Truckin' on the Western Branch

Dee Barnes Dee Barnes, retired Churchland High finance officer, grew up in the heart of Churchland where her father, Harry Primrose Barnes, had an Esso station in the center of the village. His clientele came from the Marine base at Pig Point. Marines changed into their civvies in the station bathroom. The cops and state troopers hung out there too. The troopers raced down old High Street after 10 p.m. when the station closed. Dad had a Packard and always beat the troopers. I was a tomboy and played football with the boys behind the Gomley Chesed synagogue. I rode horses bareback, drove a tractor, and helped pick tomatoes and corn. It was a wonderful living that parents and children today don’t know. We’d visit on the front porch and walk to the store at 7 p.m. without fear. It was a good time. At Churchland High I played basketball and softball for Gracie VanDyck. That was when the guards couldn’t cross the center line in girls’ basketball. Gracie was never ugly but she meant what she said and she gave us instruction and discipline. And she never forgot my name. Rabbit Howard was my geography teacher and umpire for softball, and Dick Barnes was the leader of “The Villagers,” a wonderful group to be in. There were stables and houses where Roses is now and Mom and Pop stores in the village. The Trucker Burger was there before Mr. Quick and Wilson Spruill had a grocery store. My mother would send me to A. W. Johnson’s store to buy a pound of hamburger for dinner—he sold the best in town.

Ben Lynch remembered the village as it was in the 1950s.

Dee Barnes with her grandchildren, Peyton Gilliam (left) and Ron Wright (right). Image by Sheally

The Spruills had a store and raised rabbits behind the store in several large pens. I bought a few as pets. Mrs. Adams worked in the confectionary/luncheonette. Clyde Smith had a cannery near the railroad tracks and C. C. Buck’s Pure Oil station was on the corner where the 7/11 is now.

Charles Griffin Charlie Griffin grew up in River Park and graduated from Wilson High School in 1967. Before he hauled a Churchland house to his lot in Western Branch and called it home, he lived in the old original Churchland school.

His great-uncle Griffin had a farm in West Norfolk where the Coast Guard Station is now, and his father’s father ran Planters Manufacturing, the barrel and basket factory in Port Norfolk.

Charlie’s father, Gordon “Bubba” Griffin, and Bubba’s three brothers—Jack, Bob, and Bill—owned Griffin Brothers, a place everyone called simply “the Shop.”

I started working with my father and uncles when I was six years old, riding in trucks and combines, playing with all the tools at the shop on Towne Point Road in Churchland. The family did a little bit of truck farming to make a dollar—corn, watermelons, tomatoes—on two to three acres where the Department of Motor Vehicles is now. We put watermelons in a trough of ice at the shop and they always sold out.

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