One Century Ago: What Cold Really Looks Like

Local headlines recently proclaimed that the Hampton Roads area is experiencing perhaps the coldest new year it has experienced in a century.  Thousands of "nonessential" workers at military bases across the Hampton Roads Region are off for the second day in a row (myself included, although I'm still on deadline for this blog post and other projects).  Many of them are busily documenting the snowdrifts and other winter wonders deposited by the recent "bomb cyclone" that made it all possible.  But what did the winter of a century ago look like to the Sailors and other photographers who were working then?  

The Hampton Roads Naval Museum recently acquired photographs taken by a young gunner's mate floating on the York River that show just how cold it got one century ago. Compared to the arctic blast of January 1918, which froze battleships into place off Yorktown and made the majority of the Chesapeake region practically impassible, the so-called "bomb cyclone" that swept through the area this week was a mere inconvenience.

Thanks to a young Sailor named Ernest A. Washburn, who was serving aboard USS Rhode Island (BB 17), we now have a better idea what the York looked like during that epic cold snap.

Two photographs taken from USS Rhode Island (BB 17) have been combined to show the monitor Tallahassee (BM 9), which served during the war as a submarine tender, and the battleship Texas (BB 35), frozen in at the location near Yorktown, Virginia, known as "Base 2" in January 1918. (E.A. Washburn Collection, Hampton Roads Naval Museum)

The battleship Virginia (BB 13) waits out the weather on the York River in January 1918. (E.A. Washburn Collection, Hampton Roads Naval Museum)

When not on patrol or in the midst of training the teeming multitudes of prospective engineers and gunners passing through Hampton Roads during the First World War, the bulk of the Atlantic Fleet, made up mostly of ships that sailed with the Great White Fleet ten years before, was bottled up behind anti-torpedo nets at "Base 2" on the York River, just off the old Yorktown Battlefield.  The area was also home to "Camp Mayo," a tent encampment serving as a provisional headquarters to the fleet while the naval operating base at Sewells Point was under construction.

One of the young officers tasked with gunnery training aboard the newer superdreadnought Texas (BB 35), future Vice Admiral Bernhard H. Bieri, recalled in an oral history he gave to the U.S. Naval Institute:

They took the whole fleet into the York River, behind the submarine nets, in early 1917.  We spent the winter of 1917 in the York River and the Chesapeake Bay.  The Germans were prowling in the Atlantic and sinking ships all over.  So we had nets up, and they put us back of those barriers in the Chesapeake Bay, where we carried out our target practices. The river and the bay froze up very hard.  We had some of the old battleships that were used as icebreakers. 

Meanwhile, Sailors at the the newly-opened naval training center at Sewells Point, about 36 miles southeast of Yorktown, were facing even more extreme living conditions than those marooned on the York.  Water pipes that had just been installed in brand new barracks began bursting and the steam plant designed to support hundreds of new recruits with hot water failed. 

Roger B. Copinger, an officer candidate from Maryland who was waiting for classes to begin at the Officer-Material School, established at the former Pennsylvania Exhibition Hall on the base, later recalled what the winter was like for him and his shipmates:

Shortly after we reported the weather became even colder. The overhead steam pipe froze, and as a result we had no heat in the barracks or hot water in the showers. We slept in our clothes, and our week end liberty became not only a relaxation but a necessity. We would usually make for the Navy Y and a hot bath, or if we had the required funds, we would team up, and three of four of us would get a room at the Neddo Hotel on Plume Street near Granby.

Chesapeake Bay from the Capes to Baltimore was frozen, and while channels in the lower portion were kept open, shipping from the Potomac north was at a standstill. The Navy finally ordered the USS Ohio to try to break out a channel in the upper Bay, but the task turned out to be too much for the old battleship, and she was likewise frozen in.

When we had a few minutes before or after classes we would walk out on the ice which extended from in front of the Pennsylvania Building almost to the channel. This was dangerous because of the thin places or holes, so we were finally ordered to discontinue this activity.

Copinger, who ultimately rose to the rank of commander while serving in Hampton Roads during the Second World War, also reported that several Sailors on their way to Sewells Point for classes in early January were diverted to downtown Norfolk to stand guard over the remains of the Monticello Hotel, which had burned on New Year's Day, 1918.  

Longtime Norfolk photographer Harry C. Mann recorded the aftermath of the Monticello Hotel fire, after which a fire engine remained frozen in place.  At far left, merchants can be seen removing whatever wares they can salvage. (Library of Virginia Digital Collections)

Construction projects at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, just south of the city of Portsmouth, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, as well as the new mine assembly plant at St. Juliens Creek Annex, about a mile south of the shipyard, also ground nearly to a halt.

