Before Langley Air Force Base: The muddy history of Shellbanks, Sherwood and other plantations of Elizabeth City County

Detonations echoed across the Back River as dynamite planted under tree stumps liberated them from the loamy swamp. Away from the blasts, the chatter of men filling in craters mingled with the sounds of axes chopping and saws gnawing at Virginia pines.

And 105 years ago, the construction of the flying field in Hampton had begun.

The U.S. government had acquired the swath of land — once a closely knit neighborhood of plantations between the branches of the Back River in Elizabeth City County — for the military’s first installation devoted to air power. On the fringes of the Army airfield, the first laboratories of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, were born.

Today, the chest-rattling roar of the F-22 Raptors thunders above Langley Air Force Base, which employs some 15,000 airmen and 5,000 civilians. It is the headquarters of Air Combat Command and home of the 1st Fighter Wing and 633rd Air Base Wing. The neighboring NASA Langley Research Center plays a critical role in the U.S. space program and has contributed to the first manned missions to the moon.

Perhaps lesser known — but no less fascinating — are the people who lived on Langley before it was Langley. Their gravestones still rest alongside military housing; the name of a plantation remains on buildings. Their stories include conquest and colonization, revolution and a daring slave escape, Civil War blunders and federal land buyers in disguise.

What lies beneath

“Stop reader stop! Let Nature claim a Tear. A Mother’s last and only Child lies here.”

That’s the epitaph on the gravestone of Frances Hollier, who died at age 16 in 1798. She rests next to her younger sister, Ann, who died two years earlier at age 12. Their marble stones are shaded by trees among brick houses in what is still called the base’s “Lighter-Than-Air” area — from which massive airships such as the Roma once lumbered above Hampton Roads.

Another burial ground is more prominently displayed in the parking lot of the base’s Riverview Event Center — once the Officers’ Club — where the Sherwood plantation house once stood. There, a set of plaques marks the remains of the Booker family along with a few other notable names: Marshall, Armistead, Von Schilling, Houseman and Jones.

Then there’s “Shellbank.” The name is on the Shellbank Gym and on the out-of-service Shellbank Pool, and in common use it refers to a section of the base that stretches from the King Street Bridge to LaSalle Avenue.

The name conjures images of seagulls dropping oysters from lofty heights to crack them on the granite rip rap that lines the Back River. But “Shellbank” derives from Shellbanks, or Shell Banks. Old names for a plantation.

Worlds collide

In 1621, Capt. Thomas Purifoy boarded the George, leaving his home in Leicestershire for a rapidly transforming Elizabeth City County — an occasion noted by a plaque in the Sherwood burial plot.

The Virginia Company of London was sending settlers to the “New World” to find wealth and a shortcut to China.

They were colonizing an area that had been occupied for 12,000 years by Indigenous peoples. By the 1600s, Powhatan tribes such as the Kecoughtan farmed the wooded banks of the rivers that split Hampton — the town formed there in 1610.

Two years before Purifoy set sail, a privateer named the White Lion docked at nearby Old Point Comfort and delivered a cargo hold of Africans — beginning the slave trade in the colonies.

Elsewhere on the Virginia Peninsula, tensions between the English, who had settled Jamestown in 1607, and the Indigenous tribes were simmering. The colonists had become increasingly dependent on the Powhatan confederation for food and as an early warning system for anticipated attacks from Spain. The tribes relied on the English for metal tools and technology.

But the tribes soon realized the colonists were not here to trade. They wanted the land.

Purifoy arrived in Virginia months before the Indian Massacre of 1622 and enlisted as a commander in the second Anglo-Powhatan War, which lasted until 1632. He served in several capacities for Elizabeth City County, and by 1635 King Charles I granted him a 2,000-acre plot of land on the eastern side of what is now Langley Air Force Base.

The Langley plantations

By the 1630s, a sweet-tasting strain of tobacco developed by Jamestown settler John Rolfe was wildly popular in Europe, and the plant had become the No. 1 cash crop in Virginia. The town of Hampton was a port central to this trade.

But tobacco quickly depleted the soil and many families eventually began raising corn, wheat, alfalfa and barley.

