Markers of History

I’d hoped to put a marker post out today, but that was not to be. (Isn’t that always the way on the day before you go on a trip?)

My wife and I are headed out of town first thing tomor­row morn­ing for my wife to take her vows as a novice in the Anglican Order of Preachers at their chap­ter gath­er­ing in Savannah, GA. I hope to have some free time that, if the weather’s good, may lead to my first posts about mark­ers out­side of Virginia on this blog.

I’ve also decided (after spend­ing some time yes­ter­day catch­ing up on my log­ging at Markeroni) that this blog needs to change a lit­tle bit. From the begin­ning, I’ve blogged about every marker I’ve logged on that site, and the back­log is now more than a month and grow­ing much faster than I can write about it. So when I return, I’m plan­ning to be a lit­tle choosier with post­ing, at least on a trial basis. That also means I would have a bit more free­dom to choose mark­ers (since, to date, I’ve been post­ing them sim­ply in the order I saw them) or to take a break from a cer­tain series of mark­ers if I would like to write about some­thing new. I also hope to move to a sched­ule of mostly a sin­gle post per day and not so many days with two or three posts, so that I can find time to research and write more in depth about some markers.

The first man­i­fes­ta­tion of these changes will prob­a­bly be a report on my trip back here, and if I get some marker-hunting time in, I expect I’ll make next week’s posts focus on the mark­ers from this week’s trip.

Thanks for read­ing! I hope you’ll find a his­tor­i­cal marker near you to read this week, and I’ll be back here with new con­tent start­ing Monday, August 17th!

It’s amaz­ing how great the Internet is for find­ing infor­ma­tion that you didn’t even know you were miss­ing. I’ve men­tioned Markeroni reg­u­larly on these pages, but I haven’t yet men­tioned The Historical Marker Database or HMDB (except for adding a link to the sidebar).

Schenectady, NY. Photo: Howard C. Ohlhous, 2007. Courtesy of hmdb.org

Yesterday, though, I learned through the exper­tise of one of their edi­tors about links between a war memo­r­ial I had vis­ited in Portsmouth, VA and oth­ers across the coun­try. Almost two months ago, I saw a memo­r­ial com­mem­o­rat­ing those who served in the Spanish-American War. But through an editor’s links, I found that the depic­tion on that 1942 mon­u­ment, ded­i­cated to those who vol­un­teered from Portsmouth and from Norfolk County, was actu­ally some­what famous.

Their data­base includes exam­ples from three other places:

• Schenectady, NY, ded­i­cated in 1921 (and reded­i­cated in 1996) to honor those who served from Schenectady County;


Savannah, GA. Photo: Mike Stroud, 2008. Courtesy of hmdb.org

• Savannah, GA (a city my wife and I will be vis­it­ing next month), erected in 1931 to honor those who vol­un­teered from Georgia; and


Arlington, VA. Photo: Richard E. Miller, 2008. Courtesy of hmdb.org

• Arlington, VA, where it has stood in Arlington National Cemetery (where my wife and I attended a bur­ial ear­lier this year) since 1965.

According to Wikipedia, there are many more copies around the coun­try, with esti­mates of 39 in an arti­cle on another exam­ple to roughly fifty, accord­ing to the arti­cle on the sculp­tor, Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson (1871 – 1932). Born in Brookline, MA, she was denied entry to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, because she was female. She started study­ing with sculp­tor Henry Hudson Kitson in 1886 and went on to marry him. Kitson was the first woman to be admit­ted to the National Sculpture Society.

So next month, when we go to Savannah, I think I’ll have to see if I can get to this marker. And I’ll def­i­nitely be keep­ing my eyes open online to see what else I can learn about his­tory (and his­tor­i­cal mark­ers) from others!

It’s amaz­ing what you can learn from the Internet these days!

On Monday, this blog will con­tinue our trip towards Yorktown and later in the week, we’ll travel from there to Jamestown on the Colonial Parkway. I hope you’ll join us.

I feel the urge to get more Portsmouth pho­tos some­time soon. I’ve been want­ing to for a few days (and at one point had plans to go yes­ter­day), but I was been deal­ing with a hor­ri­ble cold and throat stuff for a few days, as well as being quite tired. Most of that has passed, but I’m still a lit­tle wary of strand­ing myself far from home (in city bus terms) and get­ting over-tired. So I decided to try to plan for that trip that will hope­fully hap­pen tomor­row or Wednesday (since I think it’s sup­posed to get hot again at the end of the week).

So, ten­ta­tive plans for my next trip to Portsmouth (and future con­tent for this blog and snarfs at Markeroni):

1. Take ferry to North landing.
2. Visit Visitor’s Center, look­ing for brochure on Path of History.
3. Visit some sites from the National Register of Historic Places that I didn’t see on my last trip:
   1. Cedar Grove Cemetery
   2. Old Norfolk County Courthouse, cor­ner of Court & High Sts
   3. Pythian Castle, cor­ner of Court & County Sts
   4. Seaboard Coastline Bldg, next to High St ferry landing
   5. St Paul’s Catholic Church, High St
4. Find other state his­tor­i­cal mark­ers, espe­cially along Crawford Pkwy/Elizabeth River.
5. Buffalo Bill Cody marker, Water St, S of High St

Of course, not all of these may come to pass. That’s a lot of walk­ing and while I might be up to that on an ordi­nary day, I’m likely to play it safe and cut things short so I don’t get overtired.