The construction site for Dry Dock 4 at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, January 8, 1918. (Courtesy of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard Archives)

The dangerous conditions did not prevent these workers from venturing out to the new power plant construction site at Norfolk Naval Shipyard on January 8, 1918. (Courtesy of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard Archives)

Despite the conditions, the nation was in the midst of war, and the work went on.

One Century Ago: Admiral Dillingham Inherits a Mess

As an example of a locality with almost ideal conditions for a training station, I would give the vicinity of Norfolk, Va.... The great possibilities of this strategic locality make it certain, that with the increase of the fleet, the Government will be obliged to have its principal training station and rendezvous there in the near future, and it is apropos of this consideration that is well now, to study plans for the best possible habitation for our men.

Rear Admiral A.C. Dillingham, 1910 

Great leaders don't make a recommendation or proposal unless they are willing to see it through personally.  Such was the case one hundred years ago this month for Rear Admiral Albert C. Dillingham, just after ground was broken at a former exposition site and fairgrounds just north of Norfolk, Virginia, for a huge facility he had envisioned seven years before.  In 1910, he had professed his belief in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that Norfolk would make an ideal site for a permanent new recruit training facility.  Officially, Norfolk was already one of four locations throughout the country where initial recruit training was conducted, but Dillingham, who had recently finished up a tour as commanding officer of the Receiving Ship Franklin opposite Norfolk Naval Shipyard, wrote, "At Norfolk there is officially no training station, there never having been any appropriation for the specific purpose of training at that place, although, as a matter of fact, it is the most important training station in operation."

A postcard marketed at about the time of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition showing the Receiving Ships Richmond and Franklin (the names on the postcard being reversed) at the St. Helena Annex in the Berkeley section of Norfolk, across the South Branch of the Elizabeth River from Norfolk Naval Shipyard. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection)

This seemingly contradictory claim captured the conundrum facing those running the two receiving ships then located on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River.  A decade into the 20th Century, the few hundred new recruits entering the Navy there were still trained much the way they were before the "New Navy" of the 1880s.  Receiving ships were not only too small to train large numbers of recruits, but, like the infamous British prison hulks of the Revolutionary War, diseases spread rapidly among the Sailors living and training there.  The Bureau of Navigation had concluded early in the new century that new Sailors needed more varied and technically sophisticated training than a receiving ship could provide, yet in Norfolk, there was little room to grow.  A shore-based training station had been established near the receiving ships at St. Helena in 1908, during then-Captain Dillingham's tour there.  In 1915, Franklin completed her 38-year tenure as the primary receiving ship of the station, yet when war against Germany was declared two years later, there were still two receiving ships, consisting of the bark Cumberland (IX 8) and former steam sloop Richmond.  With the modest shore station, St. Helena Annex had a maximum capacity of 3,555 men.

This portion of a panoramic series of photographs taken on January 2, 1917, shows the recruit training facilities of the St. Helena Annex, beginning with (from left) the Receiving Ships Richmond and Cumberland, the small boat training pier, parade and training grounds within the center image, concluding at the center right with modest bungalows for recruits. The demands of war that summer quickly overwhelmed the facility, which resorted to tents to contain the overflow of new recruits.  When those quickly ran out, some prospective Sailors showing up in Norfolk were told to go home until new accommodations could be found. (Norfolk Naval Shipyard Archives)    

Dillingham's wish to create a modern training facility finally came true in June, 1917, after President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill authorizing the purchase of the former Jamestown Exposition land and some adjoining properties, including the Pine Beach Hotel, to become Naval Operating Base Hampton Roads.  On the cusp of retirement after serving as a senior military liaison to the government of the Dominican Republic, Dillingham found himself back in Hampton Roads with a mandate to bring his vision to fruition.  Even with $1.6 million in funding and 4,000 construction workers suddenly at his disposal, however, Dillingham's twilight tour would not be a walk in the park.  He had inherited a monumental mess.  

The United States Lifesaving Station, which once stood where Chambers Field is located today, was beyond economical repair by the time it was surveyed on August 2, 1917.  Just ten years before, it was one of the many Jamestown Exposition buildings that merited its own postcard (Inset). (Hampton Roads Naval Museum Collection) 

The dilapidated fairgrounds were a far cry from the gilded city on Willoughby Bay envisioned by the Jamestown Exposition Company.  Even during the exposition itself in 1907, many of the larger pavilions were not quite finished, and the company went bankrupt shortly thereafter.  The sprawling fairground had in just a decade been reduced to ruin through neglect and by the dramatic storms that sweep across Hampton Roads.  The demise of many of the remaining buildings was also probably hastened by vandals and looters who had ripped everything that they could wrest from them, nailed down or not, by the time they were surveyed during the summer of 1917.  Only the state houses, the majority of which had remained for the most part in private hands, avoided the worst of a destructive decade.  Despite the degradation, housing for 7,500 men had been constructed by August 4, only one month after ground was broken and an epic cleaning and building effort began.

