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This week on Tidewater Talk, we caught up on a little local life and a lot of Coastal Virginia news. We talked about the Wells Theatre reopening quickly after flooding, the Great Bridge in Chesapeake getting stuck open again in the heat, and one of my favorite local history stories yet: Portsmouth’s Richard Dale, who was captured by the British five times and escaped all five. We also revealed last week’s “Where in Tidewater” answer, Fort Monroe, and shared why it’s such a powerful place in regional and national history, from Edgar Allan Poe to its role as "Freedom’s Fortress."
We also highlighted an important Virginia Beach safety reminder that stormwater ponds, ditches, drains, and channels are not safe play areas, especially during and after rain, and shared the city’s reporting line for concerns. On top of that, we ran through the week’s weather outlook, previewed a few upcoming local events like Tidewater Horror Con, the Neptune Fall Wine Festival, and several 9/11 memorial events around Hampton Roads, and wrapped with a new “Where in Tidewater” mystery pointing listeners toward a vanished coastal community at the southern tip of Virginia Beach.
Where in Tidewater
- The people who founded this town did not pick it. They washed up on it. Sailors off ships that broke apart on this stretch of coast, men with no money to get home and in some cases no interest in going, who walked out of the surf and just stayed.
- So they built a town out of what the ocean handed them. A schooner went down offshore loaded with cypress lumber, the lumber came ashore, and they used it to build their Methodist church. At its best this place had three hundred people, two churches, a schoolhouse, a grocery store, and a Life-Saving Service crew. The graves in the little cemetery are packed with seashells, because there was no florist anywhere near and nothing worth picking to put on a grave.
- Then the ocean started coming over the sand more than they could live with, and by the 1930s every last person was gone. The site is still there, at the very bottom of Virginia Beach, inside False Cape State Park, right up against the North Carolina line. You cannot drive to it. You hike in, bike in, or come by boat through Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. And the church steeple is still standing, sitting inside a white glass-walled building somebody put up around it to keep the weather off.
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This week on Tidewater Talk, we caught up on a little local news and a lot of Coastal Virginia life. We talked about a strange case involving red-light tickets in Virginia Beach tied to a car that had already been sold, then shifted into a health update after the Virginia Department of Health confirmed human cases of West Nile virus in Virginia Beach. We also shared practical mosquito precautions, compared notes on recent summer illnesses, and, as always, mixed in a few very real and very funny personal stories along the way.
We also dug into one of Tidewater's more memorable local quirks: Norfolk's iconic mermaids. I shared how the whole public art tradition actually grew out of Chicago's famous cow parade before becoming a lasting symbol of Norfolk, complete with an official mermaid trail. We wrapped with a weather update featuring dangerous heat, storm chances later in the week, this week's location riddle for you to solve, and a roundup of Labor Day weekend events including concerts, fireworks, the Super Girl Surf Festival, a local car show, and Norfolk's upcoming Neighborhood Expo and Uplift Awards.
Where in Tidewater
- A young man enlisted in the Army here under a fake name, Edgar A. Perry, and made sergeant major before he quit to go to West Point. He got famous later, under his real name, writing about ravens and beating hearts.
- It is the largest fort in North America with a moat around it. Ten-foot-thick walls, sixty-three acres inside them, and construction started in 1819. After the Civil War the United States held Jefferson Davis prisoner in it for two years.
- In May of 1861 three men who had escaped slavery, Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Sheppard Mallory, rowed to this place and the general in charge refused to send them back. He called them contraband of war. Word traveled, thousands more came, and Black Americans started calling it Freedom's Fortress. It sits at the tip of Hampton where the Chesapeake Bay begins, President Obama made it a national monument in 2011, and this past Saturday they unveiled the first sculpture of a new memorial there.
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This week on Tidewater Talk, we covered a wide mix of Coastal Virginia stories, from another round of flash flooding in Norfolk to West Nile virus turning up in mosquitoes across multiple Virginia Beach neighborhoods. We also talked through a headline-making lawsuit involving a former Norfolk police officer and her privacy complaint against the department, and then shifted into one of our favorite lanes: the strange and memorable corners of local history. This week’s “Strange and Odd of Tidewater” spotlight was Portsmouth’s long-running Winter Wonderland animatronic Christmas display, a community-loved holiday attraction with roots going back decades and a story that includes fire, restoration, and a second life at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center.
We also shared the latest local forecast, with comfortable mid-80s temperatures, storm chances building later in the week, and an eye on two tropical disturbances in the Atlantic. To wrap things up, we swapped a few Tidewater tips for the weekend, including Maker Fest Portsmouth, the East Coast Surfing Championships, a “dive-in” screening of Finding Nemo at Ocean Breeze Waterpark, and Moth Night at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Plus, we dropped a new local history trivia clue centered on the Great Dismal Swamp.
Where in Tidewater
- In 1763 a young George Washington rode down here, looked the place over, and called it a glorious paradise. Then he and eleven other Virginians started a company to drain it, cut it up, and sell it off. It did not work. Two hundred and sixty years later it still has not worked.
- The oldest hand-dug waterway still in use anywhere in this country runs right along its edge, twenty-two miles of it, dug by enslaved workers standing waist-deep in mud between 1793 and 1805. And there is a five-mile ditch cut straight through the middle of this place that still carries Washington's name.
- For about two hundred years, people who had freed themselves from slavery lived out on the dry islands in the middle of it. Whole communities, some of them born out there and never leaving. Archaeologists have dug up their cabins. Today the whole thing is a national wildlife refuge, a hundred and twelve thousand acres, and the line between Suffolk and Chesapeake runs right through it.
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Brodie and Co cover free ADA beach wheelchairs at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and Sandbridge, a fourth shift for Norfolk Fire Rescue, a beachy clean at Lafayette Park, and the nine to two vote on the Virginia Beach golf course.
Strange and Odd heads to Suffolk, where Mr. Peanut was drawn by a thirteen year old for five dollars.
Where in Tidewater answers with the World's Oldest Edible Ham at the Isle of Wight County Museum in Smithfield, and Co sets a new one hiding under the same roof.
Plus the Wells Theatre, Atlantic Comic Con, and the Norfolk Waterfront Jazz Festival.
If you're in Coastal Virginia, this is your weekly mix of local news, odd history, and things worth leaving the house for.
Where in Tidewater
- It shares the exact same "roof" as the 1902 World's Oldest Ham, sitting in a neighboring display case.
- It is even older than the ham, dating all the way back to 1890. It was originally grown by a farmer named A.B. Scott, but was pocketed and dated by the very same peanut merchant, P.D. Gwaltney Sr., to use as a marketing tool for his business.
- Like its ham neighbor, it has also been featured by Ripley's Believe It or Not! and was recently 3D-scanned by anthropologists so people around the world could study its historic wrinkles.