Purifoy’s land was split into two plantations, with Shellbanks descending to the Lowry family and Sherwood going to the Hand-Marshall-Booker line. Other settlers established plantations in the area, including John Layden, who around 1609 became the father of the first child of English parentage born in Virginia, and Benjamin Syms, who founded the first “free school” in America around 1647.

Perhaps the most prominent farm was Chesterville, first patented by Thomas Wythe in 1676. Ruins of the plantation house still stand on NASA’s Langley Research Center.

George Wythe was born on Chesterville in 1726 and became one of the nation’s founding fathers and a framer of the U.S. Constitution. He studied at William & Mary and became the school’s first professor of law.

Wythe represented Virginia in the Continental Congress and at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He even helped design the state seal. In 1776, he was among the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Langley and the Revolution

The Revolutionary War had raged for nearly six years when, in March 1781, a British force of about 400 sailed up the Back River.

Led by Lt. Col. Thomas Dundas, the troops landed at the mouth of Wythe Creek near present-day NASA and marched north toward an American outpost in the Tabb area. The redcoats were later met by a patriot force of about 40 men, led by Col. Francis Mallory of Hampton, in the area now known as Big Bethel. Mallory died in the skirmish, which ended in a British victory.

Seven months later and just 15 miles north, the British surrendered to Gen. George Washington at Yorktown.

According to family legend, Washington paid several visits to John Lowry at Shellbanks during his stay on the Virginia Peninsula.

Wythe had moved to Williamsburg before the Revolution and was an absentee landowner in Elizabeth City County; Lowry was one of its largest resident farmers. Lowry’s 525 acres included 100 head of cattle and a substantial dairy operation along with three boats, more than 20 horses and at least 12 enslaved people. Lowry contributed to the patriot cause, according to public records, exchanging 2,400 pounds of beef for 30 British pounds.

Next door at the Sherwood plantation, George Booker filed a claim to recover expenses for 30 pounds of bacon and 252 pounds of beef provided to American troops. He was a prominent landowner who served in the House of Delegates and as a high sheriff and a county court justice. He was able to generate wealth and power on the backs of the 27 enslaved people who farmed his plantation.

Brutal enterprise

Paul D. Luke was the lighthouse keeper on Old Point Comfort while it was under control of the British during the War of 1812.

In July 1813, he spotted an unusual sight: Three young Black men and two Black women in the company of several soldiers.

The three men said they were enslaved fugitives from Back River and answered to the name Lowry. One woman belonged to the widow Catherine Lowry of Shellbanks; the other, to George Booker of Sherwood.

The men enlisted as soldiers with the Royal Marines, according to Luke’s account, but the fate of the two women isn’t documented.

Though Congress banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade starting in 1808, the domestic slave trade continued until the end of the Civil War. Some 21,000 enslaved people were shipped from Hampton, Norfolk and Portsmouth to the cotton mecca of New Orleans between 1819 and 1860, according to the Historic New Orleans Collection research center.

Rarely could enslaved people expect to spend their life on one farm among the same people, according to a 1975 dissertation on Elizabeth City County by Sarah Shaver Hughes, then a Ph.D. candidate at the College of William & Mary.

“For the slaves of the post-revolutionary generation, as for the free people, life was more likely to yield disruption and discontinuity than tranquil attachment to one place and group of people,” Shaver Hughes wrote, ” — though with the difference that for the slave these changes were imposed, not chosen.”

Even the enslaved people who remained faced the prospect of being sold or rented out to other families.

“You suffered the horror of having your children, spouse, parents, siblings, beloved friends sold from you, never to see them again,” historian, author and Norfolk State University professor Colita Nichols Fairfax said in an interview.

Still, Black labor was different in Elizabeth City County than in places such as New Orleans.

The farms were smaller than the massive sugar and cotton plantations of the deep South. Overseers weren’t necessary because the enslaved workers had a considerable understanding of their animals and crops, Shaver Hughes wrote.

Free Blacks also had more privileges than in the rest of the antebellum South thanks to their skilled labor, the demise of tobacco farming and intermixing with white families.

