underwater archaeologist Robert Neyland who discuss the importance of underwater findings. The program, “Underwater Archaeology: A Priceless Legacy,” will be at 6 p.m. on May 19. For more information see www.hrnm.navy.mil.

May 1, 2011

2011-05-01T07:54:00.006-04:00

The scene at a Virginia rail station, “On the way to Manassas,” in July 1861, from “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 1.” Courtesy of Riddick’s Folly House Museum. (Click to enlarge.)

The ink was barely dry on the secession proclamation. Just two weeks had gone by. Yet Virginians were marching off to war with a whoop and holler, ready to take on those dastardly Yankees for threatening to invade their soil.

Take in the scene in downtown Suffolk this Saturday and you might get an idea of what it was like.

Several dozen – the number was growing by the day – Confederate Civil War re-enactors will march from Riddick’s Folly House Museum to the train station. And townsfolk in period costumes will cheer as they parade up Main Street.

This is the kickoff of a four-year/five-part series the museum and Suffolk Nansemond Historical Society will stage to mark the 150th anniversary of the war.

What were they thinking? What was the mindset of the no-doubt scared but somehow emboldened young men as they flocked to courthouses to muster into the army, not of the United States but of Virginia, and almost immediately begin training to fight their former countrymen to the death?

One clue can be found in a fictitious but, as far as others of its kind went, spot-on recruitment poster the museum has produced. “The sanctity of Virginia’s sacred soil is now being threatened,” it warns in bold type. “Northern invaders are in route to the Old Dominion with their vile intentions of forcing their will upon the State government.”

Men of Virginia, it goes on, “will fight to the last drop of their blood to defend their homes, their wives, their families…” Etc. You get the picture.

This theme, picturing Yankee invaders, was echoed throughout southern recruiting posters in the early years of the war, especially the part about protecting southern women.

A Tennessee recruitment poster, this one real, got right to the point. “To excite their hired and ruffian soldiers, they promise them our lands, and tell them our women are beautiful – that beauty is the reward of the brave…Shall we wait until our homes are laid desolate; until sword and rape shall have visited them? NEVER! TO ARMS!”

A search turns up no such promises of southern lands or southern belles.

Northern recruiting posters were more profit-incentivized, promising several-hundred-dollar bonuses for enlistments. Out-of-work immigrants, especially the Irish, were promised “good rations and handsome uniforms supplied at once.”

Appeals to “Defend the Stars and Stripes” and “Stand by the Flag” seemed as passionate as they got. One speaks of serving nine months and returning “with honor and glory.” Another promised “An Excursion Party to the Sunny South!”

One poster had a startling photograph of what appears to be the smoldering ruins of Hampton after fleeing Confederates put it to the torch. “Civil War in Hampton Roads,” it read. “A New Beginning.”

A few posters called for black volunteers, including one that read, “MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS! TO ARMS! Fail now and our race is doomed.” Not only were enlistment bonuses offered but something else: “Valor and Heroism.”

It’s hard to believe now. One of the most devastating wars in history fought on American soil, at least part of it within earshot of where we live in Hampton Roads. Millions of men, North and South, taking up arms, hundreds of thousands killed.

There’s no point rehashing the debate over the cause of the war, not here anyhow. But it’s fascinating to see a place like Suffolk, where war once touched down like a tornado, reliving

April 24, 2011

2011-04-24T20:16:00.003-04:00

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

2011-04-19T08:06:00.003-04:00

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

2011-04-10T07:33:00.005-04:00

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

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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.”

March 27, 2011

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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

2011-03-19T07:36:00.003-04:00

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

2011-03-11T08:56:00.004-05:00

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

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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.

Feb 27, 2011

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Feb. 24, 1936 started off partly cloudy and slightly warmer than the day before. The Great Depression still loomed, but if you were a female and “attractive,” you could be a curb girl at Frank’s Barbecue in Norfolk. You could buy a Model A Ford in “running condition” for $35 and Golden Edge Straight Whisky, 100 proof, for 70 cents a pint.

A legal ad in the paper announced that the city was allowing Virginia Electric Power Co. to abandon its streetcar service, provided that it remove the tracks and repave the streets. The paper also began a fund drive to help the Union of Kings Daughters keep open a financially strapped nursery for needy children.
Photo of the Colley Theater in 1936, the year it opened. Next door is an A&P grocery and upstairs a beauty salon. Courtesy of the Naro Theater (Click to enlarge).

And at the Colley Theater in Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood, an American Legion drum and bugle corps from Portsmouth performed and bouquets of flowers were strewn at the entrance. Radio station WTAR carried the event live. Vaudeville performer Lee J. Greenwood served as master of ceremonies, and hundreds of customers streamed into the new art deco theater.

At 8:36 or thereabouts, a projectionist flipped a switch and the first frames of a movie version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Dick Powell, began flickering across the screen at 24 frames per second.

It was the first of thousands of movies that have, really, made up the history of what is now the Naro Theater, a neighborhood institution that celebrated its 75th anniversary this past Thursday.

Fittingly, the Naro featured a hit film from that year, Charlie Chaplain’s “Modern Times”, written, directed and scored by the actor. It was considered the last of Chaplain’s silent films, although there was plenty of sound, including a nonsense Italian-French song he appeared to adlib when his shirt cuff – on which the words were written – flew off. Paulette Goddard played a waif who sticks by him through tough times.

The theater also showed a video of its history with slides of famous stars that have graced its screen, including James Dean, Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Jackie Gleason, Paul Newman, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland and a dozen or so others. Part of the background soundtrack is the 1970s song “Widescreen.”

The Colley was the brain child of a consummate showman and entrepreneur, William S. Wilder, who built or bought about half a dozen theaters in the area, including Portsmouth’s Commodore. He produced and promoted vaudeville shows, some of which he brought to Norfolk’s Center Theater – now Harrison Opera House.

When he died in 1946, his movie business was continued by his wife, Myde Wilder. In the 1960s the Colley changed hands and the new owner, Robert Levine, renamed it the Naro after his father, Nathan, and his mother, Rose. He owned or operated a number of single-screen suburban theaters, including the Riverview on upper Granby St., the Rosele in Ocean View and the extravagant Memrose that was torn down in the 70s for the expansion of Norfolk Sentara Hospital.

The Naro had a brief life in the 1970s as a playhouse, the Actor’s Theater, with live stage productions.

In the fall of 1977, the Naro’s lease was taken over by two homegrown friends, Tench Phillips and Thom Vourlas, who lived down the street from the theater and hoped to showcase some of the foreign, art and independent films that had been missing from local screens. The company, Art Repertory Films, in competition with big theater chains, thrived in what the owners call the Golden Age for specialty cinema, the next two decades.

The Naro was adopted by Ghent residents as a favorite gathering place, and when the theater was hard pressed 10 years ago by the need to renovate, rose up and – in the spirit of Clarence, the guardian angel of the perennial favorite “It’s a Wonderful Life,” came up with the cash to help buy new seats, fix the roof and modernize the projection booth.

Now the partners are getting ready to negotiate a new 10-year lease, and hope to carry out further improvements. Although most movie theaters are gradually making the switch to digital projectors, they plan to keep the old 35 mm machines for those special occasions when revivals are held.

As both of them say, almost every day they cause cellulose images to flash across the screen, who knew they’d be at it this long?

Feb. 20, 2011

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I’ve been thinking about revolution. Who would not after witnessing the dizzying events of recent weeks in Egypt and just about every country in the Middle East?

It was America, after all, where the idea of throwing off a repressive government, one that trampled on the rights of individuals, was born. When people around the world cry out for justice and freedom, where they demand democracy, are they not seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

The painting by Julius Stearns shows George Washington overseeing slaves harvesting grain on his plantation at Mt. Vernon. Library of Congress. (click to enlarge.)

This country, this last best hope of the earth, as Lincoln put it, is where this powder keg was created.

Mr. Jefferson lighted a candle in the dark when he dared to proclaim that all men are created equal. But he also, inadvertently, planted the seeds of civil war. He and his co-conspirators, Washington, Madison and those other slaveholding, radical Virginians.

It’s no accident that Colonial Williamsburg – you know, the folks with knee breeches and hoop skirts – held a conference this weekend called Storm on the Horizon: Slavery, Disunion and the Roots of the Civil War. Black actors portraying colonial era slaves spoke of the paradox of being owned and forced to labor by masters who gave lip service to the idea of individual freedom.

“As much as they wanted in their hearts to move away from slavery, it was impossible for them to conceive of it financially, ”one of the actors, Richard Josey, who grew up in Williamsburg, told me.

The seeds of disunion were planted by the revolution. Before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, slavery was prevalent throughout the colonies. It was just as common for factory owners in New England and bankers in New York to have kitchen slaves as it was for plantation owners in Virginia to have field hands.

But almost immediately after the war, northern states one after another began banning slavery. The idea of human bondage was abhorrent to those espousing liberty. And it looked as though Virginia would soon join the rush toward abolition. As Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and history professor at Brown University, points out, Virginia had more abolition societies than all of the northern states combined.

Unlike the Deep South, where slaves toiled almost exclusively in rice and cotton fields, Virginia had more slaves than it knew what to do with. Many were hired out to work for wages as carpenters, dock workers and even boat captains. Many used their earnings to buy their freedom. Whites and blacks mingled in taverns and the work place, and worshipped in the same churches.

It was only a matter of time before the institution of slavery would collapse, many thought. George Washington, who promised that after Martha’s death, his slaves would be freed, believed it would happen in due course.

But Wood, who spoke yesterday in Williamsburg, described how a chasm between the North and the South began to widen after the war. Spurning slavery, the North turned into maybe the most commercialized society the world had ever known, one that celebrated labor as none had before.

At the same time, the South celebrated, well not exactly sloth, but sitting back and letting someone else work for you. It’s true that not everyone in the South owned slaves. Many whites planted and picked their own cotton. But the idea that they might make enough money to buy someone to work for them was almost universal, Wood told me in a phone interview last week.

“These two societies were going to clash,” he said, “and I think the threat posed by Lincoln’s election was very scary to the southerners.”

Lincoln, who was very much in tune with Jefferson’s thoughts, used the revolution as justification for promising to ban slavery in the west and, ultimately, for writing the Emancipation Proclamation.

But freedom, as Richard Josey’s slave character points out, wasn’t the same thing as equality. That would not be decided until another revolution came along.
When young people, assembling peaceably in massive numbers, demonstrating, marching, enduring the violence of tear gas, bullets, club-wielding thugs and heavy handed cops, refused to give up until their demands were met.

Sound familiar?

Feb 13, 2011

2011-02-12T17:34:00.003-05:00

The hall of Mechanics’ Institute in Richmond, the largest available venue in the city, was jammed. Delegates from around a state that then included Appalachian counties to the west assembled. Public galleries, one for women, one for men. were packed.

There was a hum of excitement, but also an air of dread as, 150 years ago today, delegates to the Virginia State Convention gathered to consider whether or not to break away from the United States of America.

At first, there was every reason to believe they would not.

John Janney, a pro-Unionist Quaker from Loudoun County, was elected president of the convention and set the tone when he said on opening day that the consequences of their action “may be full of good or full of evil.”

There was hearty applause when he added, "I hope and trust that the result of our labors may redound to the good of the State and of the Union."

If you’re a history buff – with maybe an iron tailbone – you can read all about this extraordinary gathering in a mind-numbing – about 3200 pages – but still fascinating four-volume tome: Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention, in the history collection at the Norfolk Public Library.

It’s not exactly “Gone with the Wind,” but there is drama here, Scarlett, and treachery.

Both delegates from Norfolk County – which then included Portsmouth – and one from Norfolk City opposed secession. Much of the region’s prosperity depended on commerce with the North. They were mostly silent during the debates, but Princess Anne’s representative was another story.

From almost the moment he arrived, a few days late, gaunt, vain, mercurial former Gov. Henry A. Wise was a force to be reckoned with, provoking laughter, applause and, ultimately, disbelief among pro-Union delegates. In his first speech, he warned that if anything met with his disapproval “I shall demand the right, I shall demand the power, of objection…This is not the hour to submit to one inch of arbitrary power [LOUD APPLAUSE].”

From the outset of the convention, it was clear that Virginia, the largest and most prestigious southern state, held the fate of the Union in its hands. All of the border states, including North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, waited to see which way it would go. If Virginia held with the Union, there might be little more than a brief rebellion and then peace.

Other heavy hitters at the gathering included former President John Tyler of Charles City County, who had chaired a last-ditch. crashingly unsuccessful, Peace Conference in Washington; and Jubal Early, a contentious former army officer from Franklin County. Early, who would later serve as a Confederate general, warned that secession would be “a great crime…perpetrated against the cause of liberty and civilization.” The convention droned on with neck-snapping verbosity for three weeks, with some speeches lasting entire days. But there was intrigue, too. Henry Wise was accused of conspiring to stage an armed invasion of Washington (!), a charge he denounced as slander. But judging from what would come later, that wouldn’t be far-fetched.

At any rate, he and the other radicals called for a vote and on April 4 were soundly whipped. The first secession attempt was defeated 90 to 45.

But that was to change only eight days later. On April 12, Confederate batteries in Charleston opened fire on Fort Sumter, forcing the evacuation of federal forces. Though no one was killed, the country was suddenly at war.

Still desperate for peace, the convention on April 15 sent a three-member delegation to meet with Lincoln. He was curt with them, and no wonder. He was about to call up 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion, including recruits from still-loyal border states.

That did it. White southerners against white southerners? The delegates to the convention – still in session – stampeded to the secessionist side.

But Wise was taking no chances. Because the reluctant governor, John Letcher, had balked at acting, he and co-conspirators the night before sent a telegram to have militia companies in the western part of the state storm the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.

Brandishing a revolver before the delegates, Wise predicted that “blood will be flowing at Harper’s Ferry before night.”