A photograph taken on August 12, 1917 from the overgrown and dilapidated Godspeed Pier that was created for the Jamestown Exposition shows the former exposition auditorium at center and its east and west wings (known as buildings N-21 and N-23 today), while the postcard (inset) created for the exposition shows what its creators intended for them to look like for visitors in 1907.  The Hall of History (now Building N-24) did not appear in the postcard, but it lies just to the right of the East Wing in the photograph. (HRNM Collection) 

The interior of the former Auditorium Building of the exposition, seen here on August 4, 1917, looked like this when Rear Adm. Dillingham made it his headquarters, yet its condition was such that many essential administrative functions still had to be conducted in downtown Norfolk until the buildings could be reconditioned. (HRNM Collection) 

ABOVE: The East Wing of the former Jamestown Exposition Auditorium (now known as Building N-21), seen here on July 18, 1917, shows signs not only of neglect but of vandalism.  The words, "Education Building" can barely be seen above its central bay.  BELOW:  The interior of the East Wing at around the same time, where exhibits from colleges and universities across America were displayed during the exposition, including a college diploma awarded in 1760. (HRNM Collection)  

Among the major buildings not constructed as residences, only the main auditorium of the exposition, where Dillingham made his headquarters, and its adjoining wings, along with the former Hall of History next door and the nearby Pennsylvania Building, which would become an officer candidate school, were not too far gone to be repaired.  The Pine Beach Hotel at the northwestern end of Sewells Point was also retained for a number of years, although it too had sustained fairly extensive damage during the interregnum between corporate control and the federal acquisition of the land.


The photographs above and below were taken roughly one month and five days apart from roughly the same vantage point during the fall of 1917, a testament to the furious pace of construction maintained during Rear Adm. Dillingham's tenure as commander.  Note the United States Lifesaving Station still standing in the background at the far left. (HRNM Collection via National Archives and Records Administration)

Just three months, one week, and one day after ground was broken on the first new recruit barracks at Sewells Point, 1,400 apprentice seamen marched north from St. Helena training station in the Berkeley section of Norfolk across the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth, which represented a Rubicon of sorts from whence recruit training in the area would never be the same.  They marched past the northern reaches of the city along Jamestown Boulevard (now known as Hampton Boulevard) to the former Lee's Parade Ground, where Dillingham was waiting for them.  Taciturn to a fault, the admiral said only a few words before the assembled ranks and members of the press, concluding with the only words he was quoted as saying: "The Base has begun to function."  On Armistice Day, just shy of a year and one month after that, around 34,000 enlisted men were training and serving at the new naval operating base, which consisted of the training station, the new Fifth Naval District headquarters, a new naval hospital, and a submarine station.  As of November 27, 1918, 12,693 recruits were undergoing initial training at NOB Hampton Roads, more than three-and-a-half times the capability of St. Helena before the war began. 

The Naval Operating Base Hampton Roads Training Battalion poses for a group photograph on the former Lee's Parade Ground in December 1917.  Note Building N-42, now the main base gymnasium, in the background to the right. (HRNM Collection) 

Memorialized today by the boulevard that bears his name, sweeping past the historic houses of Admirals' Row, as well as the Pennsylvania House, which later became the birthplace of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, Rear Adm. Albert Caldwell Dillingham was a man of vision who could not only clearly articulate that vision, but could then lead thousands to translate that vision into reality.  In a less than a decade, from conception to completion, he revolutionized the training and development of Sailors in Hampton Roads, and helped transform an ossified institution still entrenched in the age of sail into a system most Sailors of today would still recognize. Despite the fact that what we now know as Naval Station Norfolk did not become a truly functioning "operating base" until after the First World War, Dillingham led the effort to make the training station fully operational well before the end of the war, and it remained that way until after the end of the Second World War.

ABOVE: The former Jamestown Exposition Hall of History, probably the most solidly-built structure still standing when the United States Government bought the property in 1917, was nonetheless still pretty beat-up when this picture was taken between 1918 and 1921.  BELOW: The same building today, known as Building N-24, serves as the main base gym of Naval Station Norfolk. (HRNM Collection/ M.C. Farrington) 

How a President's About-Face Would Help Net the World's Largest Navy Base

Local History. World Events.

This phrase has been a part of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum brand for many years, emphasizing that what happens here is connected with historical events, big and small, all around the world.

In June 1914, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and President Woodrow Wilson attend a ceremony at the State Department.  After Bryan decided against running for the presidency in 1912, Daniels, a North Carolina publisher, put his support behind Wilson, who appointed both men into his cabinet.  Daniels would play a key role in expanding and modernizing the Navy before World War I, and in procuring the former Jamestown Exposition Grounds for a naval operating base and training station after war was declared.  (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library via Wikimedia Commons)

For example, thousands of Sailors from the Great White Fleet, which left Hampton Roads in 1907, were spending the second week of January 1909 performing disaster relief operations in Messina, Sicily, after earthquakes and tsunamis killed up to 200,000, including the American consul and his wife.

