Dry Bridge Press

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This is Ivy, “you live in Dry Bridge” my after-school sitter Ms. Susan Maupin confirmed. Ms. Maupin was one of three memorable elders who became my preschool and after school sitters. Elders in those days were prime candidates. They were retired, trustworthy and charged minimal fees for adult supervision. Indeed, my family live west of Ivy Depot and south of Morgantown Road. Dry Bridge Road route 708 was known for the timber and tar bridge that rattled and shook under daily traffic and the steepening climb that peaked at a rollercoaster run on Gillums Ridge sighting Peacock Hill, then a new development in the 1970s.                                                  

Ms. Susan, a widow of two years was older than my grandparents, whom she seemed to know very well from that far end of North Western Albemarle County. She was of the Ivory-Gross family from Turner Mountain in North Ivy, marrying Vernon Maupin and moving to Morgantown Road in what was then Ivy Depot.                                                                            

Her home was walking distance from Mt. Cavalry Church, the old Ivy Cemetery and Virginia L. Murray Elementary.                                          

She was quite the grand dame in manner, Sunday hats, scarves, and shoes when occasion warranted but still worked like ladies of old. She washed her clothes with vigor on a washboard and cooked masterfully on a wood stove. The house was heated with coal during the winter, and she had no problems handling a coal shovel. I was even more fascinated when I discovered the two-story coal pile just above downtown Charlottesville and related it to Ms. Susan’s fuel source.                                                            

I stayed after school under her care from age 7 to 9, 2nd to 4th grade. She also had school-aged grandchildren my age under her care. But I was an aspiring baseball player, and they were aspiring majorettes. So, I was one of the few boys aged nine to eighteen capable of making a high fly centerfield catch and turning a cartwheel.                                                                                    

One day my parents were late, and I stayed with Ms. Susan into the supper hour. She was fine with that because though she was visited daily by her own children living in the community, she was usually alone in the evenings. It was not a question that I would have supper with her that evening, nor was it a formality.                                                                          

Ms. Susan’s evenings before sunset were for inspecting the garden, the flower beds, and cleaning up the yard. After supper she urged me to follow her on her evening rounds about the property. It was a small parcel with a well maintained back and front yard. We stopped at the garden where she forecasted what her plantings might yield later that summer. But the yard was not where she chose to focus her attention that evening. From the shed Ms. Susan retrieved a small wheelbarrow, and we were soon walking toward the tree line of the property. Everyone living on Morgantown Road has a parcel with the house site and a patch of forest before a regulated set back to the Buckingham Branch railroad.                                                                                                    

Reasons for our walk into the thicket, maybe general cleanup, a search for wildflowers, and mint that grew all over the woods of Ivy? None of my guesses proved correct, but a few more paces and the questions were answered. Ms. Susan stopped and began loading the wheelbarrow with shot put sized cannon balls—yes, cannon balls.                                                                                       

By nine years of age, I had two years of Virginia History, the Revolutionary War and a too brief overview of the Civil War. Neither my teachers nor I knew at the time that history also happened in the path of the school building. No matter, my imagination went wild. Cannon ball, cannons, soldiers—in Ivy when? Today I’d take photos from all angles and groupings, then I would contact the DAR, the University. Not to mention my own compelling written piece on the discovery.                                              

But it was 1976 and so, I just helped Ms. Susan load this ancient ammunition origin unknown into the wheelbarrow and we made our way back to the house. I think I remember her putting them in the shed—where other same sized shot lay from a previous haul.                                          

Did Ms. Susan discover discarded ammo from a 19thcentury Confederate encampment? Union General Phillip Sheridan’s Cavalry traveled through Ivy near the end of the Civil War, assigning the demolition of track, trestle and Ivy depot to George Armstrong Custer a day behind his commander.                         

Could Custer have lightened the cavalry's load of ammunition           

on the way toward Charlottesville?                                                                               

Strangely, I never discussed the historic finding with anyone and though this was not my last episode with Ms. Susan I was on my own by the Fall of 1976 I was destined to become a Gen-X latchkey kid and saw Ms. Susan infrequently thereafter. It was still a great find, a lasting memory, and maybe a better story..                                                                                     

Play ball! 

Here's our old friend and neighbor John Armstead standing near the first base line on Ivy Diamond aka Armstead Hill.                           

You could hear the umpire’s call and fan-based chorus like response from our front yard on Dry Bridge Road. It was not an acoustical wonder since the echoing command came from the community ball diamond a good strong baseball toss two parcels away on Armstead Hill, the Ivy Eagles ball field. The Armstead's were one of Ivy-Dry Bridge's oldest families, the post emancipation Armsteads came to Ivy Depot sometime at the beginning of the twentieth century from the nearby Owensville community minutes north.                                                                                                      

  With one command there was a change in the atmosphere so serene and quiet, thence alive with sounds decibels higher after the first pitch. The shouts of encouragement were audible but the celebratory shouts following a home run blast, dazzling catch, or scoring run reached a crescendo that came right into the living room. Live and in person, it was often hard to hear the person next you. “We hoped the exaltation was in favor of the Ivy team if we were not onsite witnessing the exploits.                                      

You always wanted to be there at the game, but I recall once standing at the edge of the yard with my big brother straining to follow the game action via fan frenzy and exuberance. This was after church and before Sunday dinner.                                         

No exact date as to when the Ivy Eagles began play—sometime in the 1930s by my researched compiled in Sunday Coming, Black Baseball in Virginia. The team was made up of the Armstead, Waller, and Ivory families and remained so through the early 1970s. 

