“A Glimpse Beyond the Wooden Footbridge”
By Amy Waters Yarsinske
Published Friday March 09, 2007 in Destination Ghent, a special section of the Virginian Pilot
Norfolk had already begun spreading northward prior to the footbridge being extended over Smith’s Creek, a portion of which was later dubbed The Hague, to Ghent Farm. There was a wide and substantial bridge from Smith’s Point;to the property of John P. Colley connecting Fort Norfolk with the borough. This bridge was badly damaged during a severe gale in 1821, and was not in use for the next twenty-five years. H.B. Forrest stated in his 1851 directory, “A bill was recently passed in the House of Delegates authorizing James Gordon Jr. and Aaron Milhado to construct a bridge across Smith’s Creek from the western terminus of York Street to the lands of John P. Colley on the opposite side of the county.”
Ghent was the first suburb to be developed out of the farms that surrounded the city of Norfolk over the creeks to the north of downtown proper. A footbridge across Smith’s Creek to the north of town led to Commodore Richard Drummond’s farm and the DeBree property.
“DeBreeses”
Early recollections of Ghent invariably include going over that footbridge to “de breezes,” a place where, in the minds of some children, gentle and variable winds blew. It was not until years later that two of those children, Julia Johnson Davis and her sister, realized that their nurse was saying “DeBreeses,” for the new development just over the bridge, laid out on Commodore John DeBree’s property. “My mother said,” wrote Davis, “that in her girlhood a wooden footbridge had connected ‘DeBreeses’ and Norfolk proper,” which explained why, in her own childhood, the bridge over Smith’s Creek, later The Hague, was always referred to as “the new bridge.”
Davis did not come to know the name Ghent until moving out of her grandparents’ house on College Place and into a new home in “DeBreeses.” “I vividly remember the excitement of moving,” she recalled later, “and how we loved the open fields and plum thickets, and particularly the smooth concrete sidewalks for skating.” Julia Johnson Davis would grow up and take her place as a noteworthy community leader and poet, but one who as a child lived in a prestigious Beechwood Place mansion when horse hooves crunched the white oyster shell road called Mowbray Arch. A snapshot of Mowbray Arch residents in 1902, the first year the Norfolk city directory provided a listing of those who lived there, revealed a lively mix of politicians, businessmen, doctors, bankers, teachers and widows.
Excerpted from Ghent: John Graham’s Dream, Norfolk, Virginia’s Treasure (The History Press, 2006) by Amy Waters Yarsinske, the author of many books, including No One Left Behind: The Lt.Comdr. Michael Schott Speicher Story (Dutton, 2002) and Mother Water – The Elizabeth river in American History (this was the proposed title for The Elizabeth River—Virginia’s Remarkable River Princess (The History Press, May 2007))
Due to space limitations the following text was not included in the Destination Ghent published version of “A Glimpse Beyond the Wooden Footbridge”:
The historical importance of Ghent seems to be a collective entity, rather than the product of individual actions or events. Even the antecedents of Ghent are plural. At least three colonial plantations covered all or part of the area that became Norfolk’s first planned suburb. Ghent, Jasper Moran’s plantation after which the development was named, was known previously as Brishie Neck, Brushy Neck and Pleasant Point before Moran acquired and renamed it. Part of it had at least one more name, Lilliput, after Moran died.
Along with the succession of names went a succession of owners, the last being the collective entities of the Norfolk and Ghent Companies. The name Ghent became synonymous with the high lifestyle that the plantations connoted and after which the new suburb strove. But for seventy-five years Ghent was one house, a large frame homestead surrounded by spacious lawns and flanked by acres of farmland owned by Drummond, which was situated across Smith’s Creek from Botetourt Street, just outside of the corporate limits of the city of Norfolk.
A narrow footbridge, which J.P. Andre Mottu, of the Norfolk and Ghent Companies eventually replaced with another at the same location as today’s Botetourt Street or Ghent Bridge in the 1890s, gave an approach to the house from the northern end of Botetourt Street. The site of the house was approximately at the corner of what is today Warren Crescent and Drummond Place.