From disaster relief to myriad Navy-led diplomatic initiatives around the world, Hampton Roads-based ships and Sailors have affected the destinies of nations near and far. But of course no naval operation is as consequential as those conducted to win wars, which is still a core mission of the United States Navy.

World events have also affected Hampton Roads in profound ways, but again none more dramatically than those connected to war.  Although half a world away, seemingly disconnected from the daily lives of those living in Tidewater Virginia, the events of World War I, which by January 1917 had been raging in Europe for nearly two and a half years, would culminate in the establishment of the world’s largest naval base, right here in Hampton Roads.   

Theodore Wool. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

Norfolk-based lawyer Theodore Wool had been campaigning for such a base in Sewells Point, north of the city, ever since the Jamestown Exposition had closed in November 1907.  The exposition had attracted nearly a million visitors to the area from around the world, yet the massive investment had not yielded the financial windfall investors had hoped, and the Jamestown Exposition Company ultimately went bankrupt. Wool and a number of other investors had bought the 474-acre property from the company and almost immediately began lobbying for its purchase by the federal government.  An attempt to move an appropriations bill for the property through the Senate in 1908 foundered, yet Wool soldiered on, taking up residence in one of the state houses built on the exposition property as the effort continued.  

The cover of a rare copy of Wool's pamphlet, Reasons. (HRNM Collection)

In January 1917, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels received Wool and a group of prominent Virginia politicians in Washington to discuss the acquisition of the exposition property.  Wool had probably brought a self-published pamphlet with him, entitled Reasons. Within it he argued, among other things, that Sewells Point's size, location, and existing infrastructure made it a natural choice for a new naval base.  Whether the pamphlet made an impact on Daniels is unclear, but what seems more certain is that a decision made that month in Berlin, not Washington, would ultimately become more decisive in convincing Secretary Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson that the existing infrastructure the Navy possessed in Hampton Roads was insufficient to meet the needs of a nation in a global war.   

The aversion to becoming directly involved in foreign conflicts was a key doctrine in early American foreign policy.  "Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation," said President George Washington in his farewell address. "Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns." Presidents from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams echoed this policy, with Adams declaring that America "goes not abroad, searching for monsters to destroy.”  Woodrow Wilson had begun his presidency nearly a century later with much the same stance towards Europe.  He had been primarily focused upon domestic matters during his first term, and had run for his second term upon an antiwar platform, urging Americans to stay “neutral in fact as well as in name.” One of his key reelection campaign slogans in 1916 was, “He Kept Us Out of War.”  That he was reelected on this platform just a few short months after one of the most destructive attacks ever made by agents of a foreign government on American soil says much about the national mood. 
  
German saboteurs had set explosives at the Black Tom Island munitions depot in northern New Jersey on the morning of July 30, 1916.  The titanic detonation of over 100,000 pounds of TNT and other Britain-bound munitions killed only a handful of people but caused $20 million in damage (estimated at nearly half a billion in today’s dollars), including $100,000 in damage to the Statue of Liberty, caused the evacuation of Ellis Island, and broke windows up to 25 miles away.  The Black Tom explosion was only the most infamous of over 50 attacks conducted under the auspices of a unit of the German army intelligence’s Sektion Politik, operating from cells in New York, New Orleans, and Baltimore, including fires and other damage to at least 37 ships. We now know that the tendrils of of this network also reached into Hampton Roads, and its members confessed to setting fires in Newport News and Norfolk.  Some cell members even staged anthrax attacks upon animals being sent to Europe, the first such biological attacks conducted in America.

Although Wool and his compatriots returned to Norfolk empty-handed, the German high command was to hand Wilson his greatest single reason to change his entire approach to the war in Europe before the month was out.  On January 31, 1917, Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, told Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the pledge his government made the previous May to respect international law with regards to submarine operations was ending.  Starting the following day, any ship, under any flag, within the German-designated "war zone" around Great Britain could be attacked without warning.

The German General Staff had conceived of this shift because they believed that they were within months of choking off the British from vital war material and forcing a negotiated end to the war, on their terms. Their reading of the situation with the British was not altogether inaccurate, but they failed to anticipate the American response to such a move. By resuming unrestricted submarine warfare they were in effect throwing down a gauntlet before Wilson and setting the stage for America's entry into the war. The nation’s credibility rested upon its ability to win that war. America’s Navy would play a crucial role in delivering a war-winning response to the Germans, and procuring the land that would ultimately become the world’s largest naval base would in turn become a crucial part of that effort.