Some years ago, the City of Norfolk had a “Best Kept Secrets” campaign. Its goal was two-fold: to engage local residents and to establish the city as a popular tourist destination, promoting little-known cultural and historical pearls.
Established as a town in 1682, a borough in 1736, and formally incorporated as a city in 1845, there is much to discover and explore in Norfolk, especially some very rare African-American historical gems, that many past Norfolkians indeed wanted to keep a secret.
There was former slave Thomas Bayne, a dentist who became a practitioner on the Underground Railroad and now has a street bearing his name, in the city’s Broad Creek neighborhood. There was Mary Louveste who, during the Civil War, secreted plans, for converting the United States Ship Merrimac into the ironclad Confederate States Ship Virginia, to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. And of course there was Sergeant William Carney, whose heroic actions as a Union soldier were depicted in the movie “Glory,” who was awarded the Medal of Honor…