No more foolish debates, he told them. The only result “must be delay and, perhaps, ruin.”

Wise called for the vote and this time it was 88 to 55 in favor of secession. When voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum on May 23, Virginia joined the Confederate States of America.

Photo. Former Virginia Gov. Henry A. Wise owned a plantation in Princess Anne County known as Rolleston. It was seized by the federal government and used as a training camp for former slaves. Library of Congress.

Feb. 6, 2011

2011-02-06T13:29:00.002-05:00

You walk into a three-sided display and suddenly feel you’re in the midst of Confederate soldiers charging a Union position. All around you is chaos: men yelling, guns firing, bodies falling. “Help me! Help me!” a wounded man cries.

Aided by photographs. computer-generated effects that create the illusion of movement and surround-sound technology, you are there. You are experiencing a Civil
War battle – in this case one that was fought in the Shenandoah Valley – in all its blood and gore.

Or you assume the identity of a slave attempting to escape in the middle of the night and find your way to Union lines. You take a small amount of food to tide you over – it could be several days – and leave after dark, making sure the moonlight doesn’t betray you.

You stop to speak to another slave who looks you in the eye.

“There’s all sorts of rumors about Union soldiers near here,” he tells you. “I heard you’d find ‘em if you go to the crossroads by the mill and head east. Others say there’s some not far from where you cross the Pamunkey River. Now git before you get us both in trouble.”

These are two of the most elaborate elements of an ambitious exhibit that opened Friday at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. Called “An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia,” it sprawls over 3,000 square feet in the Society’s neoclassical headquarters in downtown and features more than 200 objects and 17 state-of-the art audiovisual programs.

Combined with another offering at the Library of Virginia, “Union or Secession, Virginians Decide,” it’s Virginia’s best opening shot, as it were, in observing the 150th anniversary of the long and bloody war that changed the face and character of America, maybe for all time.

Virginia, largest and most prosperous state in the South and mother lode of Revolutionary War patriots, was considered the tipping point of the Civil War. Much of the middle South watched as this state debated joining the Confederacy, and much of the nation waited with baited breath. “All depends upon the action of Virginia,” said Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois. “Save Virginia, and we will save the Union.”

But they didn’t, of course, and close to 50,000 Virginians lost life or limb during four years of war. Because of its proximity to Washington, the state endured more than 2000 battles.

There’s an elaborate display of the major battles, but the Historical Society’s exhibit focuses mostly on individuals who fought in the war or who were affected by it. Among them are Siah Carter, an escaped slave from Shirley Plantation who rowed out to the ironclad Monitor while it lay at anchor in the James River and was taken on as first assistant to the ship’s cook and later survived its loss at sea.

Another was Alexander Augusta of Norfolk who earned his medical degree in Canada and, while practicing in Washington, was appointed surgeon of the 7th U.S. Colored Troops. At war’s end, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel for meritorious service, becoming the highest-ranking African American in the military.

For those who are text-savvy, there’s a display about how its distant relative, the telegraph, worked. It challenges visitors to key a message into their cell phones faster than the telegrapher, who often – just like counterparts today – abbreviated many words and phrases.

The exhibition runs through the end of the year, then goes on the road to locations throughout the state. One stop early next year will be the Hampton History Museum.
In the meantime, if we’re not up for a drive to Richmond just yet, the website www.vahistorical.org has a fast-moving video on the lead-up to the war.

Photo. Pvt. Henry Bird of Petersburg took the oath of allegiance to the United States so he could marry. He penned a note of apology to his fiancée, Margaret Randolph. “My darling, we are all strangers to the land now.” Virginia Historical Society.

Jan. 30, 2011

2011-01-29T15:44:00.003-05:00

The mystery lingers. How could it not?

Generations have come and gone since the disappearance of the World War I collier Cyclops somewhere between Barbados and Hampton Roads.

The Navy did its best to locate the vessel. A retired master diver thought he had stumbled across the wreckage while searching for a missing sub. Clive Cussler paid for a subsequent search. All to no avail. The greatest mystery in Navy annals persisted.

This much we know: The Cyclops steamed out of Norfolk in early 1918, bound for Brazil with a load of coal. Orders were to return with its hold full of manganese ore for the war effort. Stopping briefly in Barbados on March 3, the ship departed the next day for Baltimore.

And vanished. All 309 passengers and crew lost. Never a trace of wreckage, never a distress signal. “Voyage to oblivion,” someone called it.

Theories abound: German torpedoes sank it or a German-leaning captain sailed it home to the Fatherland. The Bermuda Triangle swallowed it whole. A violent storm off the Virginia Capes caught its crew off guard.

President Woodrow Wilson’s pronouncement that “Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship” seems to have held true.

But has it?

A column I wrote last week, showing a spare parts chest that someone liberated from the ship while it was in port – it was later found in the basement of a house on 37th Street in Norfolk and donated to the Mariners’ Museum – generated a flurry of e-mails. And piqued my interest again.

“My dad was Chief Master Diver Dean D. Hawes,” wrote Deana Zagorski. “He had stated till the day he passed away he had stood on the bow of USS Cyclops back in 1969 while searching for the Scorpion.”

Hawes did stand on the deck of a sunken wreck about 70 miles off the Capes. He was sure it was the Cyclops and convinced the Navy, then Cussler, the undersea explorer and author,to stage searches. Virginian-Pilot reporter Tony Germanotta went out with him in his last quest in 1983 and recorded his disappointment when a diver surfaced and said, “That ain’t it,Dean."

Jerry Unser wrote that his grandfather, Lawrence “Pappy” Martin, who lived on Somme Ave. in Norfolk, had served as merchantman on the Cyclops and went on leave shortly before its fatal voyage to Brazil.

“He said emphatically there was no mystery surrounding the sinking of the boat as it was a ‘rusted piece of junk,’” Unser wrote. “He said that with wave action and the boat going through heat stresses carrying ore such as coal, manganese, etc., it would split at the seams. Crews would go out and drill small holes at these points to stop the cracks, and effect more permanent repairs later. “

It’s true that the ship may have had structural flaws, a point brought home when two sister ships later went to the bottom. So here’s the best theory: Overloaded and hit by a powerful storm, it broke apart, suddenly, before signals could be made or lifeboats deployed.

But where? Apparently we’ll never know.

There are few surviving photos, but here, suddenly, comes one from a reader, David Moscopolos, with this note:

“My grandfather was a cook on the ship right before it was missing. He was attached to the ship as a merchant seaman. He always liked Norfolk and he decided to live here…once he was discharged.” James Moscopolos owned a meat market in downtown Norfolk and lived in Princess Anne County until he died in 1953.

The photo shows Moscopolos, with dapper mustache and Greek sailor cap, on board the doomed ship with a buddy. He’d request and receive his discharge at the age of 30 in 1912. It was a good time to quit. He’d have 41 more years to live.

Photo: Merchant seaman James Moscopolos, at left with a fellow crew member on board the Cyclops in about 1912. Courtesy of David Moscopolos.

Jan. 23, 2011

2011-01-23T17:32:00.005-05:00

In a storage room of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News is a glimpse of an unfathomable mystery.

A small, humble chest, wooden, dark green, splotched with red and bearing a stenciled identity, “U.S.S CYCLOPS, MISC. SPARES …COAL CONVEYOR MOTORS,” is empty now, save for the musty smell of the wood.

And maybe a hint of tragedy.

The Cyclops, born a collier at a shipyard in Philadelphia in 1910, steamed to Norfolk to join the Navy’s Auxiliary Service to refuel ships of the Atlantic Fleet. The massive vessel -- 542 feet long by 65 wide – was a workhorse of the fleet, servicing ships from Newport, R.I., to the Caribbean. There was a stint in the Baltic in 1911 and, during troubled conditions in Mexico in 1914, valiant service evacuating refugees.
But there was something odd about the Cyclops, specifically its skipper, LCDR George

W. Worley, who was known as both colorful and tyrannical. According to ship’s lore, he might cavort about in longjohns and derby hat one day and chase a fellow officer with a pistol the next. His reputation for cruelty rivaling that of HMS Bounty’s William Bligh, he berated and cursed insubordinates for trivial offenses.

And then there was this: he was born Johann Frederick Wichmann in Hanover, Germany, changing his name after jumping ship in San Francisco in 1878. This would come to light after what became one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in naval history.

The Cyclops, now a commissioned Navy ship and Worley a full commander, departed Norfolk in early February 1918 for Rio de Janeiro. Stopping in Bahia, Brazil and taking on manganese ore, which was used in weapons-making, she headed back toward Hampton Roads, with a brief stop in Barbados on March 3.

And was never seen or heard from again.

With the Cyclops due in port no later than March 13, the Navy was reported several days later to express “extreme anxiety” over its fate and that of 309 passengers and crew. A massive search and wireless calls up and down its route found not a shred of wreckage, not a radioed answer.

The disappearance of the Cyclops was the gravest non-combat loss of a Navy ship. And one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the deep.

“She really just literally got swallowed by the sea,” said Marc Nucup, associate curator at the museum.

There have been dozens of theories, among the most intriguing swirling about Commander Worley’s alleged German sympathies, as well as those of one of his passengers, Alfred Gottschalk, U.S. consul-general in Rio. Did the two conspire to hand the ship over to the Germans?

One contributing piece of the puzzle is that Worley, who lived in Norfolk with his wife and daughter. sold his house just before departing – as though planning never to return.

Or did a German U-boat sink the Cyclops, with all hands going to the bottom?
The problem with these theories is that a search of German admiralty records didn’t offer a clue.

Did the ship break apart in a storm?

The problem here is that there were no distress signals and no debris.
The most likely scenario revolves about the fact that the Cyclops, with 10,000 tons of manganese ore on board, was severely overloaded. It’s possible that a cargo shift increased the ship’s list just enough to make it vulnerable to a rogue wave, which could cause it to suddenly turn turtle and sink before a distress call could be made or a lifeboat launched.

Then, too, the Cyclops was thought to have a structural weakness amidships that might have caused it to break in two. This theory gained credence after two sister ships sank during World War II.

But no distress calls? No debris? No sunken remains?

The Mariners’ Museum has a few artifacts. In addition to contemporary news accounts, the museum library has a postcard showing the Cyclops berthed at a pier, and an engraved invitation to a reception on another ship.

Then there’s the wooden chest. It was apparently taken home by one of the crew during a stay in port and, years later, found in a basement and turned over to the museum.

Even though it has no connection to the ship’s sad fate, there’s a weird feeling about it. Maybe because it’s just about the only tangible proof that the Cyclops even existed.

Photos:
The wooden chest. The Mariner’s Museum photo staff added a few touches of mystery.
The U.S.S. Cyclops at anchor.

Both courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

Jan. 16, 2011

2011-01-16T09:38:00.005-05:00

The year was 1959. The Tidewater area – remember when it was called that? – was feeling the pressure of baby boomers whose parents had arrived here during World War II. They were now ready for college but there were few choices of four-year residential campuses.

At the same time, a farm family on land that straddled Norfolk and Princess Anne County was feeling the pressure of growing real estate taxes and wished to sell.

Luckily for both the students and the farmers, Joseph S. Johnston, a local Methodist church official, had a vision that the church build a college in or near Norfolk. There were studies, of course, but events followed swiftly.
A 1962 aerial view of the Virginia Wesleyan site shows farm buildings in the center and, in upper left, still-standing World War II barracks. Courtesy Virginia Wesleyan College. (Click to enlarge)

In February 1961, reading from a scribbled note on the back of a voucher slip, Johnston moved that the Virginia Methodist Commission on Christian Higher Education recommend “the establishment at the earliest possible date of a 4-year co-ed campus-type Methodist College in the Norfolk area.”

It was an idea whose time had come. In June of the same year, delegates to the Virginia Methodist Annual Conference in Virginia Beach voted overwhelmingly in favor of establishing Virginia Wesleyan College. After an all-night session with attorneys, a charter for the new school was approved. Even though the school wouldn’t open for five years, with many hurdles and crises to face, it marked the official beginning of the new college.

This is the story that Stephen S. Mansfield, who has been associated with Virginia Wesleyan Collage for most of its history has woven together in a new book, Wisdom Lights the Way, Virginia Wesleyan College’s First Half Century.

It wasn’t as simple as deciding to build a college, choosing the land and plunking it down in the middle of farm fields. There were tough choices to be made, not the least of which was finding the money, deciding on a site and coming to terms with one of the major issues of the day, the dawning civil rights revolution.

There were no less than 17 potential sites, one at the Virginia Beach oceanfront, another on farm land near Great Bridge. There was also the thought of relocating then-struggling Randolph-Macon College in Ashland to Norfolk.

The property that brothers William and John Smith owned – then on Burma Road – had an interesting history. It had been part of land the federal government confiscated in 1866 as a temporary station for recently freed slaves. During World War II, part of the property was used for barracks for pilots in training. Next to the Smith’s land was another parcel of 56 acres that once contained a prison farm.

The price for the 305 acres was $607,000, considerably less than the appraised value of $3,000 an acre, with the difference representing a gift to the college. One stipulation was that the mailing address be Norfolk, even though part of the campus was in Princess Anne, now Virginia Beach. Another 56-acre tract to the north was also available, but the trustees agreed to allow another potential purchaser, Norfolk Academy, to buy it.

Finally, the decision was made to change the name of Burma Road to Wesleyan Drive.

Another thorny issue had to be settled, and quickly. In order to qualify for federal and foundation loans and grants, Virginia Wesleyan had to open its doors to all. Some trustees worried about losing support from potential donors, but they agreed with Johnston’s position that “Virginia Wesleyan College under the freedom of its charter declare its policy to be one of service to all qualified persons seeking a higher education without regard to their age, race, color, or religion.”

