Markers of History

I’d seen a cou­ple of “recent snarfs” in the time I’ve been watch­ing Markeroni that were signs for Blue Star Memorial Highway signs. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, fig­ure out how this high­way vis­ited so many dif­fer­ent places. It just didn’t make sense to me. And then, on Monday when I was in Portsmouth, I saw it’s “cousin.” A marker labeled Blue Star Memorial By-Way, and so I decided that I had to look into what these things are. What was I look­ing at?

Blue Star Memorial By-Way marker

Location: In front of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum, at the cor­ner of Water St & High St, Portsmouth, VA 23704.

Visited: June 1, 2009, 1:05pm

Transcription of marker:

Blue Star Memorial By-Way

A trib­ute to the Armed Forces of America
T.D.V.F. of Garden Clubs

National Garden Clubs, Inc.

My impres­sions: shrug What’s up here? I had to do some research on this one. Because on its own, it’s a marker, a trib­ute to the mil­i­tary, which would be fairly unre­mark­able in a region with such a high mil­i­tary pres­ence as this one. But there was this con­nec­tion, this remem­brance of hav­ing seen some­what sim­i­lar mark­ers else­where on Markeroni. So I had to do some digging.

Wikipedia had a short stub arti­cle, “Blue Star Memorial Highway,” which men­tioned memo­r­ial high­ways to the armed forces and then men­tioned that they had been started by the National Council of State Garden Clubs, now known as National Garden Clubs, Inc. That looked famil­iar! They’re men­tioned at the bot­tom of the marker.

My Google-fu sent me to a page from the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs, Inc., which explained:

Through the years three dif­fer­ent types of Blue Star Memorial Markers have been adopted. They are The Blue Star Memorial Highway Marker which can be placed along ded­i­cated high­ways. The sec­ond is the Blue Star Memorial Marker which can be placed on other than ded­i­cated Highways, such as National ceme­ter­ies or Veterans Medical Centers. The third is the Blue Star Memorial By-Way Marker which is a plaque intended for gar­den set­tings, such as parks and civic and his­tor­i­cal grounds.

Aha! And this was out­side the museum. I only had one mys­tery left to solve…the ini­tials T.D.V.F.

My Google-fu came up blank! Fortunately, I had the idea: could T.D. be “Tidewater District?” Sure enough, that turned out to be the clue that solved the last rid­dle: Tidewater District of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs was the group that had placed this marker. I couldn’t find any infor­ma­tion about the plac­ing of this par­tic­u­lar marker, but there were a cou­ple of pages about them plac­ing another by-way marker at Albert G. Horton Jr. Memorial Veterans Cemetery in Suffolk in 2005. I guess that will be a snarf for another day!

Notes for future snar­fers: This marker is right next to the Naval Shipyard Museum marker, which I posted about yes­ter­day, and near a marker for the Revolutionary War at Portsmouth (fac­ing Water St, par­al­lel to the side of the museum), which I’ll post about in a few days.

Markeroni sta­tus: This marker is await­ing inclu­sion in the Markeroni database.

Update (6/7): This marker was included in the Markeroni data­base yes­ter­day and I logged my visit this morning.