Truckin' on the Western Branch

Freddy Fletcher Freddy Fletcher grew up on Progress Avenue in West Norfolk, just a couple blocks from Virginia Smelting and remembered, My father and grandfather both came to the area to work in the plant. My father was a machinist and my grandfather was a chemist for 40 years. There were whistles for starting, lunch and quitting times and people all over the community responded to those. You didn’t need a watch. The plant had a few explosions from time to time.

Gondola cars dumped the molten slag off the smelting process onto a pier. It was a big feat for kids to run from the road to the river shore over the slag pile. There was a degaussing station for Navy ships at the end of the slag pile just off the channel. There were so many lights from the station that you could sit on your porch at night and read the newspaper by their light .

Kids used to ride bikes to Port Norfolk over the bridge and ride the span out as the bridge opened. There was no bus service in West Norfolk. The bus stopped at Mt. Vernon Avenue and Bayview Boulevard. I used to deliver The Virginian-Pilot. I wore my uncle’s World War I long overcoat and my paper bag over my shoulder. I once had to be rescued from a ditch filled chest deep with snow.

During World War II the Army set up a camp with tents at the foot of the bridge and another one, an anti-aircraft unit with barracks and a searchlight, near the current VA 164. One of the neighbor girls married one of the soldiers.

Carolyn Honeycutt Carolyn Honeycutt, born in 1939, also grew up in West Norfolk and claims a great childhood. West Norfolk was the most wonderful place in the world. Everybody kept up their

houses. All “negroes” as they were called lived down the street and worked at the smelting plant but I never associated segregation with West Norfolk because we knew everyone. I remember dirt roads, wooden board sidewalks and Blanchards Store between the black and white neighborhoods. The stores were closed on Sundays. The freight train came once a day bringing sulfur into the smelting plant but we never really paid attention unless it was late. We’d pick up pieces along the tracks and thought they were gold. We draped old curtains over the railroad cars and played house in them. We used to find Dutch wooden shoes in the slag pile on the river. Virginia Chemicals had whistles at 8, 12 and 4:20. We told time by them and by the shipyard’s 9 o’clock gun. Casteen’s service station was across from Virginia Chemicals. Jimmy Pope and his son worked there. During the war my father was an air raid warden and the kids told ghost stories during the blackouts. Almost everyone worked at the plant and no one worried about health hazards. I went there in 1960 and worked in payroll when employees had to sign for their pay—it was cash in envelopes. I retired as an accounting supervisor in 1998 when it was Hoechst Celanese. My grandfather, Charles Allan Larkin, came from Richmond to work on the railroad and stayed in the Parsons’ Hotel in West Norfolk. There was a big barrel factory near where the Scale o’ D’ Whale was. When he left the railroad he ran boats delivering barrels up the Rappahannock River where people used them for pickles, potatoes, etc.

Carolyn Honeycutt and her daughter Kathy. Images by Sheally

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