REVIEW: An Evening of Civil War Spies and Love Letters
By WAYNE CREED
August 15, 2013
Last night the Palace Theatre hosted an evening of Civil War history. This was most appropriate and timely, given last week’s presentation at the Cape Charles Museum finding Shore people complicit in the 1863 raid on the Cape Charles Lighthouse (Click for story). Last night included its own intrigue, with master storyteller Lynn Ruehlmann relating the tale “Spy! The story of Civil War Spy Elizabeth Van Lew.”
Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most effective Union spies during the Civil War. Born to a prominent Richmond family, she lived with her widowed mother in a three-story mansion on Church Hill in the Confederate capital. Educated in the North, Van Lew took pride in her Richmond roots, but she fervently opposed slavery and secession, writing her thoughts in a secret diary she kept buried in her backyard and whose existence she would reveal only on her deathbed. [Read more…]
$18,000 Library Computer ‘Fine’ Overturned on Appeal
Computers in the new Cape Charles Memorial Library are the most-used feature. (Wave photo)
By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Cape Charles Wave
August 15, 2013
A demand by a state authority that the Town of Cape Charles return an $18,000 grant has been overturned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The controversy surrounded the purchase by the Town of 20 computers with federal block grant money. Following an anonymous complaint to a HUD fraud hotline claiming that the computers were not available to the public, the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development conducted an investigation.
As a result of the investigation, the Virginia DHCD required the Town to return the grant money. Town Manager Heather Arcos appealed the decision April 25, declaring that “An erroneous statement made by an unidentified person does not change the facts. Obviously, the library is not open yet and the computer lab is not open in its normal fulltime schedule right now, so therefore would appear to be unoccupied.”
The DHCD then made another unscheduled site visit May 1, finding the computer lab still not accessible to the public. The DHCD reiterated its demand that the Town return the grant money. [Read more…]
THURSDAY 8/15: Town Council Considering Suing Sewer Contractor
Town Council will hold a closed session 5:30 p.m. Thursday, August 15, to discuss possible litigation over the “W.M. Schlosser contract.” W.M. Schlosser was the contractor for the Town’s new $19 million sewage treatment plant. The agenda may be read here.
At 6 p.m. the public will be admitted for the regular monthly Town Council meeting at St. Charles Parish Hall, 550 Tazewell Avenue. Business includes reports on Public Service Authority plans for piping in sewage from the highway; the traffic study at Randolph and Fig; and uses for the former library building. The complete information packet may be read here.
COMMENTARY: Does Bay Creek Control Town Council?
By DEBORAH BENDER
August 13, 2013
Several years ago I had a shop on Mason Avenue called Scarlett’s Closet where I sold women’s clothes. So I know how shoppers think. Let’s say someone wants to buy a linen top: One of the first things she will do is look at the price tag. She will consider buying two if there is a sale that offers a second garment at half price.
A shopper will consider how much money she has in her wallet — or if she gets out her credit card, what that will mean to the family budget.
But our Town Council jumped feet-first into building a new wastewater treatment plant without knowing for sure where the money to pay for it would come from. Now they want us to foot the bills.
In accordance with the 1991 Annexation Agreement, Town Council asked Bay Creek’s developer Dickie Foster to pay its share of the cost of the new state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant. But when he just said “no,” Town Council backed down.
Now, instead of demanding that the developers of Bay Creek pony up the money, Council is expecting the people of Cape Charles to accept two large increases to our water bills. In the last five years the cost of wastewater treatment has gone from $24 a month to $60.85.
Not only that – Council expects people to pay those bills whether their house is occupied or not. They get billed even if the house has the water turned off because the owner can’t afford to pay.
What are they thinking?
When a homeowner gets behind in paying his water bill he is hit with a $30 late fee. I wonder how much late fees Bay Creek has to pay for the $42,000 invoice they received in July 2008? Have they paid anything yet? Do they have any more invoices? [Read more…]
Shore Found Complicit in Cape Charles Lighthouse Raid
Civil War-era encampment outside Cape Charles Museum (pay no attention to the power lines). (Wave photo)
By MARION NAAR
Cape Charles Museum
August 11, 2013
Were Shore people complicit in John Beall’s August 3, 1863, raid on the Cape Charles Lighthouse? Exactly 150 years later to the day, a majority of the more than 120 people attending Kellee Blake’s lecture at the Cape Charles Museum voted “yes.”
Blake, a noted Civil War historian, drawing on primary sources – letters, military documents, and news accounts — provided abundant detail of the highly successful operation, which was commissioned to Beall, then only 28 years old and at his request, by Confederate high command.
The Confederacy desperately needed supplies, and had information that valuable supplies were being stored on Smith Island at the mouth of the Bay where the new (second) lighthouse was under construction.
Beall and a crew of nine men started from Mathews County and on the morning of August 3, paid a surprise visit to lighthouse keeper William W. Stakes. Posing as fishermen, Beall and three men pressed Stakes for a detailed accounting of security, supplies, and citizenry on the island before summoning the remainder of his crew.
