dition, a dispute over business led to James and Susan’s migration upriver.
There, by the Mattaponi shore opposite West Point, James opened his own
store, and the couple built a big house (for the time): two wood-framed
stories, two rooms wide and two deep, with railed front porches up and
down and a cookhouse out back, at the edge of the Pamunkey’s tidal marsh.
Their son, Walton Leon, was born there in ; a daughter born earlier did
not thrive. The girl’s tragic early death notwithstanding, James and Susan’s
transplantation was luckily timed.
In a pair of ambitious Philadelphia shippers purchased the remains
and right-of-way of the ruined railroad, began its rebuilding, and assembled
a holding company they named the Richmond & West Point Terminal Rail-
way & Warehouse Company. The organization included traffic agreements
with the Richmond & Danville Railroad and the organizers’ own Chesa-
peake ship line. In a relatively short time the Richmond & Danville con-
nection drew on almost , miles of rails stretching deep into the cotton
South, routing thousands of bales northward to Richmond, then to Chesa-
peake Bay via West Point. Main Street, the central of the town’s three long
concourses that were parallel to the Mattaponi and Pamunkey, soon be-
came a bustling and sturdy brick downtown of stores, offices, newspapers
and printing plants, restaurants, and hotels, extending from the wharf-
and warehouse-crowded York waterfront northwestward about five blocks.
Thereafter Main Street was (and remains today) the most stylish residen-
tial stretch of the town. A three-story brick Masonic Hall, with peaked tower
alongside, went up in . ( James Kirby served as Grand Master, as his son
did later.) There were also public schools for white and black children and,
over the decades, a variety of private academies usually divided by gender
as well as color. In a -room, four-story, corner-towered hotel, the
Terminal, went up on the York waterfront. Adjacent to the grand hotel were
Beach Park and a fine boardwalk. West Point, already a great transport cen-
ter, became a saltwater resort, too, attracting Richmonders especially, for
weekends and longer excursions of swimming, fishing, promenading, and
dining well.
Walton Leon Kirby worked for the Richmond & West Point Terminal as
a young man, zestfully rolling back and forth between the capital and his
birthplace and proudly acquiring a railroad man’s big pocket watch with
chain. James Kirby died in , the same year that Lewis Puller, later called
‘‘Chesty’’ as a Marine Corps officer and commander in four wars, was born
in West Point. By this time the Richmond & West Point Terminal was no
more. The Philadelphia shipping magnates, like so many local and regional