Now, all they had to do was raise $3 million – and that proved harder than expected. One July 1964 Pilot story reported, “Virginia Wesleyan College is in trouble.” But donors stepped up to the plate and ground was broken one year later. In September 1966, with a first-year class of only 75, Virginia Wesleyan opened. It would grow to about 1,300 in 2011.

Mansfield joined the college’s history faculty in 1968, later becoming vice president for academic affairs and dean. After retiring five years ago, he began organizing the school’s archives – and working on this book.

Reflecting on all the participants in the college’s beginnings and all of the students that have come through its doors, Mansfield wrote, “I sense the eyes, or ghosts, of all these persons looking over my shoulder now, hoping that I ‘get it right’ in this first attempt at telling the VWC story.”

January 9, 2011

2011-01-09T08:36:00.005-05:00

Pre-Civil War Norfolk must have been a strange place. Once again prospering after its devastating yellow fever epidemic five years past, the city’s warehouses were bulging with corn and wheat.

Thousands of bales of cotton were leaving city docks every week, bound for New York. Steamships were sailing and rail lines rolling almost constantly toward western and northern markets.

The New York and Virginia Steamship Company announced in November 1860 that the “Roanoke” would be making two non-stop trips a week to New York. “This arrangement,” the newspaper Southern Argus trumpeted, “will render that favorite line still more popular and at the same greatly facilitate the commercial operations of our city.”

And yet, the Argus, in just about the same breath, was fulminating about “northern aggression” with regard to slavery and applauding South Carolina and other Deep South states for threatening to secede from the Union. And making racist comments about inferiority.

Reeling through microfilm in Norfolk Public Library’s local history room is like tiptoeing through a minefield. I was looking for evidence of the mood hereabouts as Virginia toyed with the idea of breaking away from the nation it helped create.

It couldn’t happen, many ardent unionists felt, not in “the Old Mother State” where the seeds of independence had been sown. Were not more Founding Fathers, indeed more presidents, of those same United States sired in these quarters? Slave-holding founders, to be sure, and, yes, states’ rights champions, but still…

“Secession is not disunion,” the Argus theorized on Nov. 14. “It is simply a mode of protecting ourselves against aggression and wrong from the North.”

This short-lived daily – it had a run of about 12 years just prior to the war – carried advertisements on its front page about miracle remedies for just about every ailment. And interesting declarations, like the one by A.H. Lindsay of Deep Creek who was selling his 1,000-acre farm fronting on the Dismal Swamp Canal. “The health of the place is excellent,” he claimed. “My doctor’s bill for over fifty negroes, during the year, was only twenty-six dollars.” Location, location…

The Argus was also railing against its competitor, The Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald, for advocating that Virginia remain in the Union. Why should the state “dance crazily out of the Union to the fiddling of South Carolina,” the Herald had dared to wonder.

The rebellious South Carolina abandoned the Union on Dec. 20, followed quickly by Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. But Virginia, at least for the moment, was against secession, and Gov. John Letcher fought to keep the state out of the Confederacy.

Still, the drumbeat of confrontation was growing daily. “Minute Men” organizations were springing up throughout the South, including one in Norfolk that claimed in its bylaws “the inalienable right to resist unconstitutional aggressions by the Federal Government.”

One of the cheerleaders for disunion was former Gov. Henry Wise, now living near the Norfolk line in Princess Anne County. In a letter published in the Argus, he advocated raising an army and building warships in case war became necessary. “I say then, stick to all your rights, renounce none, fight for all and save all!”

On Jan. 7 – 150 years ago this week – the state legislature determined that a secession convention should be held the following month. But it was then with the clear expectation that cooler heads would prevail and Virginia would vote overwhelmingly to remain in the Union.

In fact, it did, but that was before the guns of April.

Illustration: A Flyer for the Daily Southern Argus from 1852, courtesy of Brown University Library.

Dec. 19, 2010

2010-12-19T09:37:00.004-05:00

So there they were, virtual prisoners aboard their ship while the British weighed their fate. Would they be set free or turned over to the Americans who wanted them tried as pirates?

The CSS Shenandoah, out of touch with the world and its news, had virtually destroyed New England’s whaling fleet months after the Civil War ended. In an extraordinary halfway-round-the-world flight to avoid capture, the rogue ship docked in Liverpool and surrendered to British authorities.

Among the officers and crew was the young, romantic, but also tormented, executive officer, William Conway Whittle Jr., son of a prominent Norfolk family.

Not only were his thoughts weighed down by cares of his family – whether they would be ill-treated or starved by the Yankee scoundrels – but with yearnings for a mystery woman.

Pattie. Dear Pattie. Darling Pattie. Whittle’s extraordinary journal, written while at sea for more than a year, is full of lamentations for a young woman about his age, 22, whom he had apparently met only once. And yet he was, at least temporarily, madly in love with her.

As the Shenandoah battled storms and dodged federal cruisers seeking to capture or destroy it, Whittle imagined not so much his death but life in exile without her.

“To know how I feel would give anyone the blues. How my position is altered. No country, no home, no profession, and alas: to think the fondest wish of my heart, i.e., to marry, must be abandoned. Oh! My darling Pattie, how can I give thee up?”

Whittle was a complex fellow. The son of a naval officer, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at 18, joined the Navy and, when Virginia seceded from the Union, resigned his commission and joined the southern cause. He proved to be a daring blockade runner and spy, helping spirit the Shenandoah out from under British noses and turn it into a lethal weapon against northern shipping.

But he was also young and heartsick.

Another journal from 1863, tucked into files at Norfolk Public Library’s history collection, mentions letters “from my dear little Pattie.” But he also dotes on a young and beautiful woman he met while stationed in Paris.

“If I do not fall in love with this sweet creature, I shall…” and here his tiny, scrunched handwriting is illegible, even with help of a magnifying glass.

Whatever happened to these young women remains a mystery. He never mentions them again in his later writings. What we do know is that the British let all crew members go free and that Whittle went into exile in Argentina for three years. Finally, when a general amnesty was declared, he returned to Norfolk.

And that in 1872 he married Elizabeth Calvert Page, daughter of Richard Lucien Page, a naval officer, and Sarah Alexina [cq] Taylor. They settled into what would be known as the Taylor-Whittle House, a Federal-Georgian architectural gem on West Freemason St. and raised four children.

The house is owned by the city and leased to the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach, with upstairs offices used by the Norfolk Historical Society.

Whittle spent 22 years as skipper of a steamboat that plied the Chesapeake between Norfolk and Baltimore. He was also a founder of the Bank of Virginia. He and Elizabeth lived comfortably in Norfolk until his death in 1920 at the age of 80.

The last residents of the house were two of Whittle’s granddaughters. Mary Beverley Dabney and Betty Page Dabney, both schoolteachers, lived there until 1972 when the house was donated to the Norfolk Historic Foundation and, ultimately, to the city.

Betty Dabney, a poet, might have been thinking about their grandfather when she wrote “Last Voyage”:

To that unvisited harbor I must bring
My vessel in at last.
From the thronged seaways and the smoky hum
Of traffic in the ports, surrendering
All but a shadowy cargo, I shall come
Where the waves arch their glassy backs, then past
The lines of breakers, home.
There the slow ripple that spreads on the cold strand
Shall beach me, light as a shell.
The brown grass on the hills, the birdless air,
The winter light that touches all that land,
I shall know well.
Accept the sand that drifts and sifts and covers,
Soft as a fleece and deep,
Let my last treasure slip from my strenghless fingers
And into a frosty silence
Sleep.

Sketch of The Taylor-Whittle House, circa 1790, on West Freemason Street in Norfolk. Courtesy of the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach.

Dec. 12, 2010

2010-12-12T09:49:00.004-05:00

When they heard the news that the war had ended months before – while they were capturing and burning dozens of whaling ships – the 132 crew members of the CSS Shenandoah were devastated.

“The darkest day of my life,” Lt. William Conway Whittle Jr. lamented in his journal. “The past is gone for naught, the future as black as the darkest night. Oh! God protect and comfort us I pray.”

Whittle, the son of a prominent Norfolk sea captain, was executive officer on board the fast clipper during its frenzied destruction of northern merchant ships after departing London in October 1864.

They had sailed around Africa, heading east, all the way to the Bering Sea off Alaska. Now, the following August, learning that the war had ended in April, the men suddenly realized they were likely to be chased down as pirates and likely suffer the consequences: death by hanging.

They were off Northern California, some 18,000 miles from England. The only hope was to make it to a neutral port, either Melbourne, Australia, which was relatively close, or Cape Town, South Africa, somewhat farther but also under British rule.

Capt. James Waddell surprised and angered many of his fellow officers by seemingly steering toward Melbourne, then changing course and heading for Liverpool. The risks of being captured by a Union ship or wrecked in a storm or simply worn out after what would amount to more than a year at sea were enormous. There was almost a mutiny, but Waddell stuck to his guns.

Whittle, his second in command, privately considered Waddell a fool, but stood by his captain.

The three-masted Shenandoah was a race horse, capable of making 16 knots under sail. In its belly was a 250 hp steam engine and on deck a telescoping smoke stack. When in doldrums, the crew could fire up the boiler, raise the stack and soldier along at half the speed. It was this auxiliary power that would save them.

Having swung around Cape Horn and heading through shipping lanes off the shoulder of Africa, no enemy warships had been spotted. But one afternoon in late October their luck ran out. A menacing shape was spotted on the horizon.

A federal brig had altered course and, under full sail, was bearing down on them. Winds were light, so there was no way to outrun their foe, and if they raised the smoke stack or changed course, it would be a dead giveaway. Fortunately, it was late in the day and they sailed innocently along until darkness blanketed them, then fired the boilers and altered course, ducking east below the path of the enemy.

“If she be a Yankee, she will be somewhat astonished tomorrow to find no vessel in sight.” Whittle mused. “She will have a sweet time finding us….”

The Shenandoah sailed 58,000 miles over a period of 13 months and carried the Confederate flag completely around the world. But on the night of Nov. 5, 1865, the entrance to the River Mersey was confusing. They set off a flare, requesting a pilot.
Shortly after midnight, Whittle welcomed a pilot aboard, and the two had a brisk conversation.

“Good morning. What ship is this?”

“The late Confederate steamer Shenandoah.”

“The hell you say. Where have you fellows come from last?”

“From the Arctic Ocean.”

“And you haven’t stopped at any port since you left there?”

“No, nor been in sight of land, either. What news from the war in America?”

“Why, the war has been over so long people have got through talking about it. Jeff Davis is in Fortress Monroe, and the Yankees have a lot of cruisers looking for you.”

Whittle was still a long way from what would become known as the Taylor-Whittle House in Norfolk’s Freemason neighborhood. The residence, one of the best examples anywhere of Federal period architecture, will be open today for visitors – as will other historic houses in the city – from noon to 5 p.m.

Next week: Tense moments awaiting their fate; a mystery woman vanishes; exile and, finally, a homecoming.

Artist's depiction of the CSS Shenendoah in waters off Alaska. Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Historical Center.

Dec. 5, 2010

2010-12-04T12:49:00.004-05:00

In October 1864 a tall, fit-looking young man appeared in the restaurant of a hotel
in central London with a newspaper under his arm. Taking a seat, he inserted the corner of a napkin in a button hole in his coat and began scanning the headlines.
A stranger, dressed in business garb, approached.

“Is this Mr. Brown?” the stranger asked.

“Yes,” replied the young man. “Is this Mr. Wright?”

In what might seem a clichéd scene from a modern spy novel, the two breakfasted together and then repaired to one of the hotel rooms where they mapped out an elaborate scheme to sneak a fast merchant ship from under the nose of the British authorities and turn it over to the Confederate States of America.

The 23-year-old man was not “Mr. Brown,” but Lieutenant William Conway Whittle Jr. of Norfolk, son of a prominent naval officer. Whittle had already gained a reputation as a daring blockade runner.

What was to become his home on West Freemason Street in Norfolk is one of the finest examples of Federal-style architecture in the nation. Now occupied by the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach and the Norfolk Historical Society, the Taylor-Whittle House will be the scene of an open house next Sunday, Dec. 12, from noon to 5.

Just before the Sea King, a 230-foot, three-masted clipper ship, was to set sail, ostensibly to deliver coal to Bombay, Whittle, acting like a drunken sailor, stumbled down to the pier and clambered aboard. Those watching the piers were none the wiser.

Then, in a series of audacious moves, the Sea King rendezvoused with another ship loaded with small arms, munitions, powder and stores in the Madeira Islands off Africa, and within days the men had transformed the black-hulled merchant vessel into armed, lightning-fast raider and rechristened it the CSS Shenandoah. Its orders were to strike a blow at the North’s industrial might by destroying its whaling fleet.

Under the command of North Carolinian James Waddell, with Whittle serving as executive officer, the Shenandoah sailed halfway around the world to the Gulf of Alaska, taking merchant ships almost at will, acquiring a multi-national crew. Then, with unflagging efficiency, the Shenandoah seized and sank dozens of whaling ships. By the time they were through, they had seized or sunk 40 ships and suffered not a single casualty – or barely even a scratch.

But what Waddell and Whittle did not know –and could not because of their isolation – was that the war had ended months before. Just as they began their prodigious shipwrecking campaign, Robert E. Lee was surrendering at Appomattox.

The Shenandoah had received conflicting reports of the war’s last days and chose to ignore them. Lee would never surrender, Whittle believed.

He was a bit of a zealot, spewing venom on “those miserable Yankees in his journal. “I regard them individually and collectively as a pack of scoundrels consummated in every variety to rascality.”

In the Pacific again and headed south, Captain Waddell even considered bombarding and subduing San Francisco, but decided he’d make sure there was still a cause to fight for.

“On Aug. 12 …we saw a vessel, a sailing bark, which we chased under steam and sail, and overhauled and boarded her at 4 p.m.,” Whittle recalled. When asked about the war, “the English captain said. ‘What war?’” It had ended in April.

