SURPRISING HAMPTON

A trip to this Virginia harbor city reveals an early free black population, a treasure-filled museum at its famous university, and a New Deal experiment for black people that went terribly right BY AUDREY PETERSON
A L L , U N L E S S O T H E R W I S E N O T E D, BY S K I P J O N E S . A B OV E : H O L LY WAT E R S / V I S TA G R A P H I C S .

Private boats throng a marina in downtown Hampton on the river of the same name.

hampton, virginia, might have had the distinction of hosting the rst group of Africans in North America (individual Africans had come, with the Spanish conquistadors, as early as the fteenth century) had it not been for a picky Dutch ships captain. After dropping anchor in the harbor there in 1619 with several indentured African servants onboard, the captain decided that the site wasnt adequate, collected some provisions, and moved on

to Jamestown. The Africans never got off the boat, and it is unlikely they saw anything other than the ships hold. This I learn at Fort Monroe near the Old Point Comfort lighthouse, where Ive come as part of a group of journalists invited to learn more about Hamptons long history. I ask Mary Fugere, one of our hosts, exactly where the rst Africans might have set foot on American soil. I know that Jamestown is considered the Africans earliest stop, but the

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literature weve been given suggests the possibility of this previous landing, and I think that maybe, just maybe, this is a fresh fact I can cleverly unearth. Mary sighs and shakes her head: The literature is wrong. I look past the turquoise-andwhite lighthouse at the blue harbor and wonder what made the captain move on. The English captain John Smith showed no such hesitation when he made the place that would become Hampton, then the land of the Kecoughtan (pronounced KICK-uh-tan) Indians, a stop on his way to Jamestown in the spring of 1607. He was warmly welcomed, and in the winter of 1608, at Christmastime, a snowstorm forced him and his men to take shelter with the Indians. We were never more merrie, nor fedde on more plentie of good oysters, sh, esh, wild fowle and good bread; nor never had better res in England than in the drie, smokie houses of Kecoughtan, he wrote in his diary. A modernized version of the passage is engraved on the facade of the Hampton History Museum and Visitor Center. Fairly new (it was opened in May 2003), the museum is an excellent rst stop on a trip to Hampton, for it succeeds in making Indian history, black history, white history, and local episodes of American history one and the same. A look at the walls of the entryway on the rst day of our visit reveals quotes from such various people as the seventeenthcentury settler and diarist William Strachey, Thomas Jefferson, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Slaughter, a former slave. One by a Confederate soldier, a Pvt. Robert S. Hudgins II of the Old Dominion Dragoons, will come back to me the next day at the fort. Dressed in an antebellum costume with a hooped skirt, lace collar, and gloves, our guide, Teri Toepke, the director of education at the Hampton Museum, gathers us in front of a reconstructed early-seventeenth-century fortress wall made of rough-hewn timber. She explains that it was built to approximate a wall of the very rst fort in the area, Algernourne, erected in 1609. Apparently, the English repaid the generous Kecoughtans, whod made them so merrie, by driving

them away and then building a fort, yet honored the Indians by retaining the name of Kecoughtan for their town. It was incorporated in 1619 and given the name Elizabeth City, which was later changed to Hampton in honor of the third Earl of Southampton, a staunch supporter of Virginia settlement. In 1612 a colonist named John Rolfe (who later would marry the famous Pocahontas) introduced tobacco to Virginia as a cash crop. It had already become popular in England and by 1619 was the colonys leading export. This was the same year that the rst group of Africans disembarked in Jamestown. They were not slaves. Traded by the Dutch captain for provisions and baptized as Christians, they would be as free as their white counterparts once theyd served out their indentures. For the next few decades, blacks were able to gain their freedom and own land, livestock, even servants of their own, and some did. But by the early eighteenth century, British laws had been changed to make all servants who were not Christians in their native countries, including Africans and Native Americans, servants for life. Slavery in North America began in earnest.
An 1861 engraving shows ex-slaves mustering for work at Fort Monroe.

