What's in a name? | Smithfield's Joe White's Bottom

Joe White's Bottom is not what it used to be.

A coin laundry has replaced a restaurant, and a parking lot stretches over the place where a meat packing plant once sat. You can't get your horse shoes repaired here anymore, or buy wild game, and the field that hosted the traveling circus is just a field now, with roads that roll out beyond it.

You won't find Joe White's Bottom on a map, or even a sign, but this is most definitely it, a barber named Ben Seaborne said as he trimmed the beard of a customer this week. He was not sure how the west end of Main Street got its name, only that people have called it that for years and years.

"There was a guy named Joe White, and he fell down in the bottom," offered Ricky Jake, who waited on a trim.

Seaborne shook his head. The lady in the house next door would know, but she just moved to a nursing home, he said.

"I'm a little younger than that generation," he said.

So is John Brayshaw, a volunteer at the Isle of Wight Museum. He can tell you exactly where it is, though, and not everybody can these days.

Brayshaw pulled out a book called "Historical Notes on Isle of Wight County." Maybe that would hold a clue.

It did - one reference to a black man named Joe White who helped found Little Zion Baptist Church in 1879. "He probably owned something down there," Brayshaw said. "Sold crabs. Who knows?"

Judy Winslow, the county's director of tourism, thinks it is an interesting name, and a little bit funny-sounding. Joe White indeed owned an establishment down there - the "bottom" of town in the early part of the 20th century, she said.

Winslow wasn't sure what he sold.

"It was the name of it before I was born," said James Chapman, an 82-year-old funeral home owner who served as Smithfield's first black mayor.

Chapman was raised right around here and never left.

"He ought to know," said Jake, the man who waited in the barbershop this week. "He buried everybody from Joe White's Bottom."

After some thought, Chapman said: "Blacks had stores here. There were businesses all along here."

He pointed to a gray building one lot over from Seaborne's Barber Shop.

"It used to be a horse shoe repair shop," he said. "They also sold wild game. That was Joe White."

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5555, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com