Markers of History

Cannonball Trail
The Customhouse, 1859

Location: W Main St (oppo­site the foot of Granby St), Norfolk, VA 23510

Visited: June 23, 2009, 3:55pm

Transcription of marker: Construction of this cus­tom­house began in 1852 and was com­pleted in 1859, replac­ing an 1819 cus­tom­house located at Water and Church Streets (now Waterside Drive and St. Paul’s Boulevard). This build­ing was designed by Ammi B. Young (1798 – 1874), the first super­vis­ing archi­tect for the United States Treasury Department, who estab­lished high archi­tec­tural stan­dards for fed­eral build­ings. During his career Young designed some 70 gov­ern­ment build­ings around the coun­try, includ­ing the cus­tom­houses in Richmond and Petersburg. Departing from his more cus­tom­ary Tuscan designs, Young devel­oped a rich Classical Revival design for this gran­ite struc­ture. Adapting a new mate­r­ial to tra­di­tional forms, both the inte­rior columns and the cap­i­tals of the exte­rior columns are made of cast iron. All of the Federal agen­cies in Norfolk, includ­ing courts on the upper floor and the post office in the base­ment, were housed in this build­ing until space needs prompted the con­struc­tion of a new Federal cour­t­house and post office in 1900. The exte­rior of the build­ing has not been sig­nif­i­cantly altered since its construction.

My impres­sions: This is one of those moments when I con­fess to a bit of fear. Unfortunately the draw­ing on the marker is the clos­est I came to tak­ing a photo of the build­ing, largely because I believe it is still (in part) a fed­eral build­ing, and while I’m still await­ing my per­ma­nent res­i­dency sta­tus, I still feel funny about doing things that might invite scrutiny. So I exer­cised cau­tion, per­haps more than war­ranted. So, this 2005 photo, posted to Flickr by Tom Hammond under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, is your chance to see the glowingly-described building.

“U.S. Customhouse,” © 2005 Tom Hammond. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The marker is vis­i­ble in the lower right of the photo.

All that out of the way, I love the way this build­ing looks. It seems to me to be a typ­i­cally American style; by that I mean that it isn’t a style that I saw nearly enough of back in Canada. I’m not quite sure what that says, but it’s a dif­fer­ence I think I’ve noticed.

Markeroni sta­tus: I have a request in about the Cannonball Trail mark­ers, because most of them that I’ve found have not been in their data­base yet. This one might be in the data­base already under a slightly dif­fer­ent name and I’ve sought clar­i­fi­ca­tion on that.