I may also aim to find a few Cannonball Trail mark­ers over in Norfolk if I have energy, but I don’t really have a plan for those.

So hope­fully this blog won’t stay dor­mant for too much longer and we’ll return to more explo­rations of his­tory in a cou­ple of days.

I just wanted to let you all know that some of the sites I vis­ited that were orig­i­nally await­ing inclu­sion in the data­base have now been included, and this morn­ing, I logged my tenth land­mark on the site, giv­ing me a red star kudo!  :) (I know…you’re thrilled for me.) The next level of kudos will be for reach­ing 25 land­marks (and it’s quite con­ceive­able that I will reach this from places I vis­ited on Monday, but have not yet logged on the site); at that level, I’ll get an orange star.

The process of writ­ing about these places is tak­ing longer than I expected but I’m still mostly enjoy­ing it…I’m just learn­ing when I have to say “OK, Scott, that’s enough for now.” I’m also (mostly) log­ging them as I write about them (which may be a day or two before those posts appear here on the blog), so that’s one rea­son the count will take a while to increase, even though it’s been a week since I made my trip to Portsmouth.

And a fuller expla­na­tion about the Path of History mark­ers: They are not yet in the Markeroni data­base, so I’m intend­ing to hold off on sub­mit­ting those until I can see if I can get hold of a list of that program’s mark­ers. That may or may not be pos­si­ble, but that’s been on my per­sonal back-burner until I can get these write-ups done, so I don’t intend to do much on that front for about another week or two, I’d guess. But I did want to explain that note that’s appear­ing under “Markeroni sta­tus” in many of my entries this trip…because I’m the hold-up on that series of sites.

OK, enough with the “inside base­ball,” time to get back to his­toric sites and markers…

So this past week­end, my wife and I headed out of town for a church retreat, and I was amazed by the num­ber of mark­ers we saw on our route. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to stop for any pho­tos, but I was cer­tainly mak­ing note for a return drive.

I saw a “marker field” with three state his­toric mark­ers all next to each other. In total, I think there were 11 state his­toric mark­ers that we passed, another within a tenth of a mile of where we left one route, as well as one mon­u­ment in Surry, and an appar­ent marker for a for­mer church loca­tion. While it sad­dens me to not have snarfed all these over the week­end, it has turned into a plan­ning ses­sion for a snarf­ing expedition.

When com­bined with some travel we’d pre­vi­ously planned, we could log these as well as the poten­tial for four oth­ers along our likely route (which would sex­tu­ple my cur­rent total!). I’m look­ing for­ward to that and prepar­ing the GPS with points from the state marker web site (so that we don’t have to spend the entire trip strain­ing to see the signs in time to stop for them with­out backtracking).

I also ended up e-mailing the Department of Historic Resources (who run the state marker pro­gram) to ask about a prob­lem with their web site: the four cities clos­est to me have no mark­ers that turn up on that data­base, which is sur­pris­ing – espe­cially since I’ve already snarfed two of them for Markeroni and know I’ve seen oth­ers. So I sent a quick note ask­ing if it’s a known issue and won­der­ing whether they have an esti­mate for when I could access the list­ings for those sites.

I will also prob­a­bly try to get to the pub­lic library some­time this week to look at their copy of the book with all the Virginia state mark­ers. Unfortunately (for me), the book is in the ref­er­ence sec­tion, so I can’t bring it home. (That said, I know it will be a pur­chase in the not too dis­tant future, with a sim­i­lar book for North Carolina likely to be pur­chased, also.)

I don’t intend to get into a whole lot of behind-the-scenes Markeroni minu­tia here, but since this is my first time log­ging a land­mark that wasn’t on one of the site’s exist­ing lists, I wanted to fill you in on the process, espe­cially since I’d expressed some uncer­tainty about the process for this landmark.

Since there wasn’t an urgency to my ques­tions (and I fig­ured that an expe­ri­enced Markeroon could help, given the level of my ques­tion), I used the “Ask Questions” board on the Markeroni forums. A few hours later, I received a response: the statue I posted about yes­ter­day counts as a sep­a­rate snarf from the state marker I posted about on Wednesday. I also received some ideas about what sort of photo I should sub­mit for the cat­a­log and what pos­si­bil­i­ties there were for the photo for my log book.

So this morn­ing, shortly before post­ing this, I sent in the request to add the statue as a land­mark. I expect that I won’t get my visit logged until Sunday or Monday, though, because this after­noon, I’ll leave for a church event and won’t be back home until Sunday afternoon.

That also means that this is the last Markers of History entry you can expect to see until early next week.

