Peninsula In Passage

“I got a gun and threatened them and they still didn’t move but when I slung the gun over my shoulder it went off and those two men pushed that dead rise off the oyster bed like their lives depended on it,” she says. “The boat had gotten stuck when the tide went out.” Ryland Hartman remembers when a fire started in the milk shed in the mid-1950s and spread to the other barns and the milk house. “It was the dead of winter, must have been 10 below, coldest night I’ve ever seen,” he says. “My father and I got all the cows out of the barn and into the holding pen. One fire truck came in the lane so fast it missed the turn by the lions and ended up in the cornfield.” “We had no insurance and all the milking equipment was roasted so we borrowed equipment and coolers and kept on going while we built a new milk handling building.” Then Hurricane Hazel roared through in 1958 tearing away the boathouse. “There were so many fallen trees that it took a week with chain saws and tractors to get from the house to the road,” Hartman says. “I enjoyed the house, the farm, and the hard work – set my life style from then on. I used to plow fields until midnight and get up for school in the morning. Before I left that farm in 1962 I could weld, rebuild tractors and skin coons, squirrels and ducks.”

Pern Hartman’s health was failing so in 1963 they sold to a developer who in turn sold to the City of Portsmouth in 1966. Portsmouth developed a golf course and used the house as a reception center. In 2002 the City of Suffolk bought the house and golf course. The house ended up on the Preservation Virginia’s 2009 list of most endangered historic sites. Then the Ronnie Rountree family took over managing both the house and surrounding Sleepy Hole Golf Course from the City of Suffolk. The Rountrees poured money, effort and love into restoring the house as dramatically as they had the golf course. Now the home, restored to a contemporary version of its former glory, is once again open for receptions and other special events. After Pern Hartman died in 1976 Ryland and Marian Hartman each settled on the Eastern Shore where they live with a few mementoes and many memories of their “glory days” in the Obici House.

Left to right: Sharon, Ryland, and Marian Hartman

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