The realization that they had spent all this time destroying vessels of a peaceful nation, and that they were probably then and there being hunted by that nation’s warships struck like a thunderclap.

“We were bereft of country, bereft of Government, bereft of ground for hope or aspiration, bereft of a cause for which to struggle and suffer,” he moaned.

The crew immediately began disarming the by-now notorious raider, loading the ship’s guns in the hold for ballast. But what would they do? Where would they go? To whom would they surrender? Would they be tried as criminals and, most likely, convicted and hung for piracy? Could they make it safely to a neutral country?

They were thousands of miles and months away from knowing.

Next Sunday: The end of one of the strangest voyages in naval history

William Conway Whittle Jr, lieutenant in the Confederate Navy, was an 1858 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy -- at the age of 18. Courtesy of the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach.

Nov. 28, 2010

2010-11-28T22:00:00.005-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Sloane family, the wealthy and energetic New Yorkers whose influence changed Norfolk’s business and cultural life.

William Sloane took over several knitting mills in Berkley and Portsmouth and made a
fortune selling underwear to the Army and Navy during World War I. Florence Sloane became a driving force behind creation of an art museum, forerunner of the Chrysler.

And together they built and lavishly decorated the Hermitage, now a museum and garden on the Lafayette River.

The Sloanes didn’t forget the reason for their growing wealth. They not only established a service club and convalescent hospital for the military but turned their home into a virtual weekend playground for service members.

On summer weekends from 1914 to 1918 the Sloanes entertained American, Australian and English troops on the lawn and gardens of the Hermitage. The entertainment
included cookouts, games and music, with as many as 1800 arriving for one event.

At the same time, Florence volunteered as postmistress, sewed for the Red Cross and helped out at the hospitals. The couple even donated their yacht for use as a patrol boat to search for German submarines.

Last month I included a portrait of Mrs. Sloane and regretted not being able to show these great pictures of the troops disporting themselves on the grounds of the mansion. It’s clear the Sloanes weren’t just being patriotic but enjoyed sharing their good fortune with the troops.

Above photos show troops engaged in a human wheelbarrow race on the lawn of the Hermitage, and the Sloanes entertaining guests at a Saturday lawn party. Click to enlarge. Courtesy of the Hermitage Museum and Garden.

Nov. 21, 2010

2010-11-21T09:55:00.008-05:00

Ward’s gas station and grocery in 1926 by Carroll Walker. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library. (Click to enlarge.)

“Mr. Ward wants to see you at Ward’s Corner.”

If you were a farmer bumping around the countryside north of Tanner’s Creek in your Model T a decade after the turn of the last century, you might have stopped at Alfred C. Ward’s general store and gas station and asked just what he wanted to see you about.

And what was this about Ward’s Corner?

Well, the story goes that shortly after Ward opened his store at the intersection of Sewell’s Point Road (now Little Creek) and Granby Street in 1910, an enterprising fellow named D. M. Bell, Norfolk’s first Ford dealer, got him a Michelin tire franchise and began a shrewd advertising campaign. He placed signs along nearby roads advising motorists of Mr. W’s wishes to see them.

And who would not, out of curiosity, stop by and find out what was going on? Seems everyone did, and not long after this crossroads amid lush farm fields began answering to that name.

This is a good time to reflect on Wards Corner’s past. Following a talk by Robert Hitchings, head of the Sargeant Memorial Collection at Norfolk Public Library, the group Wards Corner Now has added a history page to its Web site that includes several old photographs.

And merchants who have long urged the city to focus on revitalizing the corner have begun to see improvements and new stores. A recent City Council election drew attention to the old sprawling complex.

Buried in a thick rile of mostly yellowing newspaper clips at the downtown library is a fascinating history.

There wasn’t much there at first, no shopping center or nearby housing developments, just a store and converging roads. But growth was coming. In 1926, J. Beull Teggs and his brother Herbert opened Tegg’s Log Cabin barbecue restaurant, an instant hit. Folks heading out to Ocean View on the newly built trolley line could stop for a barbecue and coke or order a pork dinner and two sides for 40 cents. It also caught on as a late-night hangout.

Still, not much changed until, as one elegantly written Pilot story put it, World War II “swept the rural corner into memory so quickly that the returning serviceman could not believe his eyes.”

All four corners of the crossroads sprouted shopping centers or major stores. Tegg’s was replaced by a large Hofheimer’s Shoe Store. The northwest quadrant had a golf driving range and, briefly, a small airport. All together, there were several dozen retail shops and restaurants, plus a post office, a movie theater, bingo hall, skating rink, bowling alley and open air market.

In the boom that followed the war, the little crossroads became a major intersection that was in part famous for snarling traffic jams. Some consider Wards Corner – the apostrophe was somehow lost – one of the first shopping centers in America. One developer even proclaimed it “the Times Square of the South.”

It had a suburban but vaguely cosmopolitan air, where one might hear Yiddish and Greek spoken at the same dime store lunch counter. It was vibrant and at the same time haphazardly planned. A bar and Christian book store were nearly side by side, cheek-by-jowl with more beauty salons per square foot than just about any place in America.

Around this hub spread a half dozen or more housing tracts where generations of Norfolk families would grow up. So many stores and services were available that there was hardly any need to go elsewhere. “When we were kids,” one old-timer was quoted as saying, “we thought Wards Corner was the center of the universe.”

In February 1971, columnist Guy Fridell, who briefly lived at Wards Corner, wrote, “We never did a week’s shopping. Simply strolled, as if to another room, to the bakery, the drug store, the grocery, for whatever item was needed at the moment. Wards Corner served as a gargantuan pantry.”

Many who love Wards Corner believe it still does.

Nov. 14, 2010

2010-11-13T20:10:00.002-05:00

We know the scene. St. John’s Church. Richmond, March 1775. Delegates to the Second
Virginia Convention, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, convene to hammer out responses to the coercive measures that Britain has handed down to deal with those troublesome Americans.

And Patrick Henry, after all others have spoken, gets to his feet, an unearthly fire in his eye. What he’s about to ask his more timid colleagues is to raise a militia and prepare for war. It’s traitorous, dangerous stuff and they know it.

But here’s Henry, rough around the edges but eloquent beyond imagining, risking everything.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

That’s about all we know about this firebrand from Virginia’s hill country: the single fiery speech that ignited the American Revolution.

The famous speech was reconstructed some years later and may not have been word-for-word accurate. But the essence of it was. All over the state, men and boys sewed the words “Liberty of Death” on their shirts as they took up arms.

But there’s much more to Henry than this single moment. He was a fearless champion of individual rights who fought for inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. During a chaotic prelude to the Revolutionary War, he rallied troops against the clueless Lord Dunmore and helped drum him out of Williamsburg for good. He was Virginia’s first governor, and a wartime one at that.

Personally, he cut quite a figure: married twice, fathered 17 children, wrote poetry and serenaded his courthouse friends with his fiddle.

Historian Harlow Giles Unger, who spoke last week at Colonial Williamsburg, has written “Lion of Liberty, Patrick Henry and the Call to a New Nation,” a reintroduction to this silver-tongued rabble rouser who was so blunt in his disregard for English law that dumbstruck opponents could think of no other response than to accuse him of treason.

This happened at least twice. The first was at Hanover Courthouse when the brash young lawyer, 27, shocked his adversaries by declaring that the king of England “had degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all right to his subjects’ obedience…” The case involved a tax that farmers were forced to pay the clergy, and Henry persuaded the jury to award the plaintive, a parson who was owed thousands, a single penny.

Spectators whooped and cheered and carried Henry out of the courthouse in triumph.
He was no more cautious two years later when he rose in the House of Burgesses and denounced the Stamp Act. “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third…”

“Treason, sir!” the speaker interrupted. “Treason!” the older burgesses chimed in, some shaking their fists at the “insolent renegade.” Then, when the shouting faded, Henry continued… “and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!”

After the shock wore off, a majority approved Henry’s resolution stating that Virginia’s elected officials, not Parliament, had the exclusive right to levy taxes upon Virginians. This was the first known colonial opposition to British rule, and it reverberated throughout the colonies, leading swiftly to revolution.

We get glimpses, too, of Henry’s personal life. He and his first wife, Sarah, had six children. But, buried in one crisis after another, he had little time for family. Desperately lonely, Sarah fell into deep depression, tried to kill herself and died early in 1775.

Two years later Henry fell head-over- heels in love with 18-year-old Dorothea Dandridge, the daughter of his former next-door neighbor in Hanover County. Henry’s oldest son, John, also in love with “Dolly,” was crushed and temporarily vanished. She presented her husband with11 children.

Henry’s battle for individual rights was not just against Britain, but the United States. “As this government stands, I despise it and abhor it,” he thundered to delegates to Virginia’s constitutional ratification convention.

Despite his long-winded speeches – one lasting seven hours – the Federalists beat him. But they did so only after James Madison assured reluctant delegates that Congress would immediately propose a bill of rights. Although he lost, Henry – and America – had won.

Patrick Henry addresses the House of Burgesses in this painting by P.H. Rothermal. National Archives.

Nov. 7, 2010

2010-11-07T21:15:00.007-05:00

On Sept. 29, 1864, a force of 2,500 Union soldiers stormed Fort Harrison, one of the key defenses around Richmond, and quickly overran a 200-man garrison commanded by Maj. Richard Cornelius Taylor of Norfolk. Taylor was wounded, but the kindness of a Union officer saved his life.

It’s one of the untold human stories of that long and bitter war that survives in brief but intriguing memoir that Taylor’s descendants have placed in the local history collection of the Norfolk Public Library.

Taylor, a member of the VMI class of 1854, wrote about being caught up in the “martial spirit” that pervaded Norfolk after Virginia seceded from the Union. He left his job at the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad and joined a volunteer company, the “Norfolk Grays.” Soon after he helped overpower Fort Norfolk and make off with tons of gunpowder.

Taylor was from an old-line Norfolk family and several of his brothers, including Walter Heron Taylor, who served as Robert E. Lee’s aide de camp, fought for the Confederacy.

Richard Taylor was promoted to major and placed in command of a number of fortifications, including Fort Harrison. During the attack, he wrote, enemy troops “gave us a volley, dropping several men at the guns, myself included.”

As Union soldiers entered the fort, one of their officers, an Irishman from New Hampshire named Colonel Donohoe, approached the wounded Taylor and asked if he was the commander and where he was from.

“When I told him Norfolk, he said ‘Norfolk? Why I know nearly everybody there.” Donohoe, who had been provost marshal in Norfolk, spoke fondly of several people he had befriended there and seemed thrilled that Taylor knew them all. One of the Union officer’s favorites was Taylor’s younger brother, Eddie, clerk of the Atlantic Hotel.

So here was this wounded Confederate commander in the midst of a still-raging battle, having a friendly conversation with an enemy officer, who promptly produced a small flask and offered him a drink. Then Donohoe issued orders to have this special prisoner well cared for. The orders were followed throughout a long painful ordeal during which Taylor narrowly avoided having his wounded leg amputated. He was taken to a hospital in Hampton where he was treated nearly as well as the Union officers.

But soon he was diagnosed with gangrene and the remedy was to burn away the infected flesh with acid. At the same time, though, the doctors prescribed nourishing food and stimulants, including a daily bottle of porter.

He was confined to the hospital’s gangrene ward, consisting of a row of tents down by the waterfront.

“The weather was pleasant,” he wrote, “sun brightly shining on the white capped waves, the flaps of the tent were spread and hooked back, and lying on my couch I was thrilled by the beautiful view of Hampton Roads. I had not seen salt water for two years, and had been longing for it. I commenced to feel better at once.”

He was soon on crutches but his hopes of going home in a prisoner swap were dashed and he was sent to a prison in Delaware. His brother Walter, in negotiations with Union officers, got him released and he reached Richmond just before it was evacuated. They took a train out of the city and, passing over a bridge, saw “the city lurid with flashing flames, with falling walls and chimneys.”

Long after the war, Taylor was able to locate Donohoe and send him a gift, a silver flask similar to the one his friend had produced at the fort. On one side was inscribed “Fort Harrison, Sept. 29, 1864,” on the other, a “Token of Gratitude.”

Later, in a letter dated the day they met on the battlefield, Donohoe replied that the flask would be treasured during his lifetime and passed on to his descendants. Taylor wrote that Donohoe’s wish was “that they and my sons should never be arrayed against each other…but if duty called, would march shoulder to shoulder in defense of their common country.”

In reading the story I remembered what Lincoln had said about the better angels of our nature. He probably didn’t mean the kindness of enemies on the battlefield – the war hadn’t begun yet – but for me it fits.

Illustrations: Richard Cornelius Taylor after the war. Norfolk Public Library.
Federal troops in front of bomb-proof headquarters at the former Ft. Harrison, renamed Ft. Burnham for a Union general who died in the attack. Library of Congress.

October 31, 2010

2010-10-29T17:25:00.002-04:00

While entertaining spooky thoughts this All Hallows’ Eve, we might well remember that our region is awash in stories and superstitions about haunted places, especially those close to the sea.

This is, after all, home to a navy base, and there is no more fertile breeding ground for ghost stories than the decks or quarters or mess halls of ships. Whether the violent, untimely death of a sailor, the tragic loss of a naval hero or the mystery of a vanished ship, these are stories that cling to such places like cold, clammy evil.

Eric Mills, associate editor at Naval History Magazine, who spoke recently at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, has dug deeply into paranormal seagoing lore and written “The Spectral Tide, True Ghost Stories of the U.S. Navy.” Some of the old tales are pretty thin, Mills admits, but others are so commonly known that they come as close to being “true” as sea stories can be.

Long lost ships that reappear as phantoms on lonely seas, shadow-like figures that dart through passageways, screams in the night, tragic heroes who watch from haunted windows, headless corpses, grotesque phantoms, spirits in the timbers – you name it; this book is haunted by them all.