any africans destined to work in the virginia tobacco elds came rst to Hampton. Between 1710 and 1718 sloops with names like Dragon and Pagan Creek brought more than 700 slaves from the Caribbean and Africa. As other crops that were less labor intensive, such as wheat and corn, slowly began to replace tobacco, both blacks and whites had more time to learn other trades. Blacks became barrel makers, carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths. Often they were hired out and earned wages, a portion of which went back to their owners. The rest they saved and used to buy their freedom. This helped create a solid population of free blacks long before the Civil War. We round a corner of the museum and nd a plaster-ofParis head of Edward Teachthe infamous pirate Blackbearddisplayed as a reminder that Virginias shores were vulnerable to these marauders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it was not only lawless pirates who plundered. British privateers, freelance warships authorized by King George III to attack enemy vessels, trawled the waters during the Revolutionary War, looking to pick off American ships. Cesar Tarrant, a literate slave, was a navigator and pilot aboard an armed supply vessel called the Patriot. In 1777 his ship, one among a group under the command of Com. Richard Taylor, was sailing from Hampton when the British privateer Lord Howe was spotted. Commodore Taylor took command of the Patriot, which quickly caught up to the privateer, a vessel twice the size of the American ship, and rammed it. Tarrant skillfully steered all through the two-hour

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At left: Outside and inside the Hampton History Museum on downtowns main street. Above: Fort Monroe from the air.

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fter a peaceful breakfast at the lady neptune Inn, on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay about four miles from downtown Hampton, we jump into a van for the short drive to Fort Monroe. Out the window to my left I see long stretches of green lawns, punctuated with piers reaching out to the bay and graceful white gazebos. This is the

AMERICAN LEGACY SUMMER 2004

C E N T E R T O P L E F T: J I M P I L E ; C E N T E R B O T T O M R I G H T: C O R B I S ; FA R R I G H T: J O H N Mc G R A I L

battle that followed. The Lord Howe broke off the action and escaped, but the commodore praised Tarrant, stating that he had behaved gallantly. Virginias General Assembly freed him after the war, and it is said that descendants of his still live in Hampton. On a summer weekday at 6 P.M., downtown Hampton is quiet. It is neat and sweet, all brick, including the sidewalks, most of it built fairly recently. It is a downtown begging you to please enjoy it. The streets are lined with crape myrtles, and the lyrically tinny bell of a nearby church strikes the hour. Live jazz music oats out from one of the restaurants. Were told that the main street, though empty now, becomes packed later at night during warm weather, especially on Saturdays, when the town throws a block party. As we stroll, we stop to look at sculptures placed here and there, part of a ne outdoor exhibit of buyable works called The Art Market. Art and music are recurring themes in Hampton in the summer.

Buckroe Beach area. In 1897 a local entrepreneur opened a hotel, dancing pavilion, and amusement park here, all of which were off-limits to black people. So a local businessman named F. D. Banks, along with a few partners, promptly formed the Bay Shore Hotel Corporation. They raised $15,000 to buy property along the bay adjoining Buckroe Beach and built a top-notch resort for African-Americans. The hotel opened for business in 1898; by 1930 the Bay Shore Hotel, which began life as a four-room cottage, had grown to a three-story beachfront establishment with 70 rooms and long porches facing the water. The resorts popularity waned some after a hurricane severely damaged the buildings in 1933, but big-name African-American entertainers, including Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, still performed there. The Bay Shore property was sold in 1977 to developers who tore down the original structures. We cross the Mercury Boulevard bridge over the calm blue-brown waters of Mill Creek (which is really an inlet) to Fort Monroe. Well before the Civil War, 8 percent of Hamptons

SOME WORRIED ABOUT TEACHING INDIANS AND BLACKS TOGETHER.

Above: Hampton University. Above left, inside Memorial Chapel, and a social studies class in 1899.

sizable black population was free. Whites in Hampton believed in slavery but did not, as a rule, tolerate cruelty. In one instance, a slave ran away from a harsh master and stayed right in town, without ever being caught and returned. However well treated, though, slaves were still slaves, and as we found out at the fort, there would come a time when Hamptons slaves would run away in droves. Fort Monroe is the oldest fort in the United States to still be operated by the military. The cornerstone was laid in 1819, and it was garrisoned in 1823 though not completed until 1834. It is the largest stone fort in the country, and the only active one with a moat (three to four feet deep, eight feet deep at high tide). Crabs, jellysh, and other critters live in its waters. Across the moat, through the postern (back) gate into the fort, we enter the rst of a series of low, arched stone-andbrick rooms. These form the Casemate Museum (a casemate is a chamber in the wall of a fort used for storage, living quarters, or positioning cannon). At Fort Monroe 32-pounder guns

with a quarter-mile range were housed in many of these rooms. On display are cases full of things military, but Im particularly interested to learn the story behind the forts other name, Freedom Fort. It seems it all started in 1861, when three slaves sought haven here by swimming across the harbor from Sewells Point in Norfolk. They belonged to a Colonel Mallory, who demanded them back. But Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who was in command, told Mallory that since Virginia was no longer a part of the Union (it along with 10 other states had seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to form the Confederacy), it could no longer benet from U.S. laws, which included the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Therefore, Major General Butler concluded, the slaves were contraband and did not have to be returned. After Butlers declaration, nearly 900 refugee slaves ran for the fort. When the Confederate military heard a rumor that the Union Army was going to quarter refugees along with soldiers in Hampton, it burned the town to the ground. One of the only buildings to survive was St. Johns, the church downtown with the lyrical bell. I recall it, and the words of the Confederate private that I read in the rotunda of the museum the day before: As the smoke ascended to the heavens . . . I thought of how my little hometown was being made a sacrice to the god of war.