The full Beall force secured Stakes and his family, as well as any islanders who happened by, then worked for six hours dismantling the light and gutting the working lighthouse, as well as one under construction. It was well worth the trouble. [Read more…]
Pickin’ Peaches at Pickett’s Harbor Farms: Get ‘Em Now!
Tammie Nottingham started picking peaches at age 10 and never slowed down. (Wave photo by Sarah Golibart)
By SARAH GOLIBART
Cape Charles Wave
August 9, 2013
With a large gleaming peach in each hand, Tammie Nottingham stands regally in her orchard on Pickett’s Harbor Farms just south of the Town of Cape Charles. With tears in her eyes but a smile that never seems to leave her face, she admires her peach trees as she tells the girls that pick for her to “sculpt the baskets” and “have fun” in the orchard that she and her husband, W.T., planted 13 years ago.
Tammie began picking peaches when she was 10 years old in South Carolina. From around 1990 until about five years ago, she picked the entire peach orchard at Pickett’s Harbor. By that time the farm’s bounty exceeded even her veteran picking abilities.
“It all happened by word of mouth,” explained Tammie. Her first helper was a local, Christine Tankard, and over the years more have signed on to help harvest. There are 500-600 peach trees in the orchard, with more than 10 varieties that begin ripening in early summer and last until the first week of September.
“Five years ago, we moved from the corner of my porch and my kitchen to the farm shed,” Tammie noted. That’s where they now sell all their locally grown produce including tomatoes, watermelon, blackberries, and cantaloupe, to name a few.
Tammie, however, does not take credit for the farm’s success. “I would like to give the glory to my husband W.T.” she said. “He takes care of everything on this farm.”
“Both W.T.’s and my family are generational here on the Shore,” Tammie continued. “We’ve been here since people first came here.” She went on to relate that both her and W.T.’s families can be traced back to Martha Custis Washington. She and W.T. are the fifth generation of Nottinghams to work the farm, with their son Josh Nottingham being the sixth and granddaughter Carlee Parker the seventh. [Read more…]
REPORT: Why Water Bills Just Went Up Again
Letter from Town Manager to Bay Creek set a June 30, 2008, deadline to make a substantial financial contribution toward the Town’s proposed new sewer plant. Bay Creek refused to pay, but the Town built the plant anyway.
By DORIE SOUTHERN
Cape Charles Wave
August 8, 2013
Yesterday Cape Charles residents received their first water bill with the huge new sewer increase – formerly $35.45, now $60.85. The rate hike is to pay debt service on the Town’s new sewer plant.
This is not the first double-digit rate increase caused by the new plant: In March 2009 Town Council hiked the $25 minimum sewer charge to $34.
The minimum sewer charge might not be the highest in the state, but other high-rate localities are “more affluent than Cape Charles,” according to USDA Rural Development official Kent Ware. The Town’s new $108 minimum monthly combined water bill is a burden on low-income and fixed-income residents, and appears likely to continue to drive them out of town.
How did the Town come to charge such a high rate? The answer is that plans for a new sewer plant were based on the assumption that the developers of Bay Creek would contribute significantly to the cost. When that didn’t happen, the Town went ahead and built the plant anyway, leaving ratepayers to shoulder the cost.
Town Council also raised, but then lowered, water and sewer connection fees for new service that are intended to pay capital costs of new water and sewer infrastructure.
How did it all happen? The Wave has unearthed some pieces of the puzzle. It begins 25 years ago with the mega-construction company Brown & Root, who decided to develop a large tract of land to be called Accawmacke Plantation and incorporate it into the Town of Cape Charles. [Read more…]
SHER: Art Through the Eyes of Those Who Love It
Marty Burgess gears up for Sunday’s Cape Charles Quick Draw. (Photos by Sher Horosko)
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
August 7, 2013
I came up in a world where everyone wanted to be like everyone else, which is to say, just the same.
It was a universe of perfect patterns: Carnation Instant Breakfast (always chocolate) for breakfast, Raymond and Glen throwing apples at me on my way home from school, a potato, some meat, and a vegetable at 5 p.m., a father who ate too fast and a mother who told him so every night without exception, religious school on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and best of all, hot rye bread from the Jewish bakery I devoured in the back seat of our white Galaxy.
It was an excruciatingly bland world for a little firecracker girl. I suffered it daily, and vowed to never acquiesce. For those who may be interested as to whether I succeeded at whistling my own sweet song: I did. And yes, I paid for it.
When I was growing up, art was something you hung from a six-penny nail tapped into a long tan wall. Art was a wall covering, really, that acted pretty much the same as a windbreaker on a Kansas prairie. It broke the wind and it broke the tan. It filled an empty space on a tan runway that stretched farther than my little eyes could see. That was art.
Last Saturday night I went to the IVir Danza performance at the Palace Theatre. There may have been 40 or 50 of us in that impossibly intimate jewel on Mason Avenue. Four men and four women from Italy danced on a stage in your yard. They moved like cougars and gazelles; their muscles pulsated with the blood thirst of the Kalahari. They went quiet, and turned into each other, like coils of smoke or butterflies finding each other through scent alone.
It is not often I wish I were young enough to start on a new course. I felt that on Saturday. And you will feel it too if you catch their last dance on August 16 at the Palace. [Read more…]
