Description
This week on Tidewater Talk, we caught up on a little local news and a lot of Coastal Virginia life. We talked about a strange case involving red-light tickets in Virginia Beach tied to a car that had already been sold, then shifted into a health update after the Virginia Department of Health confirmed human cases of West Nile virus in Virginia Beach. We also shared practical mosquito precautions, compared notes on recent summer illnesses, and, as always, mixed in a few very real and very funny personal stories along the way.
We also dug into one of Tidewater's more memorable local quirks: Norfolk's iconic mermaids. I shared how the whole public art tradition actually grew out of Chicago's famous cow parade before becoming a lasting symbol of Norfolk, complete with an official mermaid trail. We wrapped with a weather update featuring dangerous heat, storm chances later in the week, this week's location riddle for you to solve, and a roundup of Labor Day weekend events including concerts, fireworks, the Super Girl Surf Festival, a local car show, and Norfolk's upcoming Neighborhood Expo and Uplift Awards.
Where in Tidewater
- A young man enlisted in the Army here under a fake name, Edgar A. Perry, and made sergeant major before he quit to go to West Point. He got famous later, under his real name, writing about ravens and beating hearts.
- It is the largest fort in North America with a moat around it. Ten-foot-thick walls, sixty-three acres inside them, and construction started in 1819. After the Civil War the United States held Jefferson Davis prisoner in it for two years.
- In May of 1861 three men who had escaped slavery, Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Sheppard Mallory, rowed to this place and the general in charge refused to send them back. He called them contraband of war. Word traveled, thousands more came, and Black Americans started calling it Freedom's Fortress. It sits at the tip of Hampton where the Chesapeake Bay begins, President Obama made it a national monument in 2011, and this past Saturday they unveiled the first sculpture of a new memorial there.