If you'd care to travel back in history, you won't need any sort of time machine. Your car will do just fine. Take Lafayette Boulevard heading east. Cross Tidewater Drive and you're in Fairmount Park, where World War I is raging on the battlegrounds of France.
A 1904 advertisement in The Norfolk Landmark offered free rides to Fairmount Park to view "25 Choice Lots To Be Given Away" to anyone who agreed to build on them at once.
Other lots sold for between $92 and $224. "Invest Today and Profit by the Jamestown Exposition," the ad claimed, using the upcoming 1907 event as a selling point.
Despite the hoopla, it appears the area didn't hit its stride until almost two decades later, when it began drawing numbers of young World War I veterans who were marrying and looking to settle down.
While The Great War is long past, the names remain.
They include roads representing battles that were major (Verdun and Marne), multichaptered (Bapaume), bloody (Somme) and hard-won (Vimy Ridge).
They honor French towns such as Lyons (a variant spelling of Lyon).
They also pay homage to the war's military leaders, including Pershing (Gen. John J. Pershing, commander-in-chief of U.S. forces) and Kitchener (Lord Horatio H. Kitchener, British war secretary).
Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com
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