Peninsula In Passage

Frank Cross

Frank Cross overlooking Bennett’s Creek

At 88 Frank Cross looks back on the history of the North Suffolk peninsula with the eye of a historian. Cross grew in downtown Suffolk and retired to Bennett’s Creek 22 years ago. After college and the Navy he worked with his father and three brothers in the family wholesale produce business in Suffolk. When the family business closed in 1961 he took a job with Colonial Williamsburg overseeing the licensing of reproductions to be sold there. The job took him to Manhattan for a year and then back to Williamsburg where he lived in the Red Lion Inn next to Chowning’s Tavern on the grounds of Colonial Williamsburg. Now he sits in his living room, overlooking the creek, and tells about how the early settlers fortified a Bennett’s Creek Landing site with logs

coated with pitch to resemble cannons to fool marauding Dutch traders looking to seize tobacco. He and Hinton Hurff share a grandfather and he talks about the Hurff side of the family –

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