The hostage turret

The Norfolk area is a treasure trove of military history; you could easily spend a week here touring all the museums and battlefields. Heck, you could spend a week in the Newport News Maritime Museum. Alas, our trip is a short one as we have unfinished projects at home we are anxious to complete.

We arrived at the Newport News City Park on Saturday afternoon after a smooth trip down the Delmarva Peninsula and settled into the sparsely occupied campground. The park is a gem, with camping sites widely dispersed throughout a forest setting. It’s a night and day difference from the trailer park atmosphere of the Delaware Seashore State Park. While walking the girls in the campground we discovered earthworks from the Civil War in amongst the RV sites in two areas of the park. 

Fortifications from the Battle of Damn #1, (Battle of Yorktown)

On Sunday we morning we went to the Mariners Museum which is about 6 miles from our campsite. The museum has changed a lot since my last visit in the 90’s. Millie has also visited in the past and neither of us even recognized it. That’s not to say we have memory problems, the museum has been changing since it’s founding in the 1930’s. Now at 90,000 square feet of exhibition galleries it also has the largest maritime library in the world.

Another thing the museum now has is artifacts from the USS Monitor which was an iron clad warship in the Civil War. Its claim to fame is not that its iron clad, there had been armored vessels before the Monitor. Its notoriety comes from an encounter with the CSS Virginia on March 9th 1862. This was the first time in American history that iron clad warships had met in battle.

The CSS Virginia was constructed on the hull of the USS Merrimac

Note: No photographs of the CSS Virginia are known to exist, only drawings and paintings.

I stayed up till 11:30 last night writing about the Monitor and Merrimack aka CSS Virginia and after I went to bed I lay there and thought, no one is interested enough to read my narrative, so I deleted it all. I do suggest you look at the Mariners Museum website, you’ll find it very interesting.

 http://www.marinersmuseum.org/

Before we leave the subject I do have a thought on the aftermath of this Civil War Naval engagement. While I am originally from the north, I don’t consider myself a Yankee. My ancestors immigrated to this country some 50 years after the Civil War; you might say I don’t have a dog in this fight. I live in the south now, in the middle of the confederate heartland and I can clearly sense that the war is not forgotten, nor Yankees forgiven. As an unbiased observer I contend that the monitor’s turret is being held hostage by confederate sympathizers!

Long may we remember our history

Although some historians claim the battle was a draw, the monitor did keep the Virginia trapped in Hampton Roads until the Confederate vessel was destroyed by her own crew. This happened on May 11, 1862, following the fall of Norfolk to Union forces. I suspect they never really got over that; insult to injury. The USS Merrimack aka CSS Virginia was a hazard to navigation and was removed and scrapped, (Note: the harbor was now controlled by the north) very few artifacts survived.

The USS Monitor was lost to a storm off Cape Hatteras on December 31 1862 and remained lost for almost a century. In 1973, a team of scientists led by John G. Newton of the Duke University Marine Laboratory located the Monitor while testing geological survey equipment. (Note: Duke University is in the southern city of Durham North Carolina.)

The Monitor remained relatively obscure in its watery grave for almost 25 more years. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Note: Silver Springs, Maryland) warned that the wreck was deteriorating in it’s location off the stormy coast it was decided to remove some of the artifacts for preservation.

Propeller from the Monitor

On April 30 2000, teams from NOAA (Maryland), the Cambrian Foundation (Florida) and the National Undersea Research Center/University of North Carolina at Wilmington (NURC), and East Carolina University (ECU) began survey and small artifact recovery operations.

Ships lantern from the masthead on the turret of the Monitor, the last thing the survivors saw as the ship sank.

On August 5 of 2000 the turret was raised from its underwater grave. The largely Southerner salvagers rushed the northern ironclad artifact to the Maritime Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The turret was quickly submerged in a 90 thousand gallon tank of secret solution (looks like water to me) purposely to preserve it. 

The turret of the USS Monitor

And there it has remained all these years, 14 years last month. If any Yankees want to view the artifact from their ship they must climb a catwalk and peer thru a glass window to the tank below. No one is saying how long the turret will remain in the tank; I wouldn’t be expecting Johnny Reb to release it anytime soon!

Disclaimer: While my turret story was intended to be humorous, I may have to keep a lookout for stray musket balls heading in my direction. During the proof read to my southern wife, she didn't give me her normal approval but was strangely quiet. When I told her it was supposed to be funny, she replied "That depends on who's reading it."

That afternoon we visited Millie’s Aunt Ida and Uncle O’neil in nearby Hampton. Cousin’s Judy and Sharon came to their parent’s home during our visit so there was lots of catching up on family members near and far. Millie got a few pieces of information from Aunt Ida for her genealogy research project. After a pleasant visit we returned to the motorhome in time to take the dogs for a long walk around the park. The park was almost empty on Sunday afternoon and after dark you could only see the lights of about 5 campers in the woods, the closest one being about 200 yards away.

