Peninsula In Passage

Everything was farming. Potatoes were the main crop and were sent by train, truck and boat to market. The boat stopped on Bennett’s Creek. I grew up picking potato bugs for fun. My job was to drop burlap covers onto filled potato barrels and nail the covers on. We’d start at 3:30 a.m. and work until it got too hot for the mules – about 1 pm. and then start up again at 4 p.m. I grew up knowing that I did not want to be a farmer. We had a World War I veteran mule named Jack. He had a brown saddle and USA branded on his hip - and he was mean. We also had a nice mule named Kate and a Bay horse named Lady that used to draw the sleigh in the winter. In World War II soldiers were stationed in a tent by my father’s house – airplane spotters. After World War II the community started to change. I always thought the whole area would develop and I remember my grandmother saying that one day Portsmouth and Suffolk would be one city. The judge presided in the old Nansemond County Courthouse in downtown Suffolk starting in 1949. “It was an old building and limited in its facilities, but it served its purpose,” he says. “Court was held six days a week, including Saturdays until 1 p.m., and on some days the courtroom was very crowded.” Frances Jones Cleveland married in 1954 and had two daughters. After a divorce she moved to Suffolk and worked as the assistant to the Suffolk City manager, Jim Causey, for 22 years, retiring in 1987, but shares many of her brother’s memories of growing up on the farm. The family home was built in 1725 but so badly termite

damaged it was torn down when I was 10 and the family rebuilt. I always had friends come over to spend the night or weekend. We’d walk down to Arthur’s store to get the mail in the afternoon. Our aunt, Annie Lee Jones, an old maid, was organist at Glebe Church and the Yeates Free School’s first and only teacher - can you imagine teaching all seven grades? When my father finished 7th grade in Driver he had to go to Suffolk for high school. He took a train on Monday to Suffolk, boarded with a family on Linden Ave during the week and then took the train home on Friday. Train tickets were five cents. And I was the one who suggested the name for John Yeates School. The school superintendent, H. D. White, was in the back yard talking to my mother about the new school and what to name it and I suggested John Yeates. Frances Jones Cleveland

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