Photo By Max Lonzanida | A headstone marks the location of Vernon Eskridge. Eskridge was a US Navy Chaplain...... read more read more
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On September 11, 1855, 146 years before 9/11/2001, a local member of the clergy perished while rendering aid and providing comfort to the afflicted. In the midst of a devastating Yellow Fever outbreak that plagued Hampton Roads, history recorded the fateful end on a gravesite at the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Portsmouth, Virginia with the following inscription:
Vernon Eskridge
Chaplain, USS Cumberland 1852-1855
US Navy
10-26-1801 to 09-11-1855
I first learned of the gravesite while on a tour of the grounds with Barbara Early. Barbara is the President of the non-profit Cedar Grove Cemetery Foundation. The 5.3-acre cemetery contains over 4000 graves dating back to the 1700s, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its tucked away within view of the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center, the U.S. Navy's oldest continuously operating naval hospital.
Chaplain Vernon Eskridge served aboard the USS Cumberland, a wooden hulled sailing vessel that dueled with the CSS Virginia during the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862. Chaplain Eskridge’s history and his path to becoming the ship’s Chaplain lies in archived history, and hence the dots in a historical constellation to connect.
Eskridge was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia in 1801. He lost his father, Burlitt Eskridge when he was twelve, which necessitated him to enter the workforce as a carpenter. History indicates that Eskridge’s life was steeped in heartache. In August 1824, he married Mary Bourke of Essex County, Virginia. The couple had a child together, but the marriage would end tragically. Two years later, Mary died of a sudden illness; and so did their child. Five years later, in 1829, he married again to Mary Ann McLin. While he was away attending to his Methodist Circuit, Mary became suddenly ill. Records indicate that he rushed home, just hours before she slipped into her final slumber and perished.
By 1831, Eskridge had moved to Portsmouth; and he was ordained in the Methodist Church at Dinwiddie United Methodist Church (now Monumental United Methodist Church). Years later, Monumental UMC was recognized by the Virginia Legislature in 2002 via joint resolution No. 368. An excerpt from the resolution indicates the following:
"Whereas, thus began the history of what would become Monumental United Methodist church, the oldest Methodist congregation in the nation and the oldest in the south. Whereas during the Yellow Fever outbreak that struck Portsmouth in 1855, the Reverend Vernon Eskridge, a Navy Chaplain, and former minister of Monumental UMC, remained in the City to tend to the sick, a heroic action that would cost him his life."
In 1832, he married for the third and final time to Sarah A. Hope of Hampton Virginia. It was during this time that he tended to the sick during a cholera outbreak that struck Portsmouth. It was also this time in Portsmouth that he started to forge a connection with the US Navy. In 1841 and 1842, records indicate that Eskridge took up the pulpit at an old school house at Gosport Navy Yard (now Norfolk Naval Shipyard). In fact, in 1841, he was listed as Chaplain at Gosport Navy Yard when he performed a marriage for George Teamoh, a former slave that secured his freedom, to a Sallie H, an enslaved woman. Teamoh would later become a Virginia State Senator decades later. During his time in the Senate, Teamoh and other elected officials successfully secured an eight-hour work day for Navy Yard workers.
In 1851, Eskridge applied for an accepted an appointment as a Chaplain in the US Navy. Records indicate that only two Chaplains were appointed that year; Orville Dewey, a Unitarian, and Vernon Eskridge, a Methodist. In March 1851, he was ordered to the USS Cumberland, which at the time was fitting out for a cruise to the Mediterranean. The Cumberland was the flagship of the Mediterranean squadron from 1852-1855, when Eskridge served as Chaplain. While aboard the Cumberland, Eskridge engaged in his clergy work with great zeal, and is credited with being the first US Navy chaplain to establish a church organization aboard a ship. Towards the end of the cruise, on August 12, 1854, he performed a marriage aboard for Lt. J. Blakely and Ms. Edwina H., the third daughter of Commander Stringham.
That marriage was the last that he performed, as he would perish some thirteen months later. Eskridge disembarked the USS Cumberland in 1855 after her return home, and his fate loomed in the City of Portsmouth where he resided. Records indicate that on June 7, 1855, the steamer Ben Franklin arrived in Hampton Roads from the Virgin Islands; an area where Yellow Fever was rampant. The ship was quarantined, and her captain was given strict orders forbidding him to pump the ship’s bilges. That order was disobeyed, and the ship’s bilges were dumped and she docked at Gosport Navy Yard. It was there that members of the ship’s crew exhibited symptoms of Yellow Fever, and it was there that it spread rampantly.
Within a few months, thousands of Portsmouth and Norfolk residents would fall victim to this viral disease. Residents who had the means to do so fled to outlying counties. Governor Wise opened up his estate on the Eastern Shore for those fleeing the epidemic, and even had temporary dwellings set up to house the influx. While panicked residents fled, there are humanitarian accounts of those who arrived to help. Upon learning of the outbreak, the Sisters of the Daughters of Charity arrived from Maryland to tend to the afflicted in Norfolk. The group used the home of a wealthy patron, Anne Plume Behan Herron to treat the afflicted. Herron fell victim to the outbreak in September 1855, and left her house and estate to the Sisters. Records would later record Herron’s home as the first public hospital in Norfolk. That estate would later become St. Vincent DePaul Hospital a year later.
Across the Elizabeth River, Portsmouth Naval Hospital opened its doors to civilians for the first time to treat those afflicted with Yellow Fever. The hospital is the nation’s oldest naval hospital; construction commenced on April 2, 1827 and it saw its first patents in 1830. In 1855, over 600 civilians afflicted with Yellow Fever were treated at the hospital in what is recorded as its first humanitarian effort. On the streets of Portsmouth, Yellow Fever affected scores of residents and decimated nearly ten percent of the population. That did not stop Eskridge from tending to the spiritual and medical needs of the afflicted; and it did not make him immune to the disease itself. Records indicate that he showed symptoms of Yellow Fever on Tuesday, September 4, 1855. Six days later, on September 10, 1855 he became delirious and was bedridden. By the morning of September 11, 1855, Chaplain Eskridge, at 55 years old, succumbed to the epidemic that claimed the lives of thousands in the region; a full 146 years before the fateful attacks of September 11, 2001.
| Date Taken: | 07.24.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 07.24.2018 18:50 |
| Story ID: | 285600 |
| Location: | NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 360 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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