Our campsite at Newport News City Park

On Monday, we waited till after rush hour and then started our journey south. We were only about 300 miles from home and decided to make the trip in one day. We traveled down Rt 13 from the Norfolk area until intersecting with Rt 17. We prefer 17 to the interstate; it’s not as boring or hectic as I-95, which always seems to be one or the other.

The passage was uneventful and we arrived home at about 4:30 on Monday afternoon. The motorhome has been cleaned and put back in storage. We are home for awhile or I should say we’re at the beach home for awhile, as we feel equally at home on the road!

Reidsville NC to Newport News, VA

Sunday Sept 14^th we drove a leisurely 200 miles from Lake Reidsville NC to Bowling Green VA. Along the way we drove past the Farm that that Millie would have retired to if her late husband had not become ill. My condolences to the family on his loss, especially to his daughter RaeAnne but I’m awful glad that Millie is now with me. Having her as my wife is a gift that I cherish everyday. A little further along but still near the farm we stopped at Sheldon’s restaurant for chicken and dumplings.

Millie at Sheldon's restaurant in Virginia

The rest of the day was uneventful; we overnighted at Hidden Acres Family Campground at Bowling Green. The next day, Monday we continued on to Lum’s Pond State Park. I have been coping with a sore back since we left Myrtle Beach, and it wasn’t getting any better. I had planned on taking Millie to Longwood Gardens on Tuesday but instead spent the day recuperating. We did get out in the afternoon to the grocery store and stopped for a brief visit with my brother Dave.

My parents, Mary and John Midash

Wednesday we visited my parents who are 90 and 91 and still live in the same house they’ve been in since 1953. My Brother Dave lives 2 miles away and checks on them daily. Later that evening we met old friends for dinner at Shaffer’s Restaurant in Chesapeake City MD. The Kalmar Nyckel a replica of the ship the Swedes first sailed to Delaware in 1638 was docked a few feet from where we enjoyed our meal and camaraderie.

My friends, Chuck and Sallie

The Kalmar Nyckel in Chesapeake City, Maryland

Thursday we visited my parents again and then met my son and his family at Los Machados for a Mexican dinner. The next morning we packed up the motorhome and drove about 75 miles south to the Delaware Seashore State Park campground at Indian River Inlet.

My granddaughter Delaney Midash

The new bridge over the inlet is finally open and the state park campground in its shadow is getting back to some order, although staying in the section called the old camp still reminds me of an trailer park. Why do I stay here? It is the only campground in Delaware from which you can walk to the ocean. The inlet bridge project has been going on since 2004, making it the only bridge that took longer to build than the back gate overpass in Myrtle Beach! The back gate project is a simple highway overpass, it is not open yet after years of construction.

The bridge over the Indian River inlet in Delaware

My brother John and his wife Sandy recently moved to the area and they drove over to visit us at the Inlet. The next day, Saturday we drove the length of the rest of the Delmarva Peninsula, crossed 20+/- miles over/under the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay via the Bay bridge Tunnel. We then traversed the city of Norfolk and took another tunnel under Hampton Roads and then on to the city of Newport News. We are staying at a city park campground here and will be here for another day.

Maggie my copy writer hard at work on this posting

North Carolina wedding

I’m sure my son or any other youngster would listen to me trying to describe how busy I am and reply “you’ve been home since when and that’s all you’ve done!” I guess the truth is, for a variety of reasons it takes me longer to get things done. So here we are at summers end and I haven’t completed everything I had planned, oh the stress of it all, I need a vacation!

Mirror removal

Lucky for me we had planned on attending a wedding in North Carolina, so unfinished projects be damned, we’re off on another road trip!

It was an easy run of a little over 200 miles to the city park at Reidsville North Carolina from our home in Myrtle Beach. The park on Lake Reidsville has a nice campground and we had reserved a waterfront site. We had a beautiful view of the lake out the windshield.

The wedding is south of Reidsville in Kernersville but we chose our location so we could take a short drive up to Axton Virginia on Saturday morning to visit Millie’s brother and his wife. Earnest and Nancy are doing pretty well all things considered. This was my second visit to their home and it was as enjoyable as my first, they’re good folks and easy to feel comfortable around. We picked some home grown tomatoes from their garden and they are delicious, the best we’ve had this season.

 On Saturday afternoon we attended the wedding of Kimberly Brooke Yow and Robert Kyle Self. The wedding celebration was performed outdoors at Dewberry Manor, a farm house setting banquet facility. 

The wedding party

Myself, Millie, Kimberly, Robert

The groom, Robert Self is the grandchild of Millie’s sister Lucille and her husband Eddie Self. I got to meet both of Eddie and Lucille’s sons and some of their grandchildren. It was interesting to but faces with names I’ve heard about. Millie is southern you know and story telling is part of their heritage so I’m treated to many family narratives. Another of Millie’s sisters, Betty and her husband Paul were also at the wedding. They have the blueberry farm near Mount Rogers that I’ve written about in previous blogs. 

Dewberry Manor Farm

The weather which looked threatening all day held off and the wedding and reception both were enjoyed outdoors on Dewberries large courtyard. From all accounts, a good time was had by all; they were still dancing when we left!