But when it came to basic necessities, enslaved people most often had to fend for themselves. This would include clothing made from fabric scraps, furniture built from leftover materials, improvised medical care and diets centered on food that whites didn’t want.

The Civil War

In June 1861, Union Gen. Benjamin Butler and Maj. Theodore Winthrop led two columns of some 3,500 Union soldiers toward the slave-built Confederate earthworks at Big Bethel — which today is the site of a recreational park and some off-base housing owned by Langley.

The troops coming from Hampton and Newport News were to converge and launch a surprise attack at dawn.

But the Hampton force mistook their Newport News counterparts for rebel troops. A skirmish ensued. The gunfire signaled to Confederate Cols. D.H. Hill and John B. Magruder that an attack was imminent, allowing them to rally their troops. And after a three-hour battle, the Southern forces repelled the Yankees, allowing the Confederates to retain control of much of the Peninsula.

But the Union troops maintained their stronghold at Fort Monroe, and by August, Magruder ordered the town of Hampton burned to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

Robert S. Hudgins II grew up on the Lamington (or Lambington) plantation, which bordered Sherwood, and later witnessed the establishment of Langley Field on his land. He served as a sergeant in the 3rd Virginia Cavalry for the Confederate army, fought in the Battle of Big Bethel and saw the burning of Hampton from an area called Sinclair’s Corner near the southwest end of what is now Fox Hill Road.

Hudgins later recounted his experiences at Kelly’s Ford, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern and Appomattox in the book “Recollections of an Old Dominion Dragoon.”

More destruction followed when Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan landed his army at Fort Monroe and embarked northwest on the Peninsula campaign.

George Booker of Sherwood served as a major in the Confederate army under Magruder. He fell ill and resigned his commission. As Union troops ransacked the Peninsula, Booker and his family fled to Petersburg.

Thomas Whiting Lowry, at age 68, remained on Shellbanks. His granddaughter, Eliza C. Fletcher, described a night in 1861 when Union troops took him from his home — without time to put on shoes — then carried him by boat across the Back River. They forced him to walk 5 miles to Old Point Comfort to take an oath of loyalty to the Union.

“They had ransacked the place after he left,” Fletcher recounted in a family newsletter. “There were several ladies in the family and one boy whose sister put him under her bolster so they wouldn’t find him when they searched the room.”

Changing hands

When Robert Hudgins returned from the war, the Lamington farm was “a wreck.”

“Fences were down and four years growth of weeds and saplings had nearly reclaimed what was once some of the most fertile farmland in the region,” he recounted. “The house had fallen into disrepair. … Only a few of the slaves had remained; the rest, having been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, had scattered to the four winds.”

Hudgins made an agreement with the remaining freed slaves to stay and help salvage the farm in exchange for housing and food until some money could be made.

One of George Booker’s daughters, Mollie, remained at Sherwood with her husband, a German named Franz Wilhelm von Schilling. They tried farming again, but the fields had been neglected and livestock depleted. They moved to the Washington, D.C., area.

Meanwhile, Franz’s brother Louis von Schilling stayed on the Shellbanks plantation and attempted to plant white Dinkel wheat and fruit trees sent from Germany. The crops failed, and Louis was evicted in 1872. But descendants of the von Schillings remained in Hampton. They included Ilma von Schilling, who was a principal of the Syms-Eaton Academy, and U.S. Army Col. Leopold Marshall “Winks” von Schilling. A road in Hampton’s Coliseum Central district bears the family’s name.

In 1875, Thomas Tabb — a lawyer who was one of the largest landowners in Elizabeth City County — bought the Shellbanks tract and three years later sold it to Boston philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway.

She in turn donated the land to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which was founded in 1868 with the mission to educate Blacks — whose population in Hampton had boomed after the Civil War — and later Native Americans.

The school used Shellbanks for hands-on and experimental agricultural education. The Shellbanks farmhouse served as a dormitory and classroom until it burned down in 1902. Hampton Institute built a new farmhouse that has since been preserved as Air Force Building 90.

The same year as Hemenway’s donation of Shellbanks, a couple named Junius and Lucy Jones bought the Sherwood tract. They sold it in 1881 to James Sands Darling, a prominent oysterman and entrepreneur.

