Description
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.