Providing a beautiful Park full of diversity was a long-standing goal.

Well…probably not the kind of Amazons you’re thinking about, these were the Amazon-class steam screw sloop’s HMS Daphne, Dryad and Nymph of the Royal Navy and the “hunt” occurred off the East Coast of Africa as they worked to suppress the African slave trade.

By mid-September 1918, the first cases of the Spanish Flu were reported, impacting the soldiers, sailors, and workers coming into the Hampton Roads community to support the war effort. Bases and ships had to be built, requiring more workers than Hampton Roads had ever seen before.

In less than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, the city of Newport News was internationally known as a shipbuilding center with excellent port facilities.

The title of this work, “Marine Totem with Osprey Nest”, carries a reverence. The idea of a totem invokes a spirituality, rooted in the indigenous belief of humankind’s kinship with nature. More secularly, this concept describes something that acts as a respected symbol.

The anchor, a large Old Plan kedge anchor, had been recovered from the bottom of the Patuxent River near Point Patience, Maryland in 1959 by US Navy divers from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory Test Facility. Luckily, despite spending 145 years underwater, the anchor was in fairly pristine condition and retained many of its identifying marks.

The Union needed to open the river to the sea to maintain the commerce of the Midwest. This contest along the ‘father of all rivers’ was a tremendous struggle. Victory would be achieved with new and improved ship designs and industrial superiority.

Today is International Women’s Day! Recently, I learned the stories of a few amazing women in maritime history and I thought today would be a perfect day to introduce them to you.

What do a Battleship, 1950, mud, high tides, a Hudson River Ferry, a T-shirt, and a UFO all have in common?