Close to home, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard is said to harbor the spirits of ancient ships whose timbers now rest there. It seems that Buildings 29, 31 and 33 are the principal haunts of a ghost that bears a certain resemblance to the great John Paul Jones. This “John Paul,” as shipyard workers have dubbed him, is so vivid that sailors have experienced raw panic at the sight of him.

“There are floating white blobs and flickering lights of the former sailmaking loft, where eerie voices and the rat-a-tat of long-gone sewing machines chatter on through time,” Mills adds. “There is the trio of British soldiers from the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812 whose long-forgotten graves were disturbed in 1971, and who now haunt Dry Docks 1 and 2.”

Then there is the mess hall at Naval Air Station Norfolk. During the Korean War, a sailor was murdered while at lunch, and even though there were witnesses, none came forward, leaving one angry presence, Mills writes. “If he is summoned by name, objects will move through the air, propelled by an unseen hand.”

Perhaps the saddest ghost of all is one whose story-book marriage to a Norfolk socialite was cut short by a simmering quarrel that ended in a duel. Stephen Decatur, the daring hero of the Barbary wars and the War of 1812, was being feted in town when Susan Wheeler, vivacious daughter of Norfolk Mayor Luke Wheeler, wangled an invitation. There ensured a whirl-wind courtship and marriage. The couple moved to Washington where they built a mansion on what is now Lafayette Square across from the White House.

But Decatur, just 14 months after the marriage, was cut down in a duel with Capt. James Barron. Barron – later a commodore for whom the Commodore Theater in Portsmouth is named – had run up the white flag without offering a fight to a British warship near the Virginia Capes. Ridiculed by many, including Decatur, he demanded satisfaction. Although both had aimed only to wound, Decatur’s wound was fatal. He was brought home to die, and his ghost haunts the Decatur House Museum to this day.

As Mills writes, “To stand at the window where Decatur’s ghost holds his recurrent vigils is to feel a frisson of unease; yet there is a simultaneous, contrasting thrill, the fleeting sense that one of naval history’s most famous figures has just brushed your shoulder.”

The ghost stories attributed to the Navy run back to the days of sail and carry forward to iron and steel, sometimes intersecting when translucent sails from long-lost ships are spotted on today’s seas.

As Mills said when I spoke to him last week, “This is a body of lore that will continue growing as long as there’s a navy.”

Illustration: Cover of “The Spectral Tide,” by Eric Mills. Courtesy of Naval Institute Press.

October 24, 2010

2010-10-26T23:14:00.004-04:00

William and Florence Sloane breezed into Norfolk like a summer squall, bringing industry, culture and good works, more or less in that order. And although modest and unheralded, they left a meaningful legacy.

Part of that legacy is an extensive collection of art that has been stored for decades at what was once their summer home, the Hermitage, on the banks of the Lafayette River. Some of the paintings, which she collected and commissioned over decades, are soon to be displayed in a new gallery at the Hermitage Museum and Gardens.

The official timeline for the Sloanes shows they were both born in New York shortly after the Civil War. He finished college at the age of 16 and went briefly into the wholesale business. Their parents may have been business associates because her father, Jacob Knapp, was a wholesale dealer on Manhattan’s lower West Side.

In 1887, William Sloane came to Norfolk to work in his uncle’s knitting mills in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He became junior partner and played a lead role in building Chesapeake Knitting Mill in Berkley – and later the Berkley Bridge.

But he must have had New York on his mind, at least part of the time, because in 1893 he and Florence Knapp, then just 19, were married in that city. They arrived in Norfolk and lived in an apartment while Charles J. Woodsend, an English woodcarver and architect built their first home in Berkley.

Florence, who grew up in a world of museums and recitals, must have quickly noticed Norfolk’s scant cultural offerings because she soon began a tireless campaign to change all of that while her husband was amassing a fortune.

After his uncle died, Sloane took over all three mills, renamed the business William Sloane & Co. and acquired a fourth operation, Tidewater Knitting Mill, in Portsmouth.

In 1908, after the bridge linking Norfolk to the Jamestown Exposition was built over Tanner’s Creek (now the Lafayette), the Sloanes began building a five-room summer cottage on 30 waterfront acres. Mrs. Sloane spared no expense and the house eventually grew into a 42-room arts and crafts structure reminiscent of an English country home, with elaborate carvings and furniture that Woodsend, again in charge, created in his studio.

World War I intervened and Sloane’s mills turned out thousands of pairs of fleece-lined long underwear for the troops. The Sloanes gave back in a big way.

In 1917 they built a small English-style home at Mowbray Arch and Fairfax Street for use as a service club for the troops. Soon after, they purchased a large house in Algonquin Park and donated “Camp Sloane,” as it was called, to the Navy for use as a convalescent hospital. They also began holding weekly picnics for troops on their riverfront grounds. There were cookouts, games and music for crowds that at one gathering numbered more than 1,800.

After the war, they turned over the Mowbray Arch building to the Norfolk Society of Arts as a temporary museum. At the same time, she helped secure the land for the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Science, forerunner to the Chrysler Museum.

She was a relentless fund-raiser, even in the depths of the Great Depression, speaking to civic and cultural groups and lobbying the city to get on board. When the Mowbray Arch building sold, she donated the proceeds to the museum. After the museum opened in 1933, she became its first director and her husband its first president.

In the meantime, she traveled extensively in Europe, especially Spain, where she acquired numerous artifacts. While her sons were studying at Oxford, she rented a flat in London and went on an art buying spree. Among her acquisitions was an extensive collection of East Asian art, especially jade pieces. At home, she cultivated friendships with several American artists, some of whom stayed and worked at a small cottage on the Hermitage grounds.

In all, museum officials say, there are more than 40,000 works of art at the Hermitage, either on display or in storage. Reigning over much of the collection are a couple of large portraits of Florence Sloane, a dominant force in cultural affairs in Norfolk for the first half of the last century.

In a February 1927 letter, Helen M. Turner, an American impressionist painter, thanked her for her hospitality, adding, “Glad I am that it is a Southern city that can boast of such a beauty spot in its midst, and can claim you as its own – a great philanthropist.”

Portrait of Florence Sloane, a moving force in Norfolk’s cultural life in the early 1900s, by Douglas Volk. Like her artist friends, she enjoyed a certain Bohemian look. Courtesy of Hermitage Museum and Gardens.

October 17, 2010

2010-10-17T09:39:00.002-04:00

If you’re wondering about a distant ancestor, a Civil War soldier, perhaps, a property owner, a high school classmate or even birth parents, chances are his or her identity lurks among the stacks or online resources of Norfolk Public Library’s local history room.

The dead are buried in cemeteries here and elsewhere, but footsteps on this side of
the grave may linger in records of the library’s Sargeant Memorial Room.

The same is true for other libraries, including those in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Suffolk, but Norfolk, in terms of staff, space and collection, is the genealogical great grandaddy of them all.

The Sargeant Room has volumes for every country in Virginia and most in North Carolina, as well as a smattering of those in Delaware and Maryland. And as far as the Civil War goes, the identities of those who wore both the blue and the gray are accessible at the downtown library.

In several of the libraries, if you wish to expand your search to marriages in Michigan, say, or even births and deaths in England and Wales, you can with the help of online databases that are searchable for free.

In Norfolk, it’s no wonder that out-of-towners can be found in the library almost daily, with Robert Hitchings, the Sargeant Room’s genial archivist and historian, hovering nearby full of suggestions.

Hitchings has been teaching “beginning genealogy” to small classes at the library. There are two more complete sessions on Nov. 6 and Dec. 4, as well as classes on using online services on Nov. 20 and researching Norfolk property Sept. 18 and Dec. 18. All classes are at 2 p.m.

Searching for your roots is a serious, passionate game. I know. I’ve gotten the bug. But all I know is how to look up stuff online. The really serious folks haunt libraries, courthouses and cemeteries. And much more, it turns out. So I went to one of the classes recently.

Hitchings, whose family goes back around here to Adam Thoroughgood, likes personal contacts, especially talking with relatives. What they say can help lead to the correct records. But don’t forget barbers, he says. In small towns, some of them have cut hair for generations.

In Virginia, vital statistics like births, marriages and deaths aren’t available online so you have to go to individual courthouses. Or possibly the Sargeant room. Hitchings showed me record books on all Virginia counties from Accomack to York.

In many cases, individual family members have compiled histories and published them in books, then donated them to the library. So there are tomes like “The Hoggards of Poplar Hall,” or “Ancestors of Margery Ruth Howe.” There are city directories going back to 1821, so names and addresses of just about everyone in town can be nailed down.
There are several decades worth of high school yearbooks. So if you wonder what your mom looked like in ‘68 or your grandma in ‘45, there they are.

If you want church records, from baptisms to weddings to burials, the repositories are in different places: the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria for Episcopalians, for example; the University of Richmond for Baptists; or Randolph Macon College for Methodists.

Although the actual records are tucked away at the National Archives in Washington, the library has volume after volume pertaining to Civil War soldiers. What else? Passenger lists, for one thing. So, if your grandfather sailed to America in 1910, for instance, you could confirm his age and occupation and the place where he was born.

One of the people in my class, Brenda Logan, had relatives in Princess Anne County, as well as North and South Carolina. A couple of days ago, she went to the Virginia Beach Courthouse and found a marriage certificate for a great grandfather and a property deed. She was about to travel to Richmond and spend a week at the Library of Virginia to find more pieces of her family puzzle.

Why do this? She put it simply: “There’s part of all of them in me.”

Photo: Family tree? A group of friends, not necessarily related, clown it up at the Norwegian Lady statue at the Beach, probably in the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

October 10, 2010

2010-10-10T08:54:00.005-04:00

It wasn’t long after the Civil War that James Bland, a 24-year-old African American minstrel singer, paid a visit to Virginia. He was accompanied by Mannie Friend, a long-time companion, on a horse-and-buggy ride to a plantation somewhere in Tidewater.

“I have dreamed of coming back to old Virginny ever since we left,” Mannie said, according to legend, “and now I can scarcely believe we are almost home. Isn’t it beautiful, Jimmy?”

It was beautiful, and as they rode over corduroy roads beside the James River, Bland was enthralled. They stopped at the plantation where her grandmother had been enslaved and strolled beside the river. As they leaned against a sycamore, he pulled a sheet of paper and pencil from his pocket and handed them to her. He grabbed his banjo, strummed the strings slowly and began to sing, “Carry me back to old Virginny, that’s where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow…”

As she wrote down the words, he continued, “There’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime. There’s where the old darkey’s heart am long’d to go. There’s where I labor’d so hard for old massa, day after day in the fields of yellow corn. No place on earth do I love more sincerely, than old Virginny, the state where I was born.”

And thus was born the most famous of about 700 songs that Bland wrote in his prodigious career, including “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers!” Whether out of nostalgia for the old plantation days or sincere love for their state, lawmakers enshrined “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny” as the official state song in 1940. And generations sang it, many, I’m sure, who did not realize it had been written by a black man.

And many, I guess, without realizing how offensive it might sound to blacks.

Much as defenders argued that no slights were intended, that the song reflected the feelings of the times, or that “My Old Kentucky Home,” with similar notes of old-South nostalgia, still survived, it was deemed state song emeritus in 1997 and placed on do-not-disturb back shelves.

But have no fear. A legislative committee was named in 1988 to choose a new song, with a one-year deadline. Hundreds of entries were submitted and finally narrowed down to eight grand finalists. You could even go online – as you can now – and listen to them. They pined sweetly about the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Chesapeake Bay, God, cardinals and, I think, blue crabs – well, maybe not, but everything else – and a longing to return to this beautiful place. Among the favorites was a tune offered by country music singer and sausage king Jimmy Dean.

And the committee did what committees do best. It failed to agree and asked for public input. Still unable to decide, it placed the whole idea on hold. Someone came up with the idea of adopting “Shenandoah” as the state song, and the General Assembly came close until it was pointed out that it refers to Shenandoah, an Indian chief, not the river or the valley. So this idea, too, was shelved.

I remembered all of this recently when I heard Norfolk folk musician Bob Zentz performing at the Bena Country Store, a popular venue on the back road to Guinea Neck. Bob, who has long loved the banjo and old time music, has written a new version of “Carry me Back” that not only preserves the nostalgia and melody of Bland’s song but broadens its appeal.

I’ve also heard it a couple of times on his Web site.

Called simply “Ol’ Virginia,” the song carries us back, but to a kinder, gentler place where peanuts, cotton, corn and taters still grow.

That’s where the cardinals sing sweet in the springtime
That’s where this weary traveler’s heart does long to go.

Zentz hasn’t written Ol’ Virginia with the idea of submitting it in some future state contest. He just likes the old tune and has captured its spirit in a way that I’m sure Jimmy Bland would love.

Illustration: James Bland, a minstrel singer who wrote more than 700 songs, including “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Courtesy of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

October 3, 2010

2010-10-03T10:00:00.005-04:00

At the Mariners’ Museum, in an object that would fit in your palm, is a mystery within a mystery. When discovered a few months ago, it took the breath away from several observers.

The story begins something like 180 years ago when a young midshipman, obviously thrilled about his new career in the U.S. Navy, sat for his portrait. As was common in the day, the portraitist created the miniature likeness of his subject on ivory. It was chiseled into a perfect oval and framed in ornamented brass.

On the back were the subject’s initials: MFM. Matthew Fontaine Maury. You might have heard of him. Maury High School in Norfolk was named for him, as was Lake Maury in Newport News.

It was sometime after 1825 that Maury, then a 19-year-old from near Fredericksburg, Va., joined the Navy. He probably didn’t have time for the portrait then because the frigate he was assigned to, the Brandywine, was about to to sail, carrying the Marquis de Lafayette back to France after his grand tour of America.

