Saved a life here. Born here. Slept here. Spoke here. Ran away from here. Wouldn’t give up her seat here. Wrote here? Walked the woods here

Gloucester and Mathews, nestled at the end of a peninsula of the Chesapeake Bay, have been close to history from the beginning of English settlement in Virginia. Some noteworthy people were born here, and some really famous people have left their mark here.

Saved a life here

Every school child knows about the English colonists that settled at Jamestown, and the famous persons involved in those early years: Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Captain John Smith. It’s likely that all of these people were assembled at Powhatan’s seat of power in present-day Gloucester County when one of the signature lessons of our first history took place.

The storied interaction between John Smith and Pocahontas took place at Werowocomoco, on the north bank of the York River in what is now upper Gloucester. Smith had been captured late in 1607 and taken before Powhatan. In an early report on this captivity, Smith said they just talked. Later (according to Wikipedia) as Pocahontas prepared to visit England to meet King James, he gave more detail. Smith wrote that he was about to be executed; however, “at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”

A legend was born.

Pocahontas converted to Christianity, married the settler John Rolfe, and became Rebecca. Visiting England in 1617, she died there and is buried in Gravesend on the outskirts of London; but she was born in Gloucester County.

Slept here, gambled here

Warner Hall in Gloucester can claim many illustrious people in its line of descent, including Robert E. Lee and Queen Elizabeth II.
And George Washington, Father of our Country. His grandparents were Mildred Warner (of Warner Hall) and Lawrence Washington. Their son Augustine Washington and his wife Mary Ball were the parents of George Washington.

It’s probably safe to say that George in his younger years visited his family members at Warner Hall, sleeping there. It’s also believed that he gambled at Seawell’s Ordinary nearby.

The old ordinary, an 18th century building now the home of AutoMax, was a tavern and site of a racetrack. Oral histories place Washington at the track and possibly claiming a late-night bed in the lodgings provided there for the public.

Wrote here?

Thomas Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary with John Page of Rosewell, grandson of the man who built the magnificent estate. They were said to be friends and, according to the Rosewell Foundation’s website Rosewell.org, “It was here that the two young patriots first began to explore what lay ahead of the emerging nation in which they would play such an important role.” Some have stretched their relationship into speculations that Jefferson on visits to Rosewell began to write some of his famous documents that forged the will of the United States.

Walked here?

Remote and grown up on the long peninsula of land known as West Mathews, lying between the East and North rivers, is a one-time trail through the woods known to old-timers as the Cornwallis Road.

Holland L. White of Bohannon told the Mathews County Historical Society in 1968 that he remembered, as a child, “how the road known as Cornwallis Road could be identified through the woods, but no story was ever handed down as to why the road was built … Now, most traces are gone.”

The West Mathews Community League revived the legend in 1990 with Folklore Night and a three-act play focusing on the road, described as a path through the woods from Mobjack to Cardinal.

“The path is rumored to have been cut by Lord Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War, though there is no evidence at all to back the rumor which has been circulating in Mathews for generations,” the Gazette-Journal reported, after interviewing lifelong resident Audrey Mason.

Maybe or maybe not, Cornwallis walked upon our local soil, but we know for sure that he walked on Yorktown soil in 1781 where George Washington, who certainly walked here, accepted his sword in surrender.

Ran from here

At the starting point of the Revolution, there’s no dispute that John Murray, Lord Dunmore, royal governor of the Colony of Virginia, skedaddled from our own shores in July 1776.

The Battle of Gwynn’s Island got started after Dunmore and his fleet encamped on the island after being driven away from Norfolk. He and his soldiers, including a number of escaped slaves who joined the English fighters, suffered heavy mortality from smallpox.

General Andrew Lewis of the American forces set up on the mainland. Dunmore bragged that he would drive the patriots away “like crickets on a hill” and that community’s name has come down through history as Cricket Hill.

Lewis had other plans. He lined up his guns and opened fire on the fleet. His accurate fire whizzed past Dunmore on his flagship, drilled holes in other ships, and caused the English governor and his forces to flee Virginia forever.