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The ex-slaves did not just run to Fort Monroe and hide; many joined the Union Army. Three units of U.S. Colored Troops (the First and Second U.S. Cavalries and the Battery B Second U.S. Light Artillery) were formed at Fort Monroe; all three saw action in and around Hampton. And for a short time toward the end of the war, Harriet Tubman worked at the fort, as a nurse at the contraband hospital. Out of the cool, dark fort and into the sunlight, we walk down a wide lane lined with magnolias and pine trees to see the Old Point Comfort lighthouse, where Ill learn the truth about the rst blacks in Virginia. There are grass and piers here along the water but, unlike at Buckroe Beach, no swimming. Back across the bridge, we pass the district of Phoebus, which had an earlier incarnation as the large contraband camp called Slab Town. Named for the slabs of wood that were used to construct lean-tos, the town was a peaceful settlement. After the war it was renamed Chesapeake City and then Phoebus, and the black population grew, soon outnumbering the white. It was incorporated in 1900 and became part of the City of Hampton in 1952. A mixed community today, Phoebus still feels like a small town, having maintained many of its original buildings. Surrounded on three sides by the river called Hampton, the university of the same name, about a miles drive west from Phoebus, sprawls across 254 acres. On the extreme eastern end of the campus, stretching its branches for a total diameter of 98 feet, is Emancipation Oak, the true beginning of education on these grounds. In 1863 Hamptons slaves gathered beneath this tree to hear President Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation read to them. Not long after, Mary Peake, the daughter of a freed colored woman and a Frenchman, used the shade of the oak as an outdoor classroom for those who were eager to learn to read and write. Five years later the school opened its doors as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Founded by Brig. Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the 29-year-old son of missionary parents, the school was a haven of education for newly freed blacks. Hampton had, and still has, a dress code and a student code of conduct. It also has a president, William R. Harvey, who has led the school for 26 years. Harvey has been offered secretary- and ambassadorships by more than one U.S. President. On the walls of the anteroom to his office I see photos of Harvey with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bushes senior

and junior, and Bill Clinton. He calls his university post not a job but a way of life. His enthusiasm and drive are sparkling and have clearly translated, over his career, into success. During his tenure Harvey has added 64 new academic programs, balanced the schools budget and created a multimillion-dollar surplus, expanded the physical facilities, and increased the enrollment from 2,700 when he rst took office to 6,000. Appointed to several national advisory boards, Harvey, who does actually speak to President Bush on issues like education and business, smiles when asked if he ever disagrees with the President. Lets just say that I was in favor of the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action case, he says.

e wave good-bye to president harvey, who has dashed past us on his way to a meeting at the schools museum. Hampton University Museum is the oldest African-American museum in the country, founded on the day the rst students enrolled in 1868. General Armstrong wrote to his mother, who lived in Hawaii, send what you have to send not in money, but in rare specimens of all kinds. The gifts will be very instructive. Guided by the museums director, Ramon Austin, we are treated to a look at some of the museums 9,000 pieces of Native American, African, Asian, and Pacic Asian art and artifacts, only a small portion of which are on display. Austin directs our attention: Here are pieces from the Kuba collection brought back from the Congo by the black missionary Rev. William Sheppardmasks, hats, weapons, furniture, jewelry. There is a girls jingle dress from the Anishinabe tribe, a Cherokee basket, a ceramic pitcher painted by a Cheyenne student at . . . Hampton? Forward thinking is what got the school started, and forward thinking is what kept it going; it Ex-slaves learned to was to the school that the Indians reread beneath turned, more than 200 years after theyd Hampton Universitys been driven out of Kecoughtan. In 1878 Emancipation Oak. Hampton welcomed Native American students, beginning the institutes early commitment to serving a multicultural population. Said General Armstrong, The Negro has the only American music; the Indian has the only American art . . . the mingling of students there is good for both. There were many, however, who objected to the then-radical idea of a mixed-race school. Some critics

