" Mr O"

 An American Life

1898-2001

Albert Frederick Olverson entered this world on March 3, 1898  at Parham Point, Lower Machodic Creek, behind Coles Neck. The Lizzy Borden trial held the country spellbound. It would be eight years before the first radio broadcast, and a decade before the Wright brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk. Benjamin Harrison was President.

"Mr. 0" left this world on March 16, 2001, living in three different centuries and under twenty-one U. S. Presidents. What amazing changes occurred in his lifetime as transportation moved from buggy and boat to autos, trains and airplanes, and as telecommunications made our world so small.

"I was raised on Kirk Point The Kirks owned a good parcel of land in those days. My Daddy owned 100 acres on that point. In fact, my father's mother was a Kirkborn around 1800. She died back before I was born. "

He saw the steamboat era come and go, and was a part of it when there were 40 or 50 stops, including Nomini, The Yeocomico, Coan River, and Lodge Landing on the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. His father owned the steamboat landing "Parham," where Mr. 0 was born, along with a farm and a general store.

"I was a lockout and quartermaster-helmsman. I could pilot a boat in these waters but I wasn 't a licensed pilot. The licensed pilot gave the quartermaster the course. I didn 't go out when it was foggy. "

Years later, he remembered some of the steamboats and their captains . . . the Majestic and the Wakefield, Captain Burley Reed who ran excursion boats from Washington to Colonial Beach, and Captain Chap Sly of the Saint John.

"Not only side-wheelers and stem-wheelers, but big two-masted schooners used to tie up at our pier when I was a kid. Everything went by boat in those days. . . lumber, wheat, barley, rye, and even canned tomatoes from the factory at Parham. "

After the steamboats succumbed to competition from trucks, Mr. 0 went to work in Washington, D. C. as a conductor for the old Capital Transit Company, later Washington Transit Company. He worked his way up to "Driver," a position for which only the best men were selected. They had to steer their electric streetcars through narrow city streets thronged with horse-drawn wagons, delivery truck, cars, bicycles and pedestrians. Mr. 0 was always on time, never sick, never a penny or fare token short. When streetcars gave way to buses, Mr. 0 was assigned one of the last streetcar runs to the Glen Echo Amusement Park.

" I worked forty-three years, six months and two days for the WTA. "

While he was with the transit authority, he dreamed of buying a farm on the Northern Neck and getting back to his roots. Mr. 0 and his young son Freddy would often come down on weekends to look at farms for sale. When he realized that he couldn't afford a "real" farm, Mr. 0 bought 41 acres of land on the Yeocomico south fork at Lodge Creek. He used it for a summer place until he retired. It took him years to clear the trees and pull the stumps to clear his "farm." The 41 acres included a mile of shoreline on deep water and the turn of the century Victorian farmhouse in which Mr. 0 died. He paid $6,500 for the property.

"It made some of the local people mad. They thought I paid too much and their real estate taxes would go up."

ln the 1960s, the Virginia Highway Department approached Mr. 0 about taking hundreds of tons of the sandy gravel from his property's steep banks to build a better road to Lewisetta, which was virtually an island at the time. Mr. 0 agreed. This action created a gentle slope down to the water on about five acres of the property.

"They needed the fill, and it made my land more valuable. "

Mr. 0's son Fred, a recent graduate of the University of Maryland and University of Baltimore law school, began to talk to his father about building a marina on the shore of the farm. Together they built some docks and a few slips. That was the beginning.

"Freddy thought running a marina would be more fun than farming. . . more profitable, too, I guess. "

Olverson's Lodge Creek Marina today has nearly 200 slips and is visited by boaters literally from all over the world.

In his final years, Mr. 0 would sometimes ask son Freddy "Who built this place?"

"You did. Pop."

And he did.

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