Truckin' on the Western Branch

Al Spradlin. Images by Sheally

posthumously received the Carnegie Medal for his actions, and his mother, Martha Sullivan, was awarded a small pension for the rest of her life.

Virginia Chemicals Virginia Chemicals traced its roots back to the 1830s and the first commander at Fort Monroe, U.S. Army General Abraham Eustis, who was from a wealthy Boston family. His son W. E. C. Eustis and his twin grandsons, Frederick and Augustus Eustis, were mining engineers with major copper mining operations in Cuba, Ontario and Virgalina, Virginia. Each of the three mines produced a different type and grade of copper. The family needed a deep water site on which to build a smelter to blend the three ores—a site with good rail connections and a harbor that could handle large cargo ships bringing in the ore. In the 1890s they decided on the asparagus fields at Lovette Point, at the foot of the current West Norfolk Bridge, to build a smelter. According to Spradlin, asparagus was still growing wild in the 1980s around the Virginia Chemicals water purification ponds on the property. To make the West Norfolk location work, W.E.C. Eustis paid a bounty of $5,000 to the Atlantic and Danville Railroad to extend its tracks from the copper mine in Virgalina to West Norfolk. The family opened the Eustis Copper Smelter (at one time called Norfolk Smelting Co.) in 1898. Soon afterward the family changed the name to Virginia Smelting Co. The smelter thrived until the 1920s when the bottom fell out of the copper market. The Eustis family faced other challenges as well. One was the disposal of large quantities of slag produced by the smelting process. They dumped the slag along the shoreline near the Kingman Farm and later, as a breakwater at Lovette Point. The slag pile grew to 20 to 30 feet deep, well above the high water line. When management discovered that the slag’s fine, hard particles made a superior sandblasting material, they sold tons of slag to NORSHIPCO (Norfolk Shipbuilding and Drydock Corp.) for sandblasting ship bottoms. The resulting depressions in the surplus slag piles in West Norfolk became water treatment and settling ponds for the Virginia Chemicals amines plant. The smelter sent large quantities of sulfur dioxide shooting into the air as a byproduct of the smelting process. The chemical mixed with atmospheric moisture to form sulfuric acid, which fell back on the farm fields, acidifying the soil. Not good, according to Spradlin. So in the 1920s W.E.C. Eustis’s twin sons built a plant to recover the gas and liquefy it into a marketable product. The sons brought in another Harvard engineer, A. K. Scribner Sr., to find productive uses for the liquid sulfur dioxide.

Scribner convinced the North and South Carolina textile mills to buy the liquid sulfur dioxide to use in dying denim rather than continue to burn their own sulfur for the process. In 1927 General Electric

149