By that time, oyster farming and aquaculture were playing a vital role in the rebuilding of Hampton.

Local historian, preservationist and author John Quarstein called Darling, who was born in New York and moved to Elizabeth City County after the Civil War, a visionary industrialist and one of the largest oyster producers in the world. Darling also invested heavily in the menhaden and lumber industries, along with trolleys and a hotel.

“He had to own everything he could that made his industry successful,” Quarstein said in an interview. “He’s one of those carpetbaggers that then became the gentry.”

Darling’s son, Frank, inherited the farm before the U.S. government took interest in the land in 1916.

Into the modern age

The military was looking for land near Fort Monroe that was convenient for over-water flying with a proximity to industry, as well as a temperate climate.

So a group of federal investigators dressed themselves as hunters and fishermen to prowl and survey the Sherwood tract without revealing the government’s interest in purchasing it.

The ruse didn’t work.

Three men with political ties — Harry H. Holt, H.R. Booker and Nelson S. Groome — learned of the government’s interest and bought options on the land encompassing Sherwood, Lamington, Tide Mill, Downing Farm and portions of others.

The men then lobbied the government to build its airfield there and sold it to the Army in 1916 for $290,000 (about $8.1 million in today’s dollars).

“They did it quietly and they did it essentially, surreptitiously. They made no noise about it,” said Wythe Holt, a local historian and the grandson of Harry H. Holt. “And it was a bonanza for them.”

By 1917, Hampton’s Gannaway-Hudgins Co. began flattening the landscape to accommodate a pair of runways for the “flying machines.”

A large portion of that land — which hadn’t been farmed — was still thickly wooded marsh.

One of the first arrivals at the airfield described the grounds:

“Nature’s greatest ambition was to produce in this, her cesspool, the muddiest mud, the weediest weeds, the dustiest dust and the most ferocious mosquitoes the world has ever seen. Her plans were so well formulated and adhered to that she far surpassed her wildest hopes and desires.”

The Sherwood plantation house served as a barracks and then a guard house before being razed in the 1920s to make way for the Officers’ Club.

The Shellbanks farm remained the property of Hampton Institute until 1941. The feds had paid for portions of the land to accommodate a road and a large ditch, but bought the remaining 770-acre tract consisting of Shellbanks, Canebrake and Elmwood on Feb. 26 of that year for $155,000 ($3.2 million today).

Meanwhile, Langley’s influence on the region was well underway.

Mike Cobb, who retired as the Hampton History Museum’s founding curator, described the sweep of history during an interview.

“The Hampton that had existed for so long is forever changed by the advent of technology, the modern age,” he said. “And in no other place in Elizabeth City County is that more striking than what is Langley today.”

Other sources

NASA web archives (Cultural Resources Geographic Information System): tinyurl.com/LangleyPlantations

Hampton History Museum collections: tinyurl.com/HamptonHistory

“Langley Field, The Early Years: 1916-1946? by Robert I. Curtis, John Mitchell and Martin Copp: tinyurl.com/EarlyLangley

“Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782-1810: the economic and social structure of a Tidewater county in the early national years” a dissertation by Sarah Shaver Hughes, a Ph.D. candidate at the College of William & Mary: tinyurl.com/HughesDissertation

“Freedom’s first generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890? by Robert Francis Engs: tinyurl.com/FreedomsFirst

“The Beverley family of Virginia; descendants of Major Robert Beverley, (1641-1687) and allied families” by John McGill: tinyurl.com/BeverleyFamily

“Booker: descendants of Captain Richard Booker of Abingdon Parish, Gloucester County, Virginia” by Jean Marshall von Schilling: tinyurl.com/BookerFamily

“Recollections of an Old Dominion Dragoon: the Civil War experiences of Sgt. Robert S. Hudgins, II, Company B, 3rd Virginia Cavalry” by Garland C. Hudgins, ed.: tinyurl.com/RobertHudgins

The son of two Air Force veterans, Matt Cahill researches genealogy and for several years has worked maintaining the grounds at Langley Air Force Base.

Matt Cahill, matthew.cahill@pilotonline.com