If you’re in the US, have a great (and safe) Memorial Day week­end, and if you’re any­where else, stay safe and have fun this week­end, too!

Update (5/26): I received the e-mail noti­fy­ing me that this had been added to the Markeroni data­base Friday evening, and I logged my visit this after­noon. I still have some ques­tions about con­tribut­ing infor­ma­tion to the cat­a­log, but my visit is recorded now.

While stopped to snarf the state his­tor­i­cal marker for Grace Sherwood, we also stopped to look at this statue, acces­si­ble from the same park­ing lot.

Location: Alongside Witchduck Rd, in front of Sentara Bayside Hospital at the inter­sec­tion of Independence Blvd, Virginia Beach, VA 23455.

Visited: May 19, 2009, 7:10pm

Description: A statue of Grace Sherwood with a small ani­mal. I’d like to do some fur­ther research into the ani­mal and its inclu­sion and how that relates to Sherwood’s story.

The statue sits on a base and there are four plaques, one on each side of the base: I’ll go through each, begin­ning with the side clos­est to Witchduck Rd and pro­ceed­ing counter-clockwise around the statue.

Plaque #1
Letter from Governor Kaine

[Virginia state seal]

Timothy M. Kaine
Governor

Ms. Belinda Nash

Dear Ms. Nash:

I am pleased to join the mayor of Virginia Beach in extend­ing best wishes as you work to pro­mote jus­tice in the 1706 “witch duck­ing” case of Grace Sherwood.

With 300 years of hind­sight, we all cer­tainly can agree that trial by water is an injus­tice. We also can cel­e­brate the fact women’s equal­ity is that a con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected today, and women have the free­dom to pur­sue their hopes and dreams.

The his­tor­i­cal records that sur­vive indi­cate that Ms. Sherwood, a mid­wife and wid­owed mother of three, sur­vived her “trial by water” in 1706. Those records also indi­cate that one of my pre­de­ces­sors, Governor Alexander Spotswood, even­tu­ally helped her reclaim her prop­erty. The record also indi­cates Ms. Sherwood led an oth­er­wise quiet and law-abiding life until she died at age 80.

Today, July 10, 2006, as 70th Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I am pleased to offi­cially restore the good name of Grace Sherwood.

Sincerely,

[signed]
Timothy M. Kaine

Patrick Henry Building, 1111 East Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia 23219
(804) 786‑2211, TTY (800) 828‑1120
www.governor.virginia.gov

Plaque #2

Grace White Sherwood
Born 1660 Died 1740
Married April 1680 to James Sherwood
James died 1701
Survived by sons,
John, James, and Richard

Sentara Healthcare

has gra­ciously pro­vided this site in
recog­ni­tion of their com­mu­nity, and
the his­tory that sur­rounds us.

This 21st day of April 2007

Sculptor
Robert Cunningham

Plaque #3
The Trial of 1706

At Witchduck Point, 10am July 10th 1706 Grace Sherwood, the daugh­ter of a car­pen­ter and the wife of a planter in the County of Princess Anne, was accused by neigh­bors of witch­craft. Grace was tried in the sec­ond Princess Anne County cour­t­house, found guilty, and con­sented to the tra­di­tional trial by water, Grace was tried cross­bound and dropped into water above man’s depth. If she were to sink and drown she was inno­cent and could be buried on holy ground, Grace did float, thus was guilty as the pure water was cast­ing out her evil spirit. She was incar­cer­ated in the local jail just beyond this statue. After her release, Grace paid the back taxes on her prop­erty in 1714, returned to her farm and worked the land until her death at age 80 in the autumn of 1740. Grace Sherwood, Virginia’s only con­victed witch tried by water, she lays claim to Witchduck Road. Her leg­end lives on as “The Infamous Witch of Pungo”

Plaque #4
Major Donors

[not tran­scribed here, but pic­tured below]

My impres­sions: I really like this statue and the plaques around it. I like the way it tack­les an injus­tice, fac­ing up to what hap­pened, while admit­ting that an injus­tice was done. I also found that the texts here human­ized Grace Sherwood far more than the dry state marker a cou­ple of hun­dred feet away. It’s mark­ers like this that make me want to dig around and find more of the real story behind them.

Notes for future snar­fers: This and state marker K 276 are both acces­si­ble from the Bayside hos­pi­tal park­ing lot.

Where do I go from here: I’m off to fig­ure out how to log this. I’m pretty sure it’s a wild­card (a site not on Markeroni’s exist­ing lists), but I’m not sure whether I should be log­ging the whole thing as one, or whether I’d log plaques #1 and #3 sep­a­rately (#2 doesn’t appear to me to qual­ify and #4 def­i­nitely doesn’t).

So I’ll have some ques­tions for Markeroons more expe­ri­enced in the ways of Markeroni than I, and I’ll report back here when all is prop­erly decided and logged.

Update (6/2): Yesterday, The Virginian-Pilot pub­lished a brief arti­cle by Kathy Adams about the name Witchduck Road which men­tions Grace Sherwood’s story, as well as the statue described above.