Born here, buried here

Sally Louisa Tompkins was born at Poplar Grove on the East River on Nov. 9, 1833.

This young woman moved with her family to Richmond just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Like so many other women of that period, unable to help on the battlefield, she established the private Robertson Hospital in Richmond. She had an outstanding success rate in a period when infection and fever just as lethal to a patient, perhaps more so, as a gunshot wound itself.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis shut down private hospitals because many had poor treatment and high mortality. Sally Tompkins appealed in person to the leader; he awarded her a commission as a Confederate Army captain so that she could continue her work. She was the first woman commissioned in the U.S. service.

Effective, and loved: When Sally Tompkins returned to Mathews for a visit in January 1906, she attended a Lee-Jackson Day gathering of veterans in the courthouse. The Mathews Journal reported that she was received “by the old soldiers all rising as she entered the room.”

She died July 25, 1916, and was buried at Christ Episcopal Church in Mathews.

Born here, came back here, helped here

Thomas Calhoun Walker, born a slave in 1862, grew up without schooling and taught himself to read and write. He got the elements, then saved
92 cents, and took himself to Hampton Institute. He was accepted provisionally, worked his way through, and returned to his native county before setting to work on a lifetime of helping his fellow man.

Walker founded schools. He preached education and land ownership. He took in homeless youths.

While doing all this, he studied law under the supervision of a former Confederate officer, General William Booth Taliaferro. Walker was admitted to the state bar in 1883.

He built up a practice, defended people accused under the Jim Crow system, bought property, lived on Main Street, and remembered from the perch on that hill the fabled Honey-Pod Tree that once stood on the street not far from his front door. There, he said in his autobiography named after the tree, enslaved people were bought and sold.

And there, he wrote, “All of us Gloucester Negroes used to gather under the honey-pod tree, that sheltered the slave auction-block, on anniversaries of our emancipation to hear the Proclamation read all over again and give thanks to ‘de Lawd’ for giving us our freedom. Men, women, and children like me, joined hands and shouted, jumped, swayed, and sang our most joyous spirituals while tears of gratitude rolled down the faces of the older black toilers—free at last!”

Truly he was a homegrown legend. A Main Street mural depicts his remarkable life.

He spoke here

One of the renowned figures of the early 20th century, Booker T. Washington, made a swing through Eastern Virginia and stopped to give talks at the courthouses in both Gloucester and Mathews.

Typical of the news coverage of that deeply segregated era, when even the newspapers kept items of interest to the African American community to a minimum, the Mathews Journal (the Gloucester Gazette was not yet founded) reported briefly and not in depth on his talk.

The Journal said a large crowd, black and white, attended the talk, and that Washington exercised “great tact” while speaking of racial conditions in the South and urging economy in time and money and “settled habits” necessary for black people to make progress. It could not have been an easy task to please listeners of both races in those Jim Crow days, but apparently the famous orator accomplished that feat.

‘Come to Cappahosic’: People talked here

Dr. Robert Russa Moton, born just after the end of the Civil War in Amelia County, worked his way through Hampton Institute and continued his education, eventually becoming president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was he who accompanied and introduced Booker T. Washington to the crowds in Mathews and Gloucester in 1913.

His second wife, Jenny Dee Booth, was a home economics instructor at Hampton Institute. Moton’s first wife had died; Miss Booth, whose family was from Gloucester County, became his bride.

Moton retired from Tuskegee in 1935 and had a Georgian-style home, Holly Knoll, constructed on the banks of the York River at Cappahosic: and then he began to issue his famous invitation, “Come to Cappahosic.” The purpose of the resulting Moton Conference Center was to talk, and to help, and to find ways to improve the experience and condition of African-Americans. Dr. Moton died in 1940 but his legacy carried on.

Moton’s son-in-law, Dr. Frederick D. Patterson, remained closely associated with the Institute and in 1946 founded the United Negro College Fund. Another legend, possibly just speculation, is that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech at the center.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Holly Knoll hosted chain store executives, students and college officials, and representatives of civil rights groups in an unpublicized but effective conference that led to desegregated stores in the South.