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feared the effects the two races would have on each other, or worse, that they would intermarry. Eventually, the school lost its federal funding for the program. Nevertheless, Hamptons historic Native American education program spanned more than 40 years, with the last student graduating in 1923. As we walk the grounds, I see everywhere buildings of varicolored brick, and beautifully groomed lawns. We pass an 1878 structure, now an administrative building, called the Indian Cottage, which was a dormitory for Native American male students. Booker T. Washington was the house father there just before leaving Hampton in 1881 to help found Tuskegee Institute. We visit Ogden Hall, said to be the site of one of the earliest integrated audiences, and Virginia-Cleveland Hall, nanced by the famous Hampton Singers, who traveled the country giving benet performances to raise money for the womens dormitory. Past the hall and next to the Hampton River is the Memorial Chapel, built in 1886 in the Italian Romanesque Revival style with a bell tower 150 feet high. Inside, the beautifully detailed woodwork, furniture, and ironwork were all crafted by students. Look up high to spot a frieze that encircles the entire chapel. It is carved with the faces of African-Americans and Indians; their expressions solemn and penetrating, they watch over the congregants of the nondenominational chapel each Sunday at services. Hampton is short for Hampton Roads, and Roads is short for Roadstead, and it becomes time for me to ask about what, in my ignorance, I believe to be a street or lane. Where were the actual Hampton Roads? Imagine my embarrassment to learn that roadstead is actually a nautical term that means

NOT JUST ANYONE COULD MOVE INTO ABERDEEN GARDENS IN 1937.

Far left: Aberdeen resident Roosevelt Wilson. Above: Workers in a seafood factory, 1900. Left: A riveter at a shipyard in 1950.

R I G H T: M A R I N E R S M U S E U M /C O R B I S ; I N S E T: C O U R T E SY A LU M I N U M C O M PA N Y O F A M E R I C A / M A R I N E R S M U S E U M

harbor. Hampton Roads is, in fact, the worlds largest natural, ice-free harbor. The seafood industry took off there in the late nineteenth century because of it. After the war, many newly freed slaves found jobs in the shing industry and as cooks and waiters on steamboats. The positions held by some of these ex-slaves were their rst opportunity to be self-employed.

he nearby newport news shipyard also offered steady work. There African-Americans were caulkers, riveters, welders, sawyers, ferrymen, ship carpenters, and boatbuilders. During World War II, when the Navy was desperate for ships, the yard reached its peak of more than 31,000 employees, many of them black. More and more African-Americans came to Hampton seeking employment, and some of the black neighborhoods, bursting with overcrowding, went to seed. During the New Deal, the federal government built Aberdeen Gardens on the site of an old plantation to help remedy the housing problem. It was to be a model subsistence community, where people raised their own livestock and grew vegetables. The rst families arrived in 1937, many of them shipyard workers, but also doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. Two doctors, Russell and Enid OLeary, moved in with their baby girl, Hazel, who would go on to become the secretary of energy under President Bill Clinton. To hear

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WE SANG LUSTILY AS AN ORGANIST WORKED THE OLD PUMP ORGAN.

The 125-year-old Little England Chapel (left) is host to an evening singalong (above).

the town elders tell it, the neighborhood has not changed much since then, but has only gotten better. One look around and you believe them.

n each street are rows of boxy brick houses trimmed in white, 158 in all. The elders and other citizens of Aberdeen beam with pride as they walk us through. Not just anyone could move in, you had to have a medical exam, and they did a background check, says Claude Vann, one of the original residents, who still lives there. And once you did move in, it was all about camaraderie. We were out for the same things, says Vann. We were happy to provide for ourselves. The government gave Aberdeen 12 cows and 25,000 chicks, says Geneva Cooper, another resident. Everyone raised vegetables, but nobody planted at the same time, that way you always had fresh vegetables. The idea of doing for yourself sat well with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who stopped by in 1938 during a visit to Hampton University, and gave the residents a pep talk. After World War II, people who had been renting the houses were given the chance to buy them. A ve-room corner

house, the most expensive available, went for $3,200 with a $19-a-month mortgage. Were invited into one of the houses, now the Aberdeen Gardens Historic Museum. It is beautifully restored to its original state. The rooms are simple, with oak oors (the original were pine) and white walls. Everything but the air conditioning downstairs is strictly no-frills; Im beginning to appreciate that its the people here who give the place character, as we sit in the kitchen and they reminisce. In the 1960s, when other black communities around the country were falling into decay, Aberdeen stayed solid, and it has remained so. And when elsewhere in Virginia, cities and towns were closing schools rather than allowing them to be integrated, Aberdeens children were receiving a rstrate, if segregated, education. Ours was the best black elementary school in the area, says resident Allen O. Huston. In the 60s they were teaching my son French. When military orders took me to Paris, my kid could speak with the children there. A council of elders, most of them original Aberdeeners now in their seventies and eighties, work hard to preserve and nourish their community. Their efforts gained the neighborhood National Historic Landmark status in 1994, but they

