Truckin' on the Western Branch

deckhouse was removed in 1946 while the Captain John Smith remained in service until the early 1950s. Fred Beazley, Portsmouth entrepreneur and philanthropist, brought the deckhouse (20 feet by 30 feet and constructed of juniper and white cedar) to the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River near his Bridgeview Farm to be a boathouse.

Richard Bray, Director of the Beazley Foundation, remembered. “I grew up living on the Western Branch and took my small boat out on the river. The boat house was my landmark in the fog.”

Julie MacKinlay grew up in Virginia Beach, but her father, William Lee Whitehurst, owned truck farms in the Pughsville area. She frequently came to Churchland to visit her grandparents, John and Effie Ballard.

“Our birthday parties were often in the Beazley river house. We’d take a few friends out of school for strawberry picking and sleep over,” she said. “I remember when a Nor’easter drove water up into the river house and we had to evacuate.”

In 2003 the rustic old river house did not fit well with the upscale Homearama event taking place on part of the old Beazley property, Bridgeview Farm, renamed the Estates at River Pointe. So just a month before Hurricane Isabel wiped out other river houses, a Surry businessman, Scott Wheeler, had the river house split in two, raised from the river, and trucked back home to Surry to crown a new commercial/restaurant center near the ferry piers on the James. When Wheeler’s project failed to materialize, he donated the structure to The Surry County, Virginia, Historical Society and Museums, Inc., in 2005. The cabin was tucked, temporarily, behind the Edwards production plant. Beginning in 2009 grants from the Beazley Foundation and the federal government enabled the Society to launch a restoration of the cabin for use as a museum.

Images by Sheally

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