Peninsula In Passage

Annah Eberwine Cross and George Kittrell Eberwine, Jr. are the children of George Kittrell and Ida Vanderslice Eberwine. She lives in Norfolk, he in Chesapeake. Annah Cross remembers – The Dejarnette school was a boarding school in Driver in the early 1900s, and our father went to high school there. Charles Dawes, the Vice President of the United States, came for a dedication at the school and was met at Town Point Farm and brought over to Driver. We were out in the sticks and the story goes Dawes said, “If I had known where I was coming I wouldn’t have come. Joyce Carter and I were the best of friends. We used to go out on the creek and crab. Her grandfather would let us ride on the swing end of the old Bennett’s Creek bridge. We’d hear the boat whistle and come running. The Planters Club was where we all learned to swim but it was closed sometime in the 1930s because of the polio. George, being a boy had to work and help our father driving tractor. Being a girl I didn’t have to do anything. Both George and I had ponies and Bruce Eberwine had one too. John G. Eberwine had helped Oscar Smith through the Depression with the Smith Douglas Fertilizer Company and Smith gave us kids ponies. Cross graduated from Randolph Macon Women’s college in 1957 and married Parker Cross while he was in the Army. They came back to Norfolk in 1963. George K. Eberwine graduated from Chuckatuck High School and went to Virginia Tech. He worked for Central National Bank in Richmond until 1958 and for Curtis Marine for eight years before he came back to the canning company. He remembers - The Eberwines were the largest landholders in Bennett’s Creek. Fruitland Farm off Shoulder’s Hill Road where the library is now used to be owned by all the Eberwines and was said to have been planted with the first fruit trees brought from Europe. Farms were acquired during the Depression. People would take out credit with fertilizer companies to plant crops and then not be able to repay so they forfeited their farms. Annah Eberwine Cross and George Kittrell Eberwine, Jr.

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