The Eagles did not always play on Armstead Hill. Armstead Hill was reserved for family celebrations, summer picnics, and children’s recreation field. The team played on Dry Bridge Road on a strip of land formerly part of one of Ivy’s Orchards and since the late 1970s the subdivision Country View. That was in the late 1960s when John Armstead my father’s friend from high school talked him into oiling up his glove and playing for the Eagles. We did not yet live in Ivy, but my parents were building and were prospective residents. Dad played second base on the team for a few seasons. The Ivy eagles were at the bottom of the standings all those seasons and a couple of seasons more, but they seemed to attract as much of a crowd as the better winning teams, those teams traveled well?               

Win or lose, baseball was a long-standing community event on Dry Bridge and in nearly all of Albemarle’s Black communities into the 1970s. West, Crozet’s Allstars, Greenwood’s Hawks, South, Covesville’s Tigers, South Garden’s Tigers, Esmont’s Giants, East, countless Charlottesville teams and the Barboursville’s Giants. I had relatives on other community teams, and it was even more exciting when their teams came to play against Ivy. My uncles often changed into their uniforms at our house and then returned for dinner at the game’s conclusion.                                                 

There were also teams in the outlying counties, Nelson, Augusta, Rockingham, Orange, Madison, and Fluvanna. None of the visiting teams ever forgot Armstead Hill and the Ivy Eagles, not because the Eagles were formidable opponents but because the ballfield was typical of rural black baseball diamonds.                             

Armstead Hill might have been fine for a picnic but laid out in a diamond pattern presented challenges. The catcher could not see the centerfielder and the right fielder could not see the left fielder, but they played on.                                                                                 

When dad quit the team, we took in the games on Sunday afternoons cheering on a younger lineup of Eagles. Gametime occurred at the hottest point of those summer afternoons. We did not have air conditioning until my teen years, so it was just as comfortable outdoors as it was inside our brick house. 

During the short walk on 708 towards the diamond it was usual to see players in uniform hustling across the road from their homes and taking the ballplayers path through the woods to the field. 

This was our Field of Dreams preceding the celebrated 1989 movie. No cornfield just tall pine trees and brier patches for those chasing down balls out of the field of play. Ivy did not have any type of bleachers, fans brought out their lawn chairs if they wanted a seat. I always stood behind the batter’s box focused on the action at the plate and infield, strikeouts, hard hit home runs, home plate collisions.                                                                                         

When the Ivy Eagles won, we were on cloud nine for the rest of the week, a rare occurrence. But no matter, not many seven-year-olds saw baseball played in their neighborhood by guys who though not professional gave a professional effort. The games ended by the time I was out of elementary school, too much noise in the neighborhood that was slowly evolving, progressing toward a suburban status.                                                                                

Team manager John Armstead retired passing along the equipment bag, and the younger lineup looked for a new field outside Dry Bridge. Armstead Hill remained property of the Armstead family until 2008. Tall pines still mark the perimeter that used to be the outfield, even a recognizable bump of earth where the pitcher’s mound used to be, but there is now a house on the third base line. Standing at the entrance to Country View Ln looking north the scenery is the same, as quiet as it was fifty years ago, though in the right frame of mind in the moment the memories invade and you’re waiting for the echoes…Play ball!                                                          

My brother and I posed in front of the side of our old brick house in Dry Bridge circa 1971. We never used the front door nor did family and close friends. If anyone knocked at the front door—they were strangers. I never asked my parents if building with brick their only consideration for home structure design, but of course post-World War II brick homes were prevalent on the east coast United States.                                                                                       

The contractor-builder Riddle chose Roanoke based Webster Brick in Somerset Orange County Virginia as the supplier. Old ads for Webster Brick touted the sales of Famous Webster Brick with over one hundred designs available. As the story goes, Webster plants were           established in North Carolina, Roanoke and Suffolk Virginia but   Webster officials traveling through the eastern part of Virginia by chance heard there might be shale in Orange County Virginia and thus purchased land in Somerset in 1957, then drilled to establish a shale pit, with the plant operating fully by 1960.                                   

Brick styled homes in Charlottesville, Albemarle of that era were rust or red colored common for building everything from        government establishments, schools, and homes. However, Webster Brick also offered a special brick design made throughout the year. According to former Webster Brick employee Robert Anthony of Barboursville who started working at Webster Brick while still in high school. I didn’t go out for any sports, I wanted a car, so I started working at Webster Brick in the afternoon after school. Anthony was soon on the lead brick making crew with his cousin Charles Buddy Davis. Robert and Buddy set a company record making 34,000 bricks in a long sweltering workday.                        

Robert left Webster Brick in the early eighties as a crew supervisor, but 40 years later recalls much of the duties and brick making process vividly. Bricks came down the conveyor by the hundreds and bricks with flaws or imperfections were placed aside on pallets in designated stacks to be redesigned as “New Used brick.” 

The mix design for New Used required cement paint placed by hand. The resulting product produced a lighter flecked colored brick design, also referred to as “colonial” style. The bricks were the same size as any other but whereas the other designed red brick is smooth to the touch, this New Used brick was textured—rough, owing to the cement paint? Despite the textured design the brick appeared to weather as well as any other design maintaining the same multi-tone pattern decades later.                                       

In Albemarle County we never saw another home or structure with that brick façade. Thus far by my count there appears to be only three left, all of them along route 33 in Orange County. Anthony recalls that all the homes remaining displaying the New Used Brick design were owned by former Webster Brick employees who lived within five miles or less from the former Webster Brick plant.

Webster Brick ceased operations in 1989, purchased by a foreign company. A sparse number of the original designs still appear on instore samples sold by various distributors and suppliers in Virginia, notably Skyline Brick and vendor Continental Brick. 

I have to say I never lost my Webster Brick connection as enough Webster Brick was salvaged to build my fireplace and hearth. Not New Used Brick but Webster Brick, nonetheless.