railroaders, lost control of their network during the panic of . J. P. Mor-
gan, New York financier and merger maker, melded the terminal complex
into the new Southern Railway System. West Point as cotton shipper sur-
vived only four years under the Southern’s regime. In the railway’s
directors moved its seaport terminal to Portsmouth, Virginia, which had
deeper water, better connections to more transport vessels, and excellent
direct rail connections not only with Richmond but with the South Atlan-
tic’s coastal plain. Suddenly, then, West Point was reduced to a seasonal
tourist destination and, again, a minor Chesapeake port and fishery.
Then in —the year Walton Leon married—much of downtown West
Point was destroyed by fire. The Terminal Hotel was spared, as was the Kirby
house, but residents of the town’s midsection were rendered homeless.
For all its relative wealth, the little city had been ill prepared for the scourge
of fire. After the blaze (its origin still unexplained) was under way, men and
women formed bucket lines. A woman saved one house by covering it with
soaked blankets and quilts. The city of Richmond quickly responded with
the loan of a steam pumper, but West Point had only brackish marsh water
to feed the boiler and hose, so much of the town’s center was consumed.
This was in May. In August, naturally, the town’s voters approved the sale
of bonds to erect a water tower, apparently the first in West Point’s con-
siderable experience. Townsmen also, and at last, organized a volunteer fire
company. Walton Leon was chief in . By this time he had left the rail-
road’s employ and, with a partner, had begun a sign-painting business. He
was already father of a baby girl, and by he and his wife were parents
of three sons as well. Supporting such a family was probably not easy, for
by West Point was clearly in decline again. One of its banks had failed
after the great fire. The Terminal’s occupancy rate began to wane, too, as
the town and the York fell out of fashion. Population declined proportion-
ately, perhaps as much as one-third, by about , when a new industry
and new outsider knight appeared, fixing, in effect, West Point’s destiny for
at least a century.
That year an Ohio paper mill acquired Pamunkey-front land just north
of town and began construction of a wood pulp mill. Local pines would be
harvested, chipped, cooked, and digested, the resulting fibrous slurry then
pumped into tanker cars and sped over excellent rail connections to the
paper mill at Loveland, near Cincinnati. West Point’s skyline—and skies—
were thus changed, seemingly forever. The Chesapeake Pulp & Paper Com-
pany was built and ready for production early in , its impressive com-
plex of buildings and a water tower sprawling beneath a giant smokestack.