Truckin' on the Western Branch

Margaret Davenport Margaret Tisdale Davenport was born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, in 1919. She completed a two-year license to teach and was boarding with the Davenport family while she taught school in Amelia for two years in a two-room schoolhouse.

Mother Davenport was an old country doctor who wanted me to meet her son, William Ezekial “Zeke” Davenport. He found me dusting books in the schoolhouse.

Zeke came to Hampton Roads to build the Davenport Lewis Chevrolet store. Charles Davenport was Zeke’s older brother, and Ashton Lewis’s mother, Lulubelle, was Zeke’s sister.

We had five children and were in Detroit during the war for 16 months. We made prisms for the war effort in a home basement factory. I think some of them went into the atomic bomb.

We lived in Century Homes in Simonsdale for nine years, and it was a full house. Then we built a house on three acres on Tyre Neck Road near Ashton Lewis.

Zeke and his brother bought a foundry in Norfolk. I went back to school at 50 when the youngest child was four years old to get my teaching certificate. I taught at Churchland Elementary for Garfield Shafer.

Margaret Davenport and Mary Shafer. Images by Sheally

Such nice students at that time—and the parents were wonderful, not like now.

You couldn’t find a better place to live than Churchland. The children all enjoyed growing up here.

Cindy Eberwine Cindy Davenport Eberwine is Margaret and Zeke Davenport’s oldest child and moved with her family to Churchland in 1956.

When I was born, my grandmother delivered me in the same room where my father Zeke had been born in Amelia County. I came to Churchland High as part of the Simonsdale crowd in seventh grade. The high school on High Street was brand new. My father had built us a beautiful home off Tyre Neck Road, using brick that came from England as ballast. The floors were heart pine from the Seaboard Railroad warehouse.

I feel like my class were all good friends. There were some cliques, but that was not a problem since they were based on where we lived. I had good friends from West Norfolk, Bowers Hill, and Hodges Ferry.

After I married John Eberwine, we lived in Georgia for three years, and I was very happy to get back to this area. I taught business education from 1984 to 1994 at Deep Creek High School.

Churchland/Western Branch has changed so much. In 1956 we’d walk home after school if we had activities and missed the bus. Oak Point was the only development on Tyre Neck Road. We would take rides, since no one was a stranger, or walk on the railroad tracks, but that made me nervous.

At Churchland High we all had school jackets. Frank Beck might really have known all our names—or maybe he was reading our jackets.

There was a real sense of community, and a lot of that has been lost with the loss of the rural community. But in Churchland if you weren’t born there, you were a newcomer. They that were had something very special because of that.

Cindy Eberwine. Image by Sheally

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