THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505190259
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Olde Towne Journal
SOURCE: Alan Flanders
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
On what were once the Hardy and Wyatt farms, backhoes and bulldozers lunge forward, twirl and then back away for another bite of earth and underbrush. Hammers keep rhythm with a chorus of power saws and drills as workers dangle above on a forest of wooden rafters. Cement trucks chug into position in a whirlwind of dust, then lurch to a sudden stop. Moments later a torrent of gray mud that will cement the earth below spills forth from a revolving drum. Stacks of bricks and lumber mark the few remaining sites of what was once the domain of the Norfolk County ``truckers.''
The scene described above leaves little room to doubt that before the century is gone, physical evidence of the past will be wiped out. It will be impossible to imagine that thousands of acres of land along the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River were ever the pastures, meadows and windbreaks of a local gentry farm society known since the 1840s as Norfolk County's truck farmers.
But lest you think they were some kind of modern union, they got their name from the common use of a flat-bottom boat or ``truck'' boat to ``truck'' (carry) farm produce to ships anchored in the channel from whence they were shipped to produce markets elsewhere.
Hardly a high school student today would know that the Churchland ``Truckers'' have roots deep in the rich soil of this region and have nothing to do with the four- and six-wheel motorized giants that haul our produce over interstate highways today.
Driving through areas like Castle Heights, Cavalier Forest and Westwood, it's hard to believe they were once crisscrossed by endless rows of peanuts, grassy seas of soybeans and alfalfa, and ribbed as far as one could see by cornfields. But there was a time where near the water's end of each of these farms stood the family seats of the Dukes, Griffins, Carneys, Bruces, Kirns, Wises, Dennises and Bidgoods and Trotmans. Today these names are familiar to only a few of our more senior citizens who remember when this ``working'' landed gentry ruled this area in all political, economic and social matters.
In those days, land was the measure of one's real power and many of the families listed above owned 500 to 1,000 acres of rich farmland. They were a far cry from the tobacco plantation aristocracy that grew along the James River in the Colonial period, but it would not have been a ``put down'' in any way had someone said that you could earn only ``peanuts'' as a trucker.
At the turn of the century, the Merchants' and Farmers' Peanut Co. was considered one of the largest in the United States. It cleaned, separated and graded from 80,000 to 100,000 bags of Norfolk County peanuts per year. There was also a lot of green to be made in more ways than one in other ``truck'' crops as well. An 1890 census reveals that ``the aggregate sales of market garden vegetables, from the area embraced in a circle drawn 20 miles around this seaport, have reached a point exceeding $5,000,000 in a single year. No other agricultural area in the United States, or in the world, can make such a good showing, and the equal output of this portion of Eastern Virginia. . . ''
But besides being good and efficient stewards of their land, the truckers were blessed with good soil in which to plant their money crops. The same 1890 census boasted about the natural attributes of the local climate and soil:
``Norfolk County's climatic and topographic conditions are such as to indicate its natural adaptability for the profitable raising of garden truck. It is located on the Atlantic Coast in Latitude 36 degrees 51 minutes North, and enjoys the benefit of the tempering influence of the Gulf Stream. Its soil is rich sandy loam, quickly responsive to fertilization and cultivation and gives abundant yields.''
Abundant yields did indeed grow in this soil combined with the toil of the truckers. In what must have seemed like a giant cornucopia pouring out an endless array of cash crops in 1890, the truckers shipped an astonishing 10,000,000 quarts of berries, 200,000 half-barrel baskets of beans, 225,000 barrels of cabbage, 100,000 barrels and boxes of cucumbers, 100,000 barrels of kale, 10,000 baskets of lettuce, 60,000 barrels of sweet potatoes, 450,000 barrels of Irish potatoes, 100,000 baskets of peas, 50,000 barrels and baskets of radishes, 120,000 barrels of spinach, 70,000 boxes of tomatoes, and 600,000 watermelons!
Figures like those can cause you to wonder what takes so much sweat these days just to get a couple of tomato plants going in the back yard. But the truckers knew they could get their price. In Baltimore and New York markets where local truck crops found eager buyers, a barrel of green peas could make $15, a barrel of tomatoes could bring $10, and local cucumbers could fetch as much $45 to $50 a barrel. It is said that the first crate of Norfolk County berries went for $90.
At those prices, Norfolk County farmers kept on trucking for the next six decades until the city limits of Portsmouth expanded across the Elizabeth River. Better crossings like the Churchland and West Norfolk bridges and paved roads extending through West Norfolk and into Churchland village helped bring on suburbia after the end of World War II. Today only a name on a city street here or there reminds us that once this was the proud agrarian domain of the truckers. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by MARK MITCHELL
Houses are going up in Churchland on lots that once were the Hardy
and Wyatt truck farms.
by CNB