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    Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
    Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
    Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
    Ebook185 pages55 minutes

    Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

    By John Warren and Jeff Holland

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    About this ebook

    At its opening in 1964, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was named one of the "Five Wonders of the Modern World" by Reader's Digest magazine.


    It was the culmination of a concerted, decade-long push by a group of men, led by Lucius J. Kellam Jr., an Eastern Shore native and businessman who dreamed of opening up the remote Eastern Shore to the bustling Virginia mainland. This $200-million, 17.6-mile-long series of bridges, tunnels, islands, and trestle in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay - long dismissed as impractical and even impossible - won the attention of the world at its opening. It also brought an abrupt end to the ferry service that was long a cornerstone of the New York-to-Florida "Ocean Highway," shuttling millions of cars between the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateAug 31, 2015
    ISBN9781439653074
    Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
    Author

    John Warren

    USMC Captain John Warren is a former Marine infantry officer and successful entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and former CEO of Lima One Capital. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with his wife, Courtney, and three children.

    Read more from John Warren

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      Book preview

      Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel - John Warren

      book.

      INTRODUCTION

      It must have been something like the notion of man walking on the moon.

      One can imagine Lucius J. Kellam Jr. and his fellow true believers and the sideways glances they encountered when they first talked about crossing 18 miles of rough water with a fixed span where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean.

      It was a fantastic idea at its core, that man could join two points of land so far apart.

      The first English colonists made landfall at Cape Henry, only a few miles from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel’s southern terminus. And as early as colonial days—when packet ships traveled between the lower tip of the Eastern Shore and Norfolk—men dreamed of a swift route linking the Eastern Shore to the Virginia mainland.

      The first suggestion of the route was realized in 1884 by an engineer named A.J. Cassatt, who built the New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad, the NYP&N, which ran 95 miles from Delmar, Delaware, to the boomtown of Cape Charles, Virginia. There, at the Cape Charles Harbor, there were freight, passenger, and railcar ferry operations to the mainland of Virginia.

      It was the NYP&N’s successor, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), that set the chain of events into play that would ultimately lead to the Virginia Ferry Corporation (VFC) and to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

      The PRR was running three ferries—the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia Lee—to Old Point Comfort in Hampton and the Brooke Street Terminal in Norfolk. The three aged vessels were carrying passengers, freight, and some cars. The upstart Peninsula Ferry Company (PFC) saw an opening for automobile ferries.

      From here, one needs a scorecard and perhaps an acronym guide.

      The PFC started running car and passenger ferries between Norfolk and Cape Charles. The PRR, not to be outdone on its home turf, responded by running ferries to Little Creek in Princess Anne County (present-day Virginia Beach). PFC asserted that PRR could not legally run automobile ferries and filed a suit. In August 1930, PRR responded by forming the Virginia Ferry Corporation (VFC). Later that year, PFC was hard at work building a new terminal at Cape Charles. But, by 1933, PFC dropped its suit, accepting substantial stock in VFC. It was now, finally, a profitable venture, and on April 1, 1933, a 26-mile run between Cape Charles and Little Creek began. The numbers of ships and vehicles carried increased steadily.

      Cape Charles, a boomtown 12 miles north of the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, had first seen its fortunes buoyed by the railroad and then by becoming a hub for vehicular ferry service.

      It was so crowded in town that locals walking to the beach had to press against the buildings on Front Street, the main drag. Coming back from the beach, they had to walk in the streets. During the holidays, people would park their cars well outside of the town limits and hike into town.

      It was a melting pot of Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Chinese, and Lithuanians. There were guys with nicknames like Bootie and Sly. When the ferries came in, the local hangouts were bursting at the seams. There were 20 to 30 arrests in a night sometimes.

      In 1935, the Ocean Highway Association, a cooperative that included business owners, the Virginia Ferry Corporation, and the American Automobile Association, was formed to promote north-south travel using US 13 from New York to Norfolk, Virginia, then US 17 to Jacksonville, Florida. Its slogan was from Pines to Palms. In the day before interstates, its main selling point over US 1 was Avoid all the traffic in Philadelphia and Washington. Of course, the Ocean Highway was heavily dependent on the Cape Charles ferries.

      During World War II, Cape Charles was busier than ever, with PRR steamers carrying railcars headed to Norfolk and VFC ferries occupying its harbor.

      It is hard to imagine anyone was anxious to see an end come to the romance of the ferry days, of meandering yet restful 90-minute boat trips across the Chesapeake Bay. The world’s champion pinch-penny cruise, one writer called it.

      But, by 1953, change was afoot. VFC shifted all passenger and vehicle traffic from Cape Charles to near the southern terminus of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, in Kiptopeke. There were five vessels handling an average of 1,800 cars and 7,000 passengers on a daily basis, and the numbers were climbing.

      In 1954, the Chesapeake Bay Ferry District was created by the state with the intent of restoring Cape Charles–Old Point Comfort ferry service. On May 17, 1956, the VFC ceased to exist; the Chesapeake Bay Ferry District bought the company for $13 million. With Hampton Roads growing and increased East Coast travel and interstate commerce, the Little Creek ferry system quickly became the busiest in the world. Its fleet of vessels was making 90 one-way crossings per day. But it could not keep up with the crossing demand.

      The ferry district’s true charge was soon enough obvious. It would not be restarting ferry service between Cape Charles and Old Point Comfort. The case had long been building for a different solution, one long thought impractical, even unimaginable.

      In 1956, the Virginia General Assembly cracked the door open just wide enough for Lucius J. Kellam Jr. and his army of true believers. It passed legislation for an engineering study, effectively challenging Kellam and his ferry district to prove the fixed crossing was feasible.

      It was the opportunity Kellam—the ferry commission chairman—had been biding his time for since at least since 1950, when the Bay Bridge opened, linking the eastern and western shores of Maryland.

      When men dared to dream of a span crossing the Chesapeake Bay, if the sheer scope of the ambition did not stop such talk, if the

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