Peninsula In Passage

Pughsville “Every morning I look at the trees and the birds and they look as confused as we are now,” Viola Gaines Cobb says. “Pughsville has changed - farm fields got carried away from here in 1950.” Some longtime residents say that Pughsville was settled by freed slaves in the late 1800s. Cobb was born there in June 1920, the eldest of 11 children. She’s seen the community change over the years, most dramatically in the last decade when scores of new homes sprang up in the former farm fields near where she was raised. She remembers - My parents lived in the oldest house in Pughsville, built in early 1900s (the house has been demolished), a little three-room house and we had lots of people there. We slept head to tail in beds and in the summer we put the beds outside. We got ice for the icebox three times a week. I went to school until after the sixth grade. When I was promoted to seventh grade my mother had another baby and needed me to help at home. Pughsville was farmland and a man named Dick Ricks ran the farm for the white owner. We worked for tickets and Mr. Ricks would give us money for the tickets

Wayne White

once a week. I didn’t work the fields - I was too slow – but my sister was quick at spooning up spinach. I did go out when potatoes were dug to grab up potatoes and cull them out and I did pick tomatoes but I didn’t like the big tomato worms with horns I didn’t like hog killing days – I had a fit with the hogs screaming and hollering for life. They had been pets – then laid out dead. But we got the meat. When we were young and roaming around there were no street names, they came later. My brothers used to carry corn to Belleville to be ground. The Atlantic Coast Line used to run behind the house at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. The Pughsville train station had two doors – one for the Atlantic Coast Line and one for the Norfolk Southern. One of my great-great-grandfathers was James Rountree in Nansemond County and Chester B Gallard was other great-great grandfather. He lost a leg and then got killed by a train’s cowcatcher when he was following the tracks to home. Wayne White, 59, grew up in Portsmouth and graduated from Norcom High School. He moved to Pughsville in 1986. After a stint in the Army he’s worked for Norfolk Southern at the Lambert’s

Viola Gaines Cobb

125