Peninsula In Passage

Outlaws Beverly Outlaw and Brenda Outlaw Duke, sisters-in-law, laugh about the full size cannon sitting in Beverly’s front yard on Nansemond Parkway, not far from the Driver Crossroads. Leave to the Outlaws to have a cannon, they joke, while admitting that they aren’t sure of the derivation of their surname. “We know that the ancestors were kicked out of Scotland because they fought for Charles I and came to North Carolina in the early 1600s,” they agree. Brenda’s father, Clifton “Cliff ” Outlaw, was born in Perquimans County. He grew up in Isle of Wight and at some time moved with his family to Driver where his father, Herman Outlaw, worked on the Upton Farm. When Cliff and Virginia Brinkley married they moved to the farm that was once part of the Hargrove Plantation. Brenda, a proud “born and bred Outlaw,” lives next door to Beverly who was married to Brenda’s older brother, Marvin. Marvin farmed the family farm and died in 1991. Along with Brenda’s sister, June Outlaw Bailey, the women share a wealth of memories of life in Driver. Brenda Duke remembers – Marvin, June and I grew up in the farmhouse where Beverly lives now next to Hargrove Tavern subdivision. When we were growing up you could see the shell of the Hargrove Tavern. It was so dilapidated that you could throw a stone through it. When we farmed land early on the hogs would wallow in the old tavern building. We went to the crossroads every day to get the mail at Arthur’s store with the potbellied stove. Mr. Arthur ran tabs at his store knowing the farmers might have to wait for crops to come in to get cash to pay their bills. I. T. Arthur took care of all of us. On Halloween all the kids would meet at the Driver Variety store in costume and hit every home in the area as a group. I remember Marvin, who was four years older, talking about visiting the Ballard river house when Ann Hurff Ballard was there. They used to let kids swim in the river while they were tied to a piling. I went to Driver elementary, Chuckatuck High School and then Yeates High for two years when it was a new high school. Ann Johnson was my math teacher and Billy Whitley was the football coach. We had graduation – with 67 graduates – in the gym and it must have been 150 degrees that night. In Driver everybody went to church and everyone was like family. Word traveled fast here. When I had just gotten my license I spun the tires slightly at the crossroads and by the time I got home my mother asked me why I had been speeding. June Outlaw Bailey, the younger sister, remembers - Everything about growing up here was good. We picked strawberries on our father’s farm land behind what is now Nansemond River High, The berries were packed in quarts, loaded in a pick-up truck and our father would deliver them to Hampton, Newport News and Portsmouth. We sold them three quarts for $1 at an open-air market on Portsmouth Blvd. There used to be a cattle bridge and path to Pughsville that ran behind house. That’s how people from Pughsville got to Driver stores. A hurricane took it out in the 1960s and it was never rebuilt. When hurricanes came my father would put all the farm equipment in field, away from the trees, and the family would head for the mountains until the storm passed. We never had the advance notice of hurricanes like weather forecasters can give now. Everybody knew everybody then – we always left the house unlocked.

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