Truckin' on the Western Branch

I taught at Churchland Baptist preschool. In 1959 Jack wanted to get back to Churchland, so we came to Long Point. I’m known as the matriarch of Long Point since we were the only house here on the Long Point farm owned by Porter Hardy. We paid $15,500 for the lot and the house that had been built for Clarence Casteen who farmed for Hardy.

We had a pony for the four children—Lee, Linda, Ann, and Neal. Lee was killed in a carjacking in Annapolis in 2002.

Churchland was a close-knit community; everybody was kin. The Griffins are kin to the Speers—Jack’s uncle married Bruce Speer’s aunt. The Griffins had lost their farm during the Depression but Jack’s uncle, Garland Griffin, rented land to farm where the Coast Guard Station is now.

Major Frank Kirby Frank Langley Kirby, retired executive director of The Red Cross in Portsmouth, grew up in downtown Portsmouth and graduated from Wilson High School in 1937. He passed away on August 1, 2014, a few months after he shared his memories with us. My father, Samuel Frank Kirby, was a businessman and sold feed, seed, and fertilizer to truck farmers in the Churchland and North Suffolk areas. That business was Mason and Kirby on the corner of Middle and King Streets in Portsmouth. All those truck farming areas are now residential.

I thought of Norfolk County as country. In high school my social peers were in Churchland High—they were the country boys.

I graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1941. I saluted three times that day—once for my diploma, once to get my commission, and once to get my orders—I was in the Army.

I met a lovely lady in England—Joan Biddles—and got engaged, but I was shipped out before we could marry.

I was in a point unit in a combat command, the first troops into St. Lo in France, a German-held town. My first full day there, the Germans’ 88s had me pegged and I was wounded. I spent six years in eight veterans hospitals rehabilitating.

I was finally sent home but Joan couldn’t follow since we weren’t married. I wrote to everyone, including President Harry Truman, to get her here. Finally we married in 1946 and lived in Swimming Point.

Kirby became a city councilman, general registrar for Portsmouth and was instrumental in bringing the lightship to Portsmouth. In the early 1960s, when he was chair of the Business Affairs Committee of the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce, he convinced the chamber to start a community foundation that evolved into the current South East Virginia Community Foundation, headquartered in Churchland.

Major Frank Langley Kirby. Image by Sheally

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