Peninsula In Passage

Peruzzi kept the estate until 1952 when he sold it to Pern and Marian Hartman. A Norfolk businessman, Hartman, like numerous other city residents, longed to be a gentleman farmer. Ryland Hartman was 9 years old when his parents bought the property, fully furnished. “We moved from a two bedroom bungalow in Ward’s Corner,” Hartman says. “The Obici kitchen was bigger than our house had been. When we moved in we used everything – even used Obici’s monogrammed flatware to eat breakfast.” He was fascinated by the ornate furnishings, the servant call button in the dining room floor – and by the bear rug in the living room under a marble table. Could that have been the same black bear rumored to ride to the post office every day with Obici in his Model T? The rug was the first thing his mother discarded. Hartman remembers hearing that Obici would park the Model T on a cattle loading ramp at the barn, where the bear supposedly was kept in a pipe cage, and coast down the ramp to start the car. “We lived in glory for five years with a cook and a yard man who put on a white coat and served meals,” he says. “We had a maid who used to iron and babysit us once in a while.”

“There was a still on the property when we bought it and the basement was like a speakeasy. Behind heavy doors with electric locks was a wine vault with basketed bottles of home made Chianti. But someone thought the bottles should be turned upright, so the corks had dried out, termites ate the baskets and the wine turned to vinegar.” Life on the farm was a new experience. The farm’s big, mean red bull with no name tossed the neighbor Nelms’ goat over the fence. “I don’t know what the goat was doing in the pasture but I saw him flying through the air, taking his last breath,” Hartman says. Marian Hartman made butter and the family drank raw milk from the farm. They also entertained, enjoying a house and pool full of company every summer. The pool was unfiltered so when the algae bloomed the Hartman children drained, scrubbed and refilled it, inadvertently draining the farm’s water tank. Marian Hartman tried to chase stubborn poachers from the estate oyster grounds.

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