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havent stopped there. We want to endow this museum so that we know it will continue, perhaps open a B & B, or go back to our roots of co-operative farming and start a green market, says Roosevelt Wilson, the president of Aberdeen Gardens Historic and Civic Association. In the end, to learn the true secret of Aberdeen, we are told, you have to come and live there, but not so fast; if you are a comer, someone not born there, then youre going to have to work yourself in, the elders laughingly warn. It is evening now and I am sitting in the front pew of a tiny church called the Little England Chapel, lustily singing Swing

Low, Sweet Chariot as the organist plays away on an old pump organ. The pews about me are lled with equally enthusiastic participants in the sing-along that has been organized by the churchs preservation society. The chapel, erected in 1879, served the nearby black community of Newton. The sing-along is a sweet contrast to the noisy excitement of the Hampton Jazz Festival, an annual event we attended the night before. Like Aberdeen Gardens, the chapel, too, is a National Historic Landmark. Its boosters speak proudly about it in between songs, then the organist begins pumping and we lose ourselves in another part of Hampton history.

TO PLAN A TRIP
THE FREE OFFICIAL HAMPTON VISITOR GUIDE

Magazine, filled with ideas for your vacation, can be obtained by contacting the Hampton Convention and Visitor Bureau, 1919 Commerce Drive, suite 290, Hampton, VA 23666, 800-487-8778 or www.hamptoncvb.com. Once there, you can pick up additional material at the Hampton History Museum and Visitor Center, 120 Old Hampton Lane, 800800-2202. The city of Hampton owns nearly 400,000 artifacts, and its museum displays a good sampling of the areas history. The Little England Chapel at 4100 Kecoughtan Road is open to the public; for information, call 757-722-8154. Tours of Aberdeen Gardens Historic Museum (57 North Mary Peake Boulevard) are available by appointment; call 757-827-0752. For more information on the Casemate Museum at Fort Monroe, write to P.O. Box 51341, Fort Monroe, VA 23651-0341, or call 757-788-3391. Contemporary art has a venue in downtown Hampton at The Art Market, an outdoor gallery where artists, both local and national, are chosen through a competition. For more information, visit www.downtownhampton. com or call 757-727-1271. In addition to its marvelous collection of African, Native American, Asian, and Pacific Asian artifacts, the Hampton University Museum also displays works by African-American artists such as Henry O. Tanner, John T. Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, and more. For hours and other information, call 757-727-5308. Music gets its due in four exciting nights

From left: Artist Greg Henry; India.Arie; and a young visitor to the Afrikan American Festival.
each June at the annual Hampton Jazz Festival. Since 1968, the city of Hampton has seen the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and in recent years, India.Arie, George Benson, Jill Scott, and the Isley Brothers. This years festival will be held from June 25 to 27. Visit the Web site www. hamptonjazzfestival.com or call 757-8385650. While youre in town, stop at Hampton University for delicious food, entertainment, and art at the 14th annual Afrikan American Festival, a celebration of African culture. There is a $2 admission fee. A short three and a half miles from Fort Monroe, on a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, sits a pink Victorian house trimmed in yellow and planted with juniper and pecan trees. Built in the 1930s, it is now owned by Shirley and John McQueen, an AfricanAmerican couple originally from Brooklyn, New York. They bought it in 1998 and converted it into the Lady Neptune Bed-andBreakfast Inn (507 North First Street). The inn is small (there are five guest rooms) but lovely, with a formal parlor and dining room, a daily Southern breakfast buffet, and charming views of the bay at the front, the serene wetlands at the back. For reservations, call 800-693-6568 or visit www. bbonline.com/va/neptune. Hamptons motto, From the Sea to the Stars, is easily proved in its history of naval battles (the Civil War ships the Monitor and the Merrimack fought for four hours to a draw in the harbor near Fort Monroe), the contribution of its shipyards to the war effort in World War II, its share in the fishing industry on the Chesapeake Bay, and its part in the U.S. space program through NASAs Langley Research Center. Established in Hampton in 1917 as the nations first civilian aeronautics laboratory, the center is still the locus of cutting-edge research. For an in-depth look at Hamptons and Virginias roles in air and space exploration, visit the Virginia Air and Space Center at 600 Settlers Landing Road, where youll see the Apollo 12 command module, a meteorite from Mars, and a three-billion-yearold moon rock. Call 800-296-0800 or visit www.vasc.org.

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