Charles and Kay James purchased Holly Knoll in 2005. Now known as The Gloucester Institute, the restored venue provides a place for emerging leaders, with a concentration on providing “skills, knowledge and intellectual foundation required to succeed in the corporate, government and academic realms,” according to the institute’s website.

Kept her seat here

Irene Morgan, a young woman then in her late 20s, visited her mother in Gloucester County in 1944 while recovering from a miscarriage. She got on the Greyhound bus at Hayes to return to her home in Baltimore. She took a seat next to another black woman carrying an infant.

Not many miles down the road, just across the Gloucester-Middlesex line, Morgan became a civil rights pioneer.

Wikipedia states, “An African-American could not sit next to or across from a Caucasian passenger, but there were no designated ‘black’ or ‘white’ seats on the bus. When a white couple boarded the bus at a stop in Middlesex County, Virginia, the bus driver ordered Morgan and her seatmate to surrender their seats. Her seatmate immediately retreated to the back of the bus with her infant, but Morgan refused to give up her spot. When Morgan would not move, the bus driver got off the bus to find a sheriff. The sheriff presented Morgan with an arrest warrant, but she tore up the piece of paper and threw it out of the window of the bus.” Things progressed to biting and wrestling before Morgan was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia’s Jim Crow transit law.

At the subsequent court case in Middlesex, Morgan paid a fine for resisting arrest but would not plead guilty to the segregation violation.

Her case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and Morgan eventually won. As a result, segregation became outlawed for interstate transportation.
President Bill Clinton awarded Morgan a Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, the second-highest award for civilians, ranking just below the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died in 2007.

Went house shopping here

Kim Robins of Zanoni was a student at James Madison University in the spring of 1980 and a part-time grounds-keeper at White Hall, near her home, when she met one of her true heroes, former Beatle John Lennon.

She was home from college that weekend and received a tip that he might visit White Hall while touring property with an eye to purchasing in the area. She remembered that the owners wanted their pansies mulched, and took herself there.

She was in the garage when a black limousine pulled up and hefty men in dark suits and dark glasses got out. “They were literally beating the bushes, looking behind trees, and then they looked in the garage. The man said, ‘who are you and what are you doing here?’ and I asked him who he was, and what he was doing.” The man did not answer, but told her to stay in the garage. He and the other scouts got back into their limo and drove off.

“Several minutes went by, then [local real estate broker] Bob Baldwin’s Cadillac drove in followed by a big black limousine,” Robins said. “They pulled up to the back entrance.” Two people got out of the limo, back to her, one wearing a cowboy hat and the other wearing a flowered sun hat. She could not see their faces.

Robins got to work with the mulch in the pansy bed, on her hands and knees. “I was having my doubts” about the identity of the visitors, when three nearly-grown golden retriever puppies ran from the house toward her. “Not far behind them was a child who yelled ‘puppies’ and they turned and went running after him. They knocked him down. He’s laughing and giggling and I went to rescue him and they jumped on me. We were all on the ground rolling around with the puppies, having a good time.”

Then, “a pair of arms reached down and picked up the little boy. All I could see were feet, jeans and cowboy boots. A voice said, ‘Need a hand up?’ He reached down and pulled me up and was shaking my hand and he said, ‘Hi, I’m John Lennon and this is my wife Yoko’ so I shook her hand, and he said ‘This is Sean.’ We chatted just a bit. He asked me what river that was and about catching fish. I’m just standing there with my hand out and my mouth open. What do you say to John Lennon?”

Bob Baldwin took his clients away and Robins just stood there for a while. The homeowners called from the balcony, where they had been watching, to ask her if she would ever wash that hand.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono would eventually purchase Auburn and Poplar Grove in Mathews that spring. Tragically, there was not much time to enjoy these purchases, as Lennon was murdered in New York that December.

Robins is now a retired reporter for the Gazette-Journal. A John Lennon poster hung in the corner near her desk for many years.

Pocahontas and John Smith