Markers of History

Two pairs of mark­ers today. This marker and the next one (JONES MILL POND) are from one pull-off and then later today, from another pull-off along the Colonial Parkway, will be GREAT OAKS and THE PALISADES.

Colonial Parkway mark­ers
A Union Advance

Location: Colo­­nial National His­­toric Pkwy, Williamsburg, VA 23185

Vis­ited: July 4, 2009, 12:15pm

Tran­scrip­­tion of marker: On May 5, 1862 Lt. George A. Custer (who in 1867 made his “Last Stand” on the Little Bighorn River in Montana) led a detach­ment along a road­way here over “Club Dam Creek” to occupy the Confederate work on the bluff imme­di­ately beyond. This maneu­ver in the Battle of Williamsburg came as the Union Army advanced toward Richmond in the Peninsular Campaign.

My impres­sions: I like the bit of connection-making on this marker. I’m sure EVERYBODY has heard of Custer and his last stand, even non-Americans who may know noth­ing beyond the con­nec­tion between his name and that phrase, so it’s nice to take what peo­ple know already and link it to what you’re tech­ing them from the marker. I think it can also make a nice reminder that his­tory didn’t stop in this area at a cer­tain point in time. Because we’re trav­el­ing between Yorktown (where his­tory was made dur­ing the Revolution) and Jamestown (where his­tory was made much ear­lier). Here, we’ve got his­tory hap­pen­ing nearly a cen­tury after the Revolution. Of course, there’s plenty of time since the Civil War…so maybe my point is a lit­tle suspect.

Notes for future snar­fers: This marker and the next marker are from the same pull-off, but for ease of dri­ving, stay­ing in the car, and tak­ing pho­tos from the pas­sen­ger seat, they are in the reverse order from our usual direc­tion of travel. (So this one is closer to Williamsburg than the next marker I’ll post about, and that one is closer to Yorktown than this marker.) Nobody else prob­a­bly cares, since they’re at the same pull-off, but I feel bet­ter for explaining.

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.

Path of History
Seaboard Air Line Railroad

Location: Near inter­sec­tion of High St & Water St, near the High St ferry land­ing, Portsmouth, VA 23704.

Visited: June 1, 2009, 12:55pm

Transcription of marker: The Portsmouth & Roanoke Railroad was incor­po­rated in March 1832 and began oper­a­tions in July 1834 when the first train, pulled by horses, ran a full cir­cuit from Portsmouth to Suffolk. A loco­mo­tive replaced the horses later that year. By late 1836, the full line run­ning to Weldon, N.C., was com­pleted. In 1846 the line was reor­ga­nized as the Seaboard & Roanoke and even­tu­ally became the Seaboard Air Line Railroad.

This build­ing at High Street Landing served as the Seaboard Air Line Railroad head­quar­ters and sta­tion from 1894 through 1958, when the com­pany moved its oper­a­tions to Richmond, Va. Since that time, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad has sur­vived a num­ber of merg­ers, exist­ing today as CSX Transportation.

My impres­sions: My imag­i­na­tion wasn’t caught ter­ri­bly by this one. I think it may be because of grow­ing up in Canada, where a large part of our national myth is about being tied together by one rail­road that the smaller rail­roads (both here and back home) don’t seem ter­ri­bly impor­tant to me. The men­tal pic­ture of horses pulling a train (which is inter­est­ing to me) gets drowned out by the minu­tiae of cor­po­rate names and mergers.

I do won­der about the place­ment. The build­ing there was head­quar­ters. Why? There is no evi­dence today of rails in close prox­im­ity to the build­ing. (Of course, there isn’t much rea­son for HQ to be right on the rail line, is there?) Was it the water­front location?

Further read­ing: “Seaboard Air Line Railroad,” Wikipedia.

Markeroni sta­tus: I will attempt to gather more infor­ma­tion about Portsmouth’s Path of History before sub­mit­ting this for inclu­sion in the Markeroni database.