News & Media
September 30, 2010
Lohmann: In effort to save smokestack, Reedville preserves heritage
REEDVILLE The venerable smokestack, once part of a fish processing plant and long a beacon for boat captains, is perhaps Reedville's most iconic structure, a towering monument to the industry that built this town.
It has weathered dozens of hurricanes, as well as fires and who-knows-what-else thrown at it over the past century at its position near the Chesapeake Bay. But when lightning scored a direct hit on the crumbling stack in early August and was followed by a violent windstorm a few days later, bricks around the top of the tower tumbled into Cockrell's Creek, and those fighting to save this tall piece of history wondered if the battle was lost.
"We were a month away from starting restoration," said Monty Deihl, general manager of Omega Protein, the company that owns the long-dormant stack and a member of the Save The Stack committee, "and we were afraid . . . that something was going to happen and it was going to crash the effort."
Said Blaine Altaffer, chairman of the committee and lifelong resident of Reedville, "I think Mother Nature was saying, 'Don't wait.'"
They didn't. I made the pleasant drive to Reedville on Tuesday afternoon to see how the restoration work was coming on the 130-foot-tall stack that was built in 1902. Since Labor Day weekend, a repair crew has been replacing bricks, fixing mortar and installing stainless-steel reinforcing bands.
The work is wrapping up at a cost of more than $230,000, which has been raised in a joint effort of residents and Omega Protein, which kicked in $50,000 and will lease the stack and the land it stands on to the community for $1 a year. In addition to writing checks, residents have sold T-shirts and lemonade and even put on a music festival (Woodstack) that might become an annual event. The campaign remains about $40,000 short, so contributions are welcome.
The stack is the last of numerous stacks once scattered about the landscape of this part of the Northern Neck. Reedville is the town where U.S. 360 ends on the eastern edge of Northumberland County, and is named for Elijah Reed, a New England sea captain who established the menhaden-fishing industry in the late 1800s. A small, oily fish not fit for human consumption but useful for other purposes, menhaden became a valuable commodity that made Reedville into what at one time was known as the wealthiest town in America per capita. Reedville's so-called Millionaires' Row, Victorian mansions built by ship captains and factory owners along Main Street, are evidence of that bygone era.
The menhaden industry is not what it once was, and most of the factories are gone, but Omega Protein still fishes and processes menhaden -- for aquaculture, livestock feeds and pet foods, and to extract the oil for use in foods we eat -- to the point that Reedville remains one of the nation's leading fishing ports.
The stack is the first thing you notice as you come off the bay into Cockrell's Creek. OK, maybe not the first, if you count the pungent aroma that has long been a distinctive characteristic of this area. But it's not as strong as it once was, said Deihl, who grew up here and comes from a long line of sea captains. Omega now uses an airless drying system that eliminates the need for venting, although Deihl acknowledged that "anytime you have 10 million fish sitting on boats at your dock at one time, there's going to be a fishy smell."
Deihl and I walked to the stack, which stands on a slender, low-lying finger of land called Point Pleasant that juts into Cockrell's Creek. Small waves from high tide lapped near our feet. Funny thing about the stack: It apparently hasn't been used for more than 90 years since a fire destroyed the adjoining plant, but it lends an air of majesty that townspeople felt important enough to save.
"All of us could not imagine coming around the point and not seeing the stack," said Altaffer, who has heard his 96-year-old retired fishing boat captain father say his father used the stack as a visual when setting his pound nets in the bay. "A few of us refer to it as our Statue of Liberty."
The project will include an exhibit on the stack's history at the Reedville Fishermen's Museum and a historic marker to be placed at the stack itself, which will not be publicly accessible but can be viewed up close by passing boats. A second phase calls for the shoreline around the stack to be beefed up and beautified.
A fringe benefit of the project has been the coming together of Reedville's two primary segments of its population: those whose families go deep into the past and those who've come to retire or spend their weekends and summers here.
"This is a project that both . . . have really identified as, we really need to maintain some piece of the heritage of this old industry," Deihl said. "It's been a very good effort between a lot of different types of people."