Almost immediately, Maury began observing the winds and currents of the seas and how they affect navigation. After intense study and a couple of round-the-world cruises, he published articles and books that established him as founder of the science of oceanography and assured his nickname, Pathfinder of the Seas. He also argued persuasively for creation of a naval academy that would rival the Army’s West Point.

You wonder how he found the time, but sometime during these years he had his portrait painted by George Williamson Ladd. It’s possible he gave it to his mother, the former Mary Ann Fontaine. But my guess is that he handed it to Ann Hull Herndon, the woman who waited patiently for his long voyages to end. They were married in 1834.

At the age of 33, his sailing career ended abruptly when a stagecoach on which he was riding overturned and he injured his hip and knee. Unfit for sea duty, Maury turned his attention to the science of the sea. With the help of thousands of ships’ logs, he published a chart showing the winds and currents of the North Atlantic, which allowed sailors to drastically reduce the length of ocean voyages. His systems were adopted by mariners around the world and used to establish sea lanes that reduced the likelihood of accidents.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Maury resigned his commission in the Navy and joined the Confederacy. By then he was world famous and, while in England, used his prestige to both acquire ships for the Confederate Navy and to argue for a peaceful end of the war and push for the gradual abolition of slavery.

After the war, Maury briefly served in Mexico where Emperor Maximillian, an admirer of his, named him imperial minister of colonization. He later accepted a teaching position at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. He died at his home in Lexington in 1873 after completing an exhausting national lecture tour.

About 60 years later, the Mariners’ Museum, famous for its collection of sea paintings, bought the miniature portrait of Maury from W. H. Lowdermilk & Co., a rare bookseller in Washington, D.C. It was probably from an estate sale. Since then the portrait has appeared in numerous exhibits and been loaned to other museums. But no one knew of its secret.

In May, author and scholar Patricia V. Veasey visited the Museum to study the Maury portrait as part of a research project she is conducting on the lives of portraitist Ladd and his wife. As part of her research she asked that the sealed case be opened because it might have contained a signature by the artist.

What she found was not a signature but, carefully wound and lying in the bottom of the case, a six-inch strand of hair, dark and reddish-brown. Part of the famous Virginian had navigated its way back to the light of day through a chance encounter.

A couple of days ago I went to visit the Maury portrait. I was able to hold it and study the initials on the back of the case, but not open it. Collections manager Jeanne Willoz-Egnor (cq) explained that opening and closing the case again might crack the ivory.

When you include documents, the museum has over a million artifacts. But this might be one of the most unusual.

“It was one of the first times I’ve actually gasped over an object,” she said.

The portrait is the only known likeness of Maury from his midshipman days. The locket of hair was examined, photographed and resealed. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

Sept. 26, 2010

2010-09-25T15:36:00.003-04:00

Rail Car # 103, which became Cuba’s #1000, a sumptuously furnished rail inspector car operated by the president of the line. As of 1983 it was still in service. Courtesy of Norfolk Southern Railway Company Historical Society.
I have a modest suggestion for Virginia Beach if the city isn’t sure about what to do with the former Norfolk Southern right of way: put down tracks and run…rail buses. Yes, rail buses, and I know where these curious vehicles might be had for a song. Or maybe a few pesos.

A little Latin music, please. But wait! A quick history. In 1883 the Norfolk-Virginia Beach Railroad and Improvement Co. built a narrow-gauge rail system between the two cities. It was mostly to serve the sumptuous Virginia Beach – later Princess Anne – Hotel and communities that sprang up along the route. The line went bust and numerous rail lines merged, with Norfolk Southern eventually surviving. The narrow gauge became standard gauge, and the trains were electrified.

These “Interurban” trains started losing out to cars and the Great Depression put a damper on rail service. There wasn’t enough business to sustain the service the way it was. So Norfolk southern came up with a unique solution: one-car trains dubbed rail buses. All they needed was someone to drive them and someone to collect tickets. These were apparently hugely popular.

Recently a letter writer, Kirkland Tucker Clarkson, called them to my attention. “My father and I took the rail bus every day to Norfolk,” she writes. “He was tall, and he loved the leg room. I could do most of my homework en route to the Graham School, a small girls’ school in Norfolk.”

Most of her friends went to Oceana High School, but in the late 1940s, county schools in Virginia had only 11 grades and her parents didn’t think that was enough preparation for college. Some of her friends took the rail bus to Maury High, for which they paid tuition.

“The rail bus usually ran from the North End down Pacific Avenue to 12th Street, then west to Norfolk on the Norfolk Southern tracks. It stopped at Oceana, London Bridge, Lynnhaven, Euclid, Rosemont and Ingleside, and others. Almost the same businessmen and students rode it every day. It was a relaxing commute, just what we need today.”

“About 1947, the rail bus was sadly discontinued because the “road bus” required only the driver, and the rail bus required a motorman and a conductor to take up tickets. It had been a unique and important part of Va. Beach, and it was sorely missed. The “road bus” on Va. Beach Boulevard just could not take its place.”

I looked up rail buses on the site of the Norfolk Southern Railway Company Historical Society and found a schedule showing 11 daily trips to downtown Norfolk and back at a one-way cost of 50 cents or 75 cents roundtrip. Most of the west-bound rail buses left from the Cavalier Hotel, with one daily northern run to Cape Henry. The timetable had an aerial photo of the Cavalier and the promise of “real surf bathing.”

And then there’s this, a 1983 National Railway Bulletin, “Rail Cars to Tidewater,” with a photograph of what had been Car 103. “All of the remaining railcar fleet was sold to several Cuban railroads in June 1948. Car 103 became the president’s personal inspection car on one Cuban line and was elaborately furnished and maintained as Number 1000. It is now Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Cuba and is still in inspection car service.”

So I researched railcars in Cuba and guess what? They have dozens of them in daily service, running all over the island. They don’t get very high marks for being on time, but they work. I don’t know if they’re the originals, but the way cars last in Cuba, you never know. Some may have survived.

Which brings me to my point. Now that car traffic in the states is really horrible, and we’re looking for more alternatives, and all that stimulus money is still waiting to be spent, and relations with Cuba are thawing, maybe we could buy a few of them back.

Sept. 19, 2010

2010-09-19T08:26:00.004-04:00

Last night’s ODU-William & Mary football game was a historical reprieve of a contest that took place 80 years ago.

It was Oct. 15, 1930. ODU, then called the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary, had just opened in the old Larchmont Elementary School on Hampton Boulevard. There were 206 students. Football began almost as an afterthought, and many of the members of the first team, including the quarterback, had never played for their respective high schools. And yet their record, even though compiled mostly against local high schools, was not all that bad.

They might have been inexperienced but were fast and scrappy and had something else
going for them, a highly regarded coach. In their book, “The Legacy Renewed,” Peter C. Stewart and Thomas R. Garrett wrote that Tommy Scott’s “influence and calm demeanor had an impact on every student he encountered."

The game that everyone had waited for was the matchup in Williamsburg between the fledgling team and the parent school.

The thing that got me about that contest was not so much the game itself but the context in which it was played.

It was the Depression. Stories in The Virginian-Pilot and The Norfolk Landmark reported that labor groups were calling upon President Hoover and local governments to ease the employment crisis. A bank in Raleigh was offering depositors 50 cents on the dollar as it expired. Norfolk County was considering reopening an alms house because of the growth of indigent residents.

There were diversions. Full-length movies with sound, known as “talkies,” were coming into their own. “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a harrowing account of soldiers in World War I, was playing at the Newport Theater. On stage at the Norva, “Those Three French Girls” starred local actors Reginald Denny and Fifi Dorsay who sailed through their roles “without sacrificing a single giggle.”

Saturday evenings, there was dancing at the Monticello Hotel.

Mutt & Jeff, Tillie the Toiler, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps were in the funnies, but not very funny.

Aircraft flight records were broken almost daily. One fellow marveled that it took only two and a half days to fly cross-country. Prohibition was on its way out, with “wet” candidates showing up in numerous races. Church groups were upset.

Mobster Jack “Legs” Diamond was shot three times in his New York hotel room and was “sinking” fast, the paper said. When asked who did it, he managed to tell an investigator, “I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

And in Williamsburg that day, students who had made their way there by ferry and bus, sat at the edge of their seats. W&M got off to any early start and enjoyed a 7-0lead until the third quarter when a couple of running plays brought the score to 7-6. A field goal missed.

Then, with two minutes left in the fourth quarter, halfback Billy Walker raced downfield, caught a pass from quarterback Terry Maxey and carried it 30 yards for a touchdown. The 13-7 victory was cause for celebration at a pageant that night at the college.

ODU abandoned its football program during World War II and didn’t resume until last year. On the slim chance that the Monarchs didn’t trounce the Tribe last night at Foreman Field – this was written days ago – I thought we could at least revel in the past.

Photo: Tommy Scott, coach of the Braves, ODU’s first football team. He was an outstanding athlete at Maury High and VMI. Courtesy of Norfolk Public Library.

Sept. 12, 2010

2010-09-12T09:05:00.005-04:00

THE OLD HOUSE ON HOLLAND ROAD near Kellam High has many stories, some contained in letters that were stashed in a plaster wall, some in the small graveyard that rests under oak trees just a little ways north.

The house, built in the early 1800s, is now part of Buyrningwood Farm. It was for many years the dwelling place of the Burroughs family. Elzy Burroughs, famed builder and keeper of lighthouses, had lived there. His son John J. Burroughs, the long-serving clerk of the court, raised a large family there and reaped a considerable share of grief.

The long-forgotten letters, discovered when the house was being renovated many years ago, revealed intimate details about the courtship of Burroughs’ daughter Mollie by a homesick soldier during the Civil War. As I wrote last week, Oscar Styron was badly wounded but lived long enough to marry her and father a child. He was only 26 when he died.

Near his grave is that of Mollie’s oldest brother. Edgar Burroughs grew up on the farm, known as Cedar Grove Plantation. He became a Methodist minister, married and moved to a farm in Back Bay. And, like his brothers, when the war loomed, joined the Confederate Army and went off to fight.

But now a strange story begins.

Edgar, a major, resigned from the Fifth Virginia Cavalry in 1862 because of family illness and went home. To do this – Princess Anne County was under Union control – he had to pledge not to take up arms again. But he couldn’t sit by and let others do the fighting. He commanded a group of partisan rangers known as “the Burroughs Battalion” that caused grief to the occupiers. He was arrested and sentenced to death but at the urging of his family took an oath of allegiance to the United States. He was spared but remained in prison.

John Burroughs must have been a well-connected man. Three of his sons were fighting against the North. (Among the discovered letters is one from John Jr. “Give my love to all and remember me to the darkies,” he writes. “Jack” and his brother William would survive the war and become prominent Norfolk lawyers.) And yet Burroughs was able to keep his court position. And while Edgar languished in prison, his father went to Washington and managed to meet with President Lincoln. Was he incredibly prominent, or incredibly persistent?

In a letter to his sons, Burroughs wrote, “After two days I got an interview with Mr. Lincoln. He had not, he said, heard of that case before, and sent immediately to the Judge Advocate General’s office and had the whole proceeding brought in ... It was severe, and the President seemed to imbibe its spirit and spoke harshly, but he said he would lay it by and give it a careful examination and determine what he might deem right....”

Burroughs pointed out to the president that his son had taken the oath of loyalty to the Union. “O[h],” Lincoln replied, “he did that to avoid the penalty.” Burroughs did not say what he replied, but didn’t deny this obvious fact.

“I asked if I should wait in Washington for his decision. He said no. And whilst he treated me politely, yet he left me under an unfavorable impression as to the final decision.”

Meanwhile, Edgar contracted smallpox and was moved to a “pest house” in Portsmouth where he was guarded night and day. There were sharply differing views on what happened next – family members claim he was merely turning over on his cot; guards swore that he was attempting to escape through a window – but one of the sentries shot him in the back. He lingered for a few hours and died. It was Jan. 17, 1865. Edgar was 40 years old.

It was “deliberate murder,” Burroughs told his sons. The authorities ruled that it was “entirely justified.”

Burroughs went the next day to Portsmouth and brought his son’s body home for burial in the family cemetery. He was almost, but not quite, a broken man. His slaves had been taken away, he complained, “except for old Patience and Kedar,” presumably elderly blacks who had long served the family. He had to get his own wood. He had no money except for “greenbacks” – paper money issued by the North. He wondered how long it would be before his land was seized. He had lost his son.

“I will try to stand the storm and look up to heaven for help,” he wrote. “I am like an old oak riven by the lightning and shorn of one of its main branches.”

A Harpers Weekly illustrator sided with the government in believing Burroughs was trying to escape. Courtesy of Elizabeth Vogt.

Sept. 5, 2010

2010-09-05T09:50:00.004-04:00

“Dear Mollie,

“The receipt of your letter on yesterday was a most enjoyable surprise,” he begins. “I had indulged the hope but scarcely ventured the expectation of hearing from you; and you can scarcely form a conception of my delight when I recognized the familiar hand writing and realized the fact that it was from old Princess Anne.”

It was June 1862. The sentiments, written to Mary Elizabeth (Mollie) Burroughs by her soldier-sweetheart, are from a recently identified cache of letters that were long hidden in a wall of a farmhouse on Holland Road. They draw back curtains of memory and family history that are at once poignant and tragic.

Mollie Burroughs was one of many children of John J. Burroughs and his first and second wives, Eliza and Ann. He was for many years Princess Anne’s clerk of court, a position he held throughout Union occupation in the Civil War, even while three of his sons fought for the Confederacy. Mollie’s letter-writing beau was Oscar Styron, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man who pined for peace and her companionship but at the same time yearned for honor on the battlefield.

The house remained in the Burroughs family until the early 1930s when it was sold to a family named Buyrn. In the process of renovating it, they discovered letters hidden a leather pouch inside a plaster wall on the third floor. Another 70 or so years went by before Elizabeth Vogt, a distant Burroughs descendant, learned of their existence and recently acquired them. She has transcribed the letters and turned over the originals to the Virginia Historical Society.

