What's in a name? | Fentress, Chesapeake

It has gained notoriety as a focal point in the debate over the future of naval aviation in Hampton Roads, but the Fentress section of Chesapeake has a long history that has little to do with the military.

The area along Centerville Turnpike, just south of the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, owes its name to Jerome Fentress, a member of a farming family that owned and worked land there in the 1800s - and perhaps earlier.

Most residents then probably called the area Centreville, said local historian Raymond L. Harper, but it took on the Fentress name after 1888, when a post office branch was opened in a small grocery store near what is now the intersection of Centerville Turnpike and Fentress Road.

Jerome Fentress owned and ran the store and was named postmaster.

Because the Centreville name already had been assigned to a post office in northern Virginia, the new office was named for him, Harper writes in his new book, "A History of Chesapeake, Virginia."

Through the 1890s and the first part of the 20th century, a small community, known as Fentress Village, grew around the post office, Harper said. The nearby canal and a rail line gave farmers a way to get their products to market and helped the area grow, but it declined rapidly during the Great Depression as the Norfolk and Southern Railroad went bankrupt.

The Navy arrived in 1943, buying a large parcel east of Centerville Turnpike to build a satellite airfield for the Norfolk naval station. By the following year, nearly 1,400 people were stationed at the field, which was home to several squadrons of FM Wildcat and TBM Avenger fighters, according to a Web site run by aircraft enthusiast Paul Freeman.

The field had four 2,500-foot runways then, and was all but shut down soon after World War II ended in 1945. Several years later, on land adjoining the original site, the Navy built an 8,000-foot runway that is still used as a prac-tice landing strip by fighters based at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.

Most of the land south of the airstrip remains agricultural, but the Navy says that the lights of growing suburban neighborhoods to the north and west interfere with the nighttime training that its pilots need. The nearby development and complaints from residents about jet noise are driving the service in an effort, fruitless so far, to build another outlying field in a darker and more remote location that's still convenient to Oceana.

The noise disputes are nothing new, said Betty Fentress Grissom, Jerome Fentress' great-niece. She and her husband, retired Chesapeake Judge Preston Grissom, recall being awakened by jets when they lived in Fentress in 1961-62.

In those days, they said, a simple phone call to the base would get controllers to re-route the planes and allow them to soothe their children back to sleep.

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com