by Larry Chowning
The Cross Rip in the name Cross Rip Campground in Deltaville came from the name of a lightship that anchored just off the coast of Nantucket in the Atlantic Ocean.
The late Anna Scott (Scotty) Hoye bought the 20-some-acre site that looks straight out into Chesapeake Bay in 1950, and over several decades transformed the property, located near Stingray Point, into her home and campground.
Then a Mary Washington College professor, Hoye, family and friends designed and built the campground with a nautical theme. The new owners, Catherine Bellows and Rebecca Wondergem, who have owned the campground since 2016, have continued in that tradition.
The nautical centerpiece on the property is a cottage built around the pilothouse of the steamboat “Virginia Dare.” The vessel was used to transport passengers and freight in the early 20th century for the Old Dominion Steamboat Line and later the Old Bay Line.
Ken Nix of Hot Springs, Arkansas, rents the Virginia Dare cottage five months out of the year and has been at the campground since 1975. “The pilothouse was transported from Norfolk to Deltaville on a flat-bed trailer,” said Nix. “Scotty said that as they crossed the James River Bridge it held up traffic for quite some time.”
The inside of the pilothouse is museum-quality, as it has original windows, wheel, wooden compass box, and kerosene oil lantern attached to the compass box. The vessel was engine-room controlled, meaning the engineer would turn the engine off and on and shift it into forward or reverse in the engine room. The pilothouse still has the 1900s tube voice system that runs from the pilothouse down to the engine room. It is mounted on the side of the pilothouse. The captain used it to alert the engineer to what was needed—forward or reverse, or more power or less— to maneuver the vessel.
There are two menhaden steamer pilothouses converted to cottages at the campground. They are named Nor’easter and Downeaster. A fourth deck boat pilothouse on the property is used as a storage shed. Most likely, that pilothouse was built in Deltaville as the town was a boat-building center in the 1920s, 30s and 40s for the building of large deadrise deck boats. Deltaville craftsmen were noted for building “a pretty” round stern on a boat and “a pretty” rounded pilothouse.
In 1980, Hoye built a permanent home on the property, named it Crow’s Nest and connected it to the Virginia Dare cottage by a large deck surrounding a flag-stone terrace and fireplace grills.
“We plan to continue the nautical theme that Scotty brought to the campground,” said Wondergem. “This place was a very special place to her and Catherine, and I feel the same way—it is a very special place to us.”
There are 46 camp sites on the property and four cottages for rent.