“It was very exciting,” she says. “Needless to say, when you read the letters, these people become alive.”

Especially Oscar and Mollie.

He was a student when he enlisted in the Confederate army at Craney Island and enthusiastic for the cause. “Let it come what it will,” he writes in that same June letter from his encampment near Richmond. “I go cheerfully and trust that I shall do my duty. I am still anxious to be in a great engagement before the war ends.”
He often thinks of her, his home and native county, he writes, “and the thought that they are in the possession of the enemy animates and nerves me to fight harder and if necessary die for their delivery.”

The idea of “getting the right kind of wound,” which might result in being sent home, has its appeal. But with his schoolmates, comrades and many of his southern “countrymen” at his side, it would be impossible. He could not go home without the honor of victory.

“Oh happy thought! To return with honor bright and be greeted by the happy faces of loved parents and friends.”

There are chatty letters from Mollie to her Ma, written from Norfolk, possibly while in school there. She writes about going to prayer meetings, witnessing church conversions and deciding whether or not to buy a calico dress.

But sometime late in 1862, wrenching news reaches her. Oscar has been seriously wounded. While lying down, a minie ball struck him at the top of his shoulder, passed between collar bone and shoulder blade and lodged in his lung.

Fortunately, as he wrote with a weak and trembling arm, the ball worked its way to the surface and surgeons removed it. “I bore the operation like a soldier,” he writes. “All around me cheered and complimented me upon my fortitude.”

He had his wound, and indeed it sent him home. Pvt. Oscar Stryon was discharged in March 1863 and he and his sweetheart were soon married. But on March 17, 1865 he died, almost certainly from his wounds. He was 26. It is not clear whether he lived to see the birth of their child.

A census of Princess Anne taken in August 1870 shows an Oscar Styron all right – as well as Mollie – but he’s not the father. He’s a five-year-old child.

Next week: Another family tragedy.

John J. Burroughs, one of Princess Anne County’s longest-serving clerks of court. This portrait hangs in the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. Courtesy of Virginia Beach Circuit Court.

August 29, 2010

2010-08-28T22:34:00.008-04:00

The Seaboard Railroad Station as it appeared in 1885. Courtesy of the Suffolk-Nansemond Historical Society.

What is it about trains that make them endlessly fascinating? Whether model trains that careen through miniature villages or the real things, the multi-ton behemoths that roll through the night with whistles wailing, they inspire awe and stir memories.

Take this weekend’s goings on in Suffolk. The Seaboard Station Railroad Museum, one of the most recognizable landmarks in town, is celebrating the tenth anniversary since the Suffolk-Nansemond Historical Society restored it to its 1885 glory. Tours, rides, vocal groups, bands, bagpipes, raffles. The whole nine yards, and all over an era that has long since faded.

Or has it? Light rail coming to Norfolk and, in a couple of years, passenger service again to Richmond. Maybe high-speed trains one day. But will they fascinate the way the old trains once did?

John Johnson grew up on Bank Street near the Norfolk and Western – now Norfolk Southern – station. He and his friends would go to the station just to watch as the train passed by poles where mail bags were suspended. In what seemed less than a second, a hook would grab the bags and they’d disappear into the train, faster than the eye could see.

The trains came and went in a hurry. “As a matter of fact, I could lay in my bed at night time and when that coal train came through, everything in there rocked. I’m serious.”

The passenger trains, especially the Powhatan Arrow and the Pocahontas, were said to whip through towns like Windsor, Wakefield and Waverly at 100 mph. Johnson, who once took the bullet-nosed Powhatan to Cincinnati, described telegraph poles whipping by. “And when you’d go through a tunnel, it was another world for a few seconds until you came popping out of that thing.”

In its heyday, Suffolk had six rail lines rolling through town. Local historians say that at one time 32 passenger trains and 70 freight trains paid visits. The sound of train whistles was a constant symphony, usually noticed when it stopped rather than when it occurred.

The story goes all the way back to 1834 when one of the first lines in the country, the Portsmouth and Weldon, rolled through town, pulled at first by horses. The name changes are many – Portsmouth and Roanoke, Seaboard Air Line, and so forth. From 1906 to 1956, the Virginian ran on the north side of the depot, the Seaboard on the south. Eventually, the lines merged into what is today CSX – and those trains still hustle through town. (Watch “CSX rolls through downtown Suffolk” on YouTube.)

One of the strongest memories among those of an older generation is saying goodbye and welcoming home soldiers who went off to war.

For William W. Jones, 88, former commonwealth’s attorney and district court judge, his most vivid memory of Suffolk was catching the train there in 1943 and going to South Bend, Ind., where he spent four months at Notre Dame training to be a Naval officer. “I came home and stayed a couple of weeks and went to duty on board ship,” he says.

Jones grew up in Driver, population 216 in 1930. Even in that small town, trains came through several times a day. “As boys we hung out and watched the trains go through. There were three or four mail deliveries a day. They’d throw it off in a sack there at the station and the Post Office sent someone to pick it up and take it back to the office.”

One of the favorite parts of the old station is the model train layout, a detailed scale model of Suffolk as it appeared in 1907. Built by more than a dozen local members of the National Model Railroad Association, it includes the six railroads that converged on the town, as well as a wharf area served by a couple of schooners, miniatures of historic downtown buildings, a nearby farm and Cedar Hill Cemetery, complete with a funeral in progress. There are hoboes hanging out under one of the bridges and laundry hanging out to dry.

Is all of this a bygone era? Last weekend while I was there, a boy and his sister who serve as volunteers for the museum rattled off more facts about local train service than any adult I’ve met. Maybe the romance is there after all.

The model train layout includes Constant's Wharf where schooners take on cargo. By Paul Clancy

August 22, 2010

2010-08-21T21:50:00.003-04:00

One of these days I’m going to Suffolk’s historic area. Easy, you say? Well, not the way I’m traveling.

Like those who visited the town in centuries past, I’ll go by water. And that’s not so simple. It must be 15 miles along the wide, then narrow and twisty, Nansemond River. The charts show a high-voltage power line just past Dumpling Island with a 40-foot clearance. And then, just short of town, the 35-foot Rte. 58 bridge. OK for most power boats, but I’m going to have to anchor near the island and putt-putt the rest of the way to town.

But it’s worth it. This place is afloat in history.
I’ll take note, for starters, that Dumpling Island is where the Nansemond Indians had their sacred place – before it was ruined by those heavy handed colonials. John Smith tried to set up an outpost there but sent an oaf named John Martin to run it. Martin attacked the Indians, looted and burned their houses and temples, despoiled their dead and seized their corn. The Nansemonds retaliated and drove the white men back to Jamestown, but later, after bloody but failed uprisings, the tribe was driven from its ancestral lands.

During the long slog up the river, I’ll no doubt curse the day in 1742 that the colonial legislature created the town about as far upriver as you can go. Why not a little settlement at Reid’s Ferry where the first church of the Upper Parish of Nansemond had been built? Or the land where the politically connected Richard Bennett held a couple thousand acres? Originally, when the Jamestown folk decreed that there should be ports, Nansemond Town was created at the point where Bennett’s Creek joins the river. It didn’t last.

What did last was the place where John Constant, possibly from Hampshire, England, built a wharf and warehouse around 1720. From there, he exported tobacco, grains and salt on ships bound for Europe. It would have taken, I’m guessing, at least a couple of tide cycles for the ships to both gain and quit Constant’s Wharf.

Suffolk historian Kermit Hobbs says he thinks the location worked because it was close to the farmers who brought their produce to market, and close to the Great Dismal Swamp where timber was turned into shingles.

The little settlement prospered and in 1742 became a town, but the name was changed from Constant’s Wharf to Suffolk in honor of Gov. William Gooch’s home county in England.

It seems that someone opened the floodgates to history when Suffolk was created, bringing the Revolutionary War and the Civil War to its doorstep. British troops marched into town in May 1779 and turned it into an inferno as combustible material in waterfront warehouses ignited. Eighty years or so later, Union forces rode into town, set up headquarters at the extravagant Riddick’s Folly mansion and endured a year-long siege that ended when the Confederates marched off to Gettysburg.

Railroads from just about every point in Virginia made Suffolk a major hub. The Seaboard Station Railroad Museum has an intricate model train setup that shows the old town.

It all started with John Constant. His plantation, called Constantia, survived both wars but was eventually crowded out by Cedar Hill Cemetery. There’s a replica of the house, I’m told, on West Washington Street.

What has survived is Constant’s Wharf Public Park and Marina, a new centerpiece for the city, next to the Hilton Garden Inn. Hmm, I could cruise up to the marina of a summer evening, take in a TGIF concert at the park, dine at one of the town’s trendy restaurants, take in a play at the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, and then, since there’s no place to sleep in a dinghy, rough it at the Hilton.

In May 1863, Harper’s Weekly published this illustration of Constant’s Wharf in Civil War-era Suffolk.

August 15, 2010

2010-08-15T14:55:00.004-04:00

I have been captured by Ireland, so please forgive this brief excursion into the wonderfully complicated history of that beautiful green island to which we owe so much of our own story.

What turned me on to our shared history during a two-week stay there was the picturesque port of Kinsale in southeastern County Cork. There, brooding over the entrance to the harbor, is Charles Fort, a massive, star-shaped structure that reminds you immediately of Fort Monroe.
A tourist walks the grounds of ancient Charles Fort with the river approach to Kinsale in the distance. Courtesy of the author.

The similarities are striking: unchallenged attacks by sea and humiliating defeats, followed by the erection of massive fortresses with enough fire power to blow future invaders out of the water.

It was the British assault on America during the War of 1812 that prompted the fort-building campaign. A powerful fleet of ships sailed into Hampton Roads in June 1813 and turned its attention first on Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth.

Fortunately, the Americans had rushed defenders to Craney Island and greeted the attackers with withering, deadly fire that forced them to withdraw. The enraged British consoled themselves by attacking and brutally sacking Hampton. Then, a year later, they entered Washington, D.C., and set fire to the Capitol and White House.

The designers of Fortress Monroe, as it was then called, took their cues from history. I don’t know if there are direct connections, but the circumstances are almost identical. We had a fascinating history tour of Kinsale that brought this all home. You can walk up from town to Charles Fort, take a tour and saunter through the grounds, gazing over the ramparts toward the North Atlantic.

It was 1601 when the last of the Spanish armadas sailed into Kinsale Harbor and took control of the town. The Spaniards were there to aid an uprising of Ulster clans – the O’Neills and O’Donnells – against British rule. After a ferocious siege by British forces, the Spanish and Ulstermen were crushed. It was a turning point in Irish history that led to 300 years of British rule.

The result was, first, James Fort, built to guard against future attacks by sea, then Charles Fort, the star-shaped complex that dominates the approach to Kinsale. Like Fort Monroe and its sister, Fort Wool, the two faced each other across the water and promised a murderous crossfire to any intruders. Like the American experience, the Irish port was never again attacked.

It was just after the Battle of Kinsale when Jamestown was settled, and there’s evidence that at least a few of the early arrivals were Irish. Archaeological digs at Jamestown have turned up copper Irish pennies and half pennies, minted in England around 1601. It’s possible they were brought over by Englishmen who saw military service in Ireland or were part of earlier migration there.

A century or so later, a fellow who was clearly fond of his Irish home town settled on the Yeocomico River off the Potomac and called the place Kinsale. This tidy little town became a flourishing tobacco port and steamboat landing. Aha! Another Virginia connection.

After the Kinsale forts were built, the town took its place as a major British port. A lot of Irish in America – there are something like seven times more people of Irish descent here than in Ireland – left from the harbors at Cork and Kinsale. In all, something like 4 million people turned up on American shores during the 19th century.

Some were ancestors of mine. The ties are a little tenuous because they run through England, but after two weeks there I’m feeling more Irish than I was. In fact, downright inspirish.

Sláinte!

August 1, 2010

2010-08-10T19:32:00.002-04:00

July 1946. It was a typically warm and humid month at the Oceanfront. Showers and scattered thunderstorms were expected nearly every day.

Sonny Walsh, a comedian, opened a four-night stand at the Cavalier Beach and Cabana Club. The Casino Park at 15th and Atlantic hosted dances every evening with Buddy Myers and His Orchestra on the bandstand. An ice show, “Serenade on Blades,” was coming to the Surf Beach Club.

“Missie,” a female cocker spaniel, had gone missing from her home on 23rd Street. A Beach swimming pool was offering adult water safety classes.

And somewhere in the board rooms or council rooms of business or government, somebody might have had a bright idea.

The United Nations has been anchored to its location on the East River in New York for about 60 years. But it wasn’t a sure thing that Manhattan would be its headquarters. In fact, the original proposal was to create a sort of international zone in the suburbs of New York or Connecticut. But of course the suburbanites rose up in arms over the thought of having a lot of foreigners in their midst, running over their children etc. while enjoying diplomatic immunity.

So, for a period in 1946 – it couldn’t have been more than a couple of months – communities across the country sniffing the possibility of full hotel rooms and ringing cash registers made bids to play host to the UN. Including, you guessed it, our own Virginia Beach. Or so it seems.

An alert Beach resident called this to my attention, a new book called “Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure” in which the author, Matthew Algeo, quotes American diplomat Isaac Stokes who had the unlucky job of handling calls from various chambers of commerce and city halls.

“I remember Virginia Beach coming in,” Stokes said.

“Well the first thing I said to them was, ‘You’ve got to face one fact. There are black members in the UN.’ I guess at that point there were only two, Haiti and Ethiopia. But there were some very dark Indians and so on. They obviously had second thoughts after that.”

