MAURY NO MORE; IT’S NOW MARINERS’ LAKE
Once named after Confederate officer, Newport News body of water rebranded 80 years later
Before there was the Lion’s Bridge, before there was The Mariners’ Museum, before there was a Newport News shipyard, there was Water’s Creek.
The body of water that runs by The Mariner’s Museum and Park used to be a salt marsh creek feeding into the James River before it was dammed to create a wildlife sanctuary.
For over 80 years, it has been Maury Lake, named for oceanographer and Confederate officer Matthew Fontaine Maury. That is, until The Mariners’ Museum board of trustees voted to change the name to The Mariners’ Lake on June 19. The museum plans to have a community event celebrating the name this fall.
“If the goal in the lake is going to be to tell the story of Matthew Fontaine Maury, there are better places to do that,” museum President and CEO Howard Hoege III said Wednesday. “In fact, we do that in our galleries.”
The move comes as a number of institutions have reevaluated their connections to Maury.
A monument dedicated to Maury in Richmond was taken down by the city on July 2. James Madison University on Tuesday changed the name of a building dedicated to him to Mountain Hall. The Norfolk School Board plans to consider renaming Maury High School at a meeting next week.
“We’re in the education business,” Hoege said, “and it turns out that simply having a name on something does not do a ton to tell the history of something, or in this case, someone.”
Maury is sometimes referred to as “The Pathