Truckin' on the Western Branch

BOWERS HILL While the community’s name likely sprang from an early 19th-century landowner rather than, as local lore suggests, a 1940s Military Highway overpass, Bowers Hill is something of a crossroads, sitting on the northeastern corner of the Dismal Swamp at the juncture of several highways. For generations Bowers Hill has also been a cultural crossroads, with smaller communities of black families, of Nansemond Indian families, and of the Polish farmers who settled the Sunray section of the area. On Friday, July 17, 1863, an unnamed New York Times correspondent wrote from the Federal Camp Foster in Bowers Hill: Bower’s Hill is situated in Virginia, on the Seaboard and Roanoke Railroad, at a point about equidistant between Portsmouth, opposite Norfolk, and Suffolk . . . The so-called “Hill,” for it is as level as Broadway, and the adjacent property, for a large distance around, is owned by the Government, and our Uncle Sam, in his new role of national farmer, is raising plenteous crops of cereals . . . The rebels are understood to be in full occupation of Suffolk, and this force at Bowers Hill is intended to dispute their approach upon the ports of Norfolk and Portsmouth from the Blackwater, and from all the section south of the James River, and between that and the Atlantic coast. A century later, the Rev. Dr. Melvin O. Marriner of Grove Church grew up in Bowers Hill, the son of the late James and Magdalene Marriner. His father was in the Navy, and the family lived off Goodman Street, then a dirt path, with his grandmother living nearby on the corner of Goodman and Riddick Streets, behind Little Zion Church. He remembered:

The black neighborhood was a couple hundred people. We lived fifteen people to a house and had outhouses. I remember shelling butter beans—75 cents for a five-gallon tin—and seeing the buses pick up people to go pick cotton.

The community was rich in sharing and supporting each other, but we couldn’t go into Polish Town—as a black you know where to go. In Bower’s Hill you didn’t mingle outside of your own community.

He walked to school at Southwestern Elementary and in 1974 graduated from Western Branch High School where he played football. When an ACL injury ruled out his football scholarship to Virginia Tech, he opted for Norfolk State University, followed by Virginia Union University School of Theology and the United Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Dr. Melvin O. Marriner. Image by Sheally

Red-tailed hawk. Image by Sheally

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