Although a fascinating story, frankly it sounded a little odd. Virginia Beach was then just an oceanfront strip that had been put on hold during World War II. It’s true that, as historian Stephen Mansfield puts it, the Beach had played host to numerous big shots, even presidents, before the war; they all came to the Cavalier. And the military had been a big presence there, giving it a national reputation, if not an international one.

But no one had ever heard that story. And, well, the story is so implausible that it would have rated moon-landing headlines, I think.

Before running with this, I tried to run it down, and there was no better source to turn to than the reference staff of the Virginia Beach Public Library, who checked just about everywhere, including the Virginia State Library, several newspapers, the UN Library, Norfolk Library’s Sargeant Memorial Room. They found a hand-written index of City Council minutes and found nothing.

They checked with the reference department at the UN and received documents listing cities that had offered to host the UN and Virginia Beach was not on the list, although Richmond and Williamsburg were. “It is possible that Mr. Stokes made a mistake when he said that Virginia Beach had offered. Perhaps he meant Richmond, which would make more sense.”

But isn’t it a strange story?

Segregation was still a hard and fast way of life, even in a lot of places outside the South. Truman would not integrate the military until 1948.

I went back to the same July newspaper that mentions the heat wave, the entertainers at the Beach and so forth, and found employment ads: most avoiding any mention of race, but quite a few specifying “white” or “colored.” A few businesses for sale were in the “colored section.” How uncomfortable would UN diplomats and their staffs be here?

There were some serious finalists: San Francisco, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. But the issue was settled that December after John D. Rockefeller Jr. put up $8.5 million to buy the land between 42nd and 48th streets in New York, and threw in an interest-free loan of up to $65 million to finance construction of the buildings.

To slightly misquote Marlin Brando in “On the Waterfront,” we never coulda been a contender!

July 25, 2010

2010-08-10T19:17:00.003-04:00

Booker T. Washington in August 1907 at the Jamestown Exposition in Norfolk. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

Looking back over his life, Booker T. Washington recalled that while working in a West Virginia coal mine he heard men talking about a new school in Hampton where former slaves could not only learn but pay their own way by working.

“As they went on describing the school, it seemed to me that it must be the greatest place on earth,” he wrote in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, “and that not even Heaven presented more attractions for me at that time than did the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia.”

Hampton Institute, founded in 1868 to teach former slaves and their children, would become Hampton University and, as the city would celebrate its 400th anniversary, one of the jewels in its crown.

Washington was born in Franklin County, Va., on a small tobacco farm where his mother was a cook. After the Civil War, they made their way by wagon across the mountains to the new state of West Virginia where there was work in the salt and coal mines.

The mines were deep, dark and dangerous, and what Washington heard about Hampton sounded like deliverance.

“I resolved at once to go to that school, although I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it; I remembered only that I was on fire constantly with one ambition, and that was to go to Hampton.”

In 1872, at age 16, he made his way, partly on foot, partly by stage coach, to Richmond where he slept under sidewalks while earning money for the rest of the trip, finally arriving on campus with 50 cents in his pocket.

Washington graduated with honors in 1875 and went back to West Virginia to teach, but his tenure there was soon interrupted when Hampton founder Gen. Samuel Armstrong asked him to come back and teach, as well as serve as “house father” and mentor to Indian students. “I made up my mind,” he would later write, “to give up my life as far as possible to spreading the doctrine that the General lived and died for.”

Armstrong was impressed with this hard-working scholar and gave him the opportunity of his young lifetime, recommending him for the leadership of a brand-new school in Alabama.

The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute opened in a local church in 1881. But soon Washington purchased a former plantation and, under his direction, the students built class buildings, barns and outbuildings, grew their own crops and raised livestock. They would become not only farmers and tradesmen but teachers who would work in the many schools that Washington helped build throughout the South.

Washington was criticized by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, for his “go-slow” approach to reversing a tide of Jim Crow laws that swept the South. He worked and socialized with many wealthy whites and white politicians who liked his approach and helped his causes. Rather than gaining immediate equality under the law, blacks would get there eventually, Washington believed, “by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens.” That meant, as another critic put it, they would be “forever subordinate.”

Washington gradually changed his views, supporting legal efforts to end segregation and attacking racism.

But it was at Hampton where his life’s work took shape. “I resolved,” he wrote, “if God permitted me to finish the course of study, I would enter the far South, the Black Belt of the Gulf states, and give my life in providing the best I could the same kind of chance for self-help for the youth of my race that I found ready for me when I went to Hampton.”

July 18, 2010

2010-08-10T19:14:00.001-04:00

Hampton has been reveling in its status as America’s oldest continuous English-speaking community, and before all the huzzahs fade there are some firsts that deserve a nod.
First English baby in what we now call Virginia. Her name, appropriately, is Virginia, born and christened at Jamestown. Her father, a carpenter named John Laydon, is quick with a marriage proposal after young servant Anne Burras steps off a supply ship in 1608. Their daughter is born the following December, and somehow she and her parents survive the horrific “starving time.” John and Anne and four daughters show up in a 1624 census of “Elizabeth Cittie,” now Hampton. Not long after, Laydon is granted 700 acres, part of which is now occupied by NASA Langley Research Center, in thanks for “the personal adventures of himself and his wife into this colony.”
First African Americans. In the summer 1619 a Portuguese slave ship departs Angola, bound for Vera Cruz, Mexico. But on the way the ship is attacked by British privateers and the slaves taken as plunder. The ship puts in at Old Point Comfort and 20 of the Africans are traded for provisions. At first these Africans are considered indentured servants, it isn’t long before slave laws follow.
First public school. In a wooded area at Langley archaeologists have unearthed numerous writing slates. Without doubt, this is the site of an overlooked chapter in American history. In his will dated Feb. 12, 1634, Benjamin Syms, who can neither read nor write, donates 200 acres and eight cows to be used for “a free school to educate and teach the children of the adjoining parishes of Elizabeth City and Poquoson from Marie’s Mount downward to the Poquoson River.” The Syms bequest is the earliest known provision for a public school in America. A 1647 report on Virginia states, “We have a free school, with two hundred acres of land, a fine house upon it, forty milch kine [cows] and other accommodations.”
America’s first health resort. Buckroe Beach, named for Buckrose in Yorkshire, England, becomes known for its healthful climate and “invigorating saltwater bathing.” The name appears in official records in 1617 on part of a large plantation that the Virginia Company of London sets aside for public use. But Buckroe is mostly a fishing camp until after the Civil War when a boarding house opens, then a bathhouse and dance pavilion. Patrons are carried from town to the beach in horse-drawn wagons. In the meantime, Hampton oyster entrepreneur James Darling founds a railway and, in 1897, opens the Buckroe Beach Hotel and Pavilion. Soon to follow: the Buckroe Beach Amusement Park, with rides that include a carousel. This elaborately carved merry-go-round, now restored, is in operation near the Virginia Air and Space Center.
First Air Base. Hampton is home to the first military base in America built for air power and the first aeronautical research center. At the onset of World War I, as combatants clash in the air over Europe, the U. S. sees the need for an airfield and proving ground and acquires 1650 acres in Elizabeth City County. It is named for aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley. As Langley Field grows, the name of the service evolves: from the Army Air Service to the Army Air Corps and finally, in 1947, the United States Air Force. In the meantime, America’s space program begins at NASA Langley Research Center. In 1959, after spacecraft systems are designed and tested at the center, the first astronauts report to NASA Langley.
Now that a fifth century has begun, you’ve got to wonder what other firsts are in store.

Hampton is home to many firsts, including the first military base built only for aircraft. This July 1944 photo shows B-17 Flying Fortresses at Langley Field. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

July 11, 2010

2010-07-11T07:25:00.003-04:00

After graduating from Williams College in 1862, a missionary’s son from Hawaii received a captain’s commission in the Union Army. He was not then certain that the cause of union was worth fighting for, but he became convinced that ending slavery was.
In a letter to a friend in September 1863, Samuel Chapman Armstrong wrote, “I hope that until every slave can call himself his own, and his wife and children his own, the sword will not cease from among us, and I care not how many evils attend it; it will be just.”
Then, when Armstrong learned Confederate leaders had issued a warning to Union officers who led black soldiers that they would be dealt with harshly, he got his back up. He applied for and was given command of a black regiment. Armstrong led the troops with distinction and marveled at the courage of men who never flinched in the face of danger.
It was then, as one historian would write, that “the young soldier stood face to face with the purpose of his life.”
Hampton, the oldest continuous English-speaking community in America, is celebrating its 400th anniversary this week. In the midst of the perennial Blackbeard’s Festival this weekend, the city is exhibiting its proudest gray hairs. One of the most important events in its history was the founding 142 years ago of Hampton University.
Soon after the war ended and then-General Armstrong retired, he signed on with the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was faced with the daunting task of improving conditions for thousands of former slaves who had taken refuge in the burned-out village of Hampton. It was clear that what they needed was education, “the only power that can lift them as a people.”
And, without as much as a missed beat, Armstrong, a charismatic and persuasive man, talked the American Missionary Association into buying a 120-acre farm called “Little Scotland” on the banks of Hampton River. It was the right spot for a “permanent and great educational work,” he said, a school that would train teachers. In turn they would teach those who would otherwise never have had a chance at an education. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute opened its doors on April 8, 1868 with 15 students, one teacher and one matron.
It wasn’t going to be a makeshift place in the old hospital and barracks that then occupied the land, but instead some of the most impressive college buildings in America. Armstrong was like that. He hired the best architects he could find, all the while persuading northern backers to pony up the money. Academic Hall, Virginia Hall and Memorial Chapel would be things of beauty and inspiration.
Armstrong had not expected to run the school but only get it started and move on, but he was so successful in raising funds and increasing enrollment, there was no turning back. “The chances are my life’s work is here,” he wrote, “and I shall not regret it.”
Hampton Institute was soon bursting at the seams, and new buildings were added. One, “the Wigwam,” was built to house Indian students. It was another Armstrong brainstorm, and it worked, educating thousands of students and becoming a model for the Indian schools around the country. The first “house father” for the students was Booker T. Washington, an 1875 honors graduate who was deeply indebted to Armstrong.
When the trustees of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama wrote to Armstrong asking if he could recommend a qualified white person to serve as principal, Armstrong replied that he knew of no such individual, but there was a black man he wholeheartedly endorsed. Send Mr. Washington immediately, they replied.
Some of Armstrong’s writing seems paternalistic today, but he believed deeply in the cause he was fighting for. When he died in 1893, he was buried among students and faculty in a small cemetery on campus.
The school he started continued to grow and a series of later principals and presidents led Hampton to its status as a distinguished university.
As the City of Hampton remembers bits and pieces of its history, it may occur to some that what flowed from the tragedy of slavery and war was the triumph of this institution.

July 4, 2010

2010-07-04T07:28:00.004-04:00

You remember those Jamestown fellows. Seems like just yesterday that we observed the 400th anniversary of their 1607 arrival in these parts and the beginning, however stumbling, of the United States. It was a big deal, but as we know, the would-be colonists didn’t stay long. In fact, so botched was their initial attempt at settlement that they clambered back on their ships and started for home – only to be turned back at the last minute. Finally, before the century was out, Jamestown’s populace did part company with that God-forsaken island.
Now there’s another anniversary to observe, but this time we can add the word “continuous.” This Friday, on its official 400th birthday, Hampton takes a curtain call as the oldest non-stop English-speaking place in America.
Of course this is no cause for kicking up one’s heels. Native peoples dwelt on the Peninsula for at least 12,000 years – 300 times longer, if my math is correct. At the time of the second landing near Point Comfort, the place we now call Hampton was home to the Kecoughtans – “Kik-o-tans,” as the natives pronounce it. They were once a thriving and independent community, blessed with access to abundant food, from seafood to wild plants to crops they harvested in carefully tended gardens. As English observer William Strachey put it, “Kecoughtan is an ample and faire country indeed, an admirable portion of land comparatively high, wholesome and fruitful.” Of course, that is exactly why the natives were vulnerable to the starving, half-crazed settlers, but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Captain John Smith and his crew paid a couple of visits to the Kecoughtans in hopes of obtaining food. Their village was likely where the Veterans Administration Hospital now sits. The most memorable visit occurred in December 1608 when the Englishmen took shelter there during a long northeasterly storm and spent Christmas among the Indians. As he would write,
We were never more merry, nor fed on more plenty of good oysters, fish, flesh, wild fowl, and good bread, nor never had better fires in England than in the dry, warm, smoky houses of Kecoughtan.
But the merry times didn’t last long. In July 2010, desirous of that “faire country,” the colonists brutally attacked the Indians, killed many of them and drove off the rest. This, then, is the official date of Hampton’s founding. (Ironically, they called their village Kecoughtan for several years before banishing the name.)
The long sweep of history since then is fascinating. It includes a period when Hampton was the most important town in Virginia, with every merchant ship arriving and leaving the new world stopping to pay customs duties. It was a lively place. Captains and seamen, stevedores and shipwrights crowded the wharves and spilled over in the taverns.
Hampton’s story is touched by war. During the Revolution, the town was bombarded but held its own. The War of 1812 brought an invasion and brutal sacking, which led to the decision to build Fort Monroe and Fort Wool.
That same sweep of history includes the Civil War and the fateful decision to deny Union access to the town by burning it to the ground. Thousands of slaves, whom historian Robert Engs called “Freedom’s First Generation,” took refuge there and built among the ruins. One of the most dramatic moments in American education was the founding of a school that at first trained former enslaved persons, then grew to become one of the most respected educational institutions in America, Hampton University.
Hampton didn’t recover from the war until seafood and hotel entrepreneurs from the North arrived, then the Air Force and NASA turned a sleepy village into a thriving city. From the sea to the stars indeed.

This painting by Sidney King depicts the Jamestown colonists in their first meeting with the Kecoughtans at a place now occupied by the Veterans Administration Hospital. Courtesy of National Park Service, Colonial National Historical Park.