My first real job was delivering newspapers in Merrimac Shores in Hampton. The Herbert House and Blackbeard’s Point as described in Blackbeard’s Lost Head are both located within the Merrimac Shores neighborhood.
Delivering papers was a surprisingly lucrative job. I delivered on a Heavy-duty Schwinn bicycle. It was a stout and fast machine allowing me to breeze through my route in less than an hour.
However, Sundays I remember were tough.
Each paper on Sunday was at least a pound and a half, full of ads and comics and a weekly magazine. Each had the texture of a folded phone book. I tried using my Buick Skylark but decided flinging papers from the Schwinn was the fastest way to go. My strategy was to divide my papers into canvas bags, then strategically stow the filled bags off along my route, picking up a bundle just as my bike basket ran out or low.
One of the spots I would cache a bundle of Sunday papers was the Little England Chapel on the corner of Kecoughtan Road and Ivy Home Road.
I knew nothing about the chapel, except that it looked like it belonged in a storybook and was occupied on Sundays by a small group of parishioners who drove huge cars. The church itself was small, not even fifteen hundred square feet I would guess. It was situated at an intersection that I passed through daily on my way to Phoebus High School, Coliseum Mall and all points in between. It was a curious place, but this young man had more important things on his teenage mind. I carried my disinterest for decades.
But then I researched Blackbeard’s Lost Head and came across a man by the name of George Clinton Rowe, a man unknown to many people except a small but dedicated group of Hamptonians intent on preserving Black history. Which is a shame, really. George Clinton Rowe was an extraordinary man.
It was Mr. Rowe who spearheaded the building of the Little England Chapel.
Mr. Rowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1853. In his younger years, George Rowe served as a printing apprentice for the newspaper Litchfield Enquirer (1870-73) where he earned his “certificate of trade.” He was a known amateur naturalist who gathered a respected collection of rocks, birds’ eggs and reptiles that he donated to the Litchfield school system for use in biology classes. In 1876, he left Connecticut and took a job at non-other than Hampton Normal School (yet another name for Hampton University. Normal School in those days meant school for training teachers). His career stint at Hampton Normal was laying out and printing (beautifully, I might add) several newsletters and journals for the university.
But Mr. Rowe felt a higher calling and started teaching Sunday school at his home near the university which became so popular that the group moved to an “outdoor arbor” at the spot of today’s chapel. The arbor provided shade, but with a congregation now over 500, Mr. Rowe decided it was time to build a proper building. He secured the land from a local landowner and funding from General Armstrong, a man you can read about in another blog. He organized a work party consisting of volunteers from the surrounding Newtown community and students from Hampton University. The building was finished in 1878. The chapel served as a place for Sunday school but also served as a meeting place for the growing Black community of Newtown. An addition was constructed on to the building for sewing classes taught by Hampton University students.
In the years following construction of the building, the Little England Chapel was called simply “the Chapel” or the “Sunday school” and some archived documents refer to it as “The Ocean Cottage Sunday School.” Today, the building is known simply as the “Little England Chapel” and was ceremoniously included on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
Mr. Rowe went on to become a minister at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Charleston, SC. While there, he published poems and is referred to in James T. Haley’s Afro-American Encyclopedia as the “Palmetto Poet“, a reference to South Carolina’s state tree. Here are his published poetry books:
“Thoughts in Verse” (1887)
“Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1890)
“Our Heroes: Patriotic Poems on Men, Women, and sayings of the Negro race”
Today, whenever I visit family, I pass the Little England Chapel and while I still associated it with my job delivering newspapers, I now know something else. The Little England Chapel was founded by George Clinton Rowe, a true renaissance man, dedicated to his profession, his faith and his community.
