Volunteers at Fort Monroe in Hampton are breathing new life into a little piece of local history.
Since 2019, Greg Siegel and others have been renovating an old streetcar that used to run through Peninsula cities like Newport News and Hampton in the early 1900s.
“We had over 40 streetcars that ran 60 miles total out of all the trackage that are have between Hampton and Newport News,” Siegel said.
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During World War 2, old streetcars were melted down for the war effort. The popularity of buses was also growing, and streetcars were being phased out.
So, if they weren’t melted down, they were sold for cheap housing. One of those streetcars, dubbed Streetcar 390, was bought for cheap housing by York county resident John Anderson in 1946.
The Anderson Family turned it into a home which they occupied for about 30 years. From there, it was acquired by the Baltimore Streetcar Museum. However, in 2013, the museum offered to give the car to the City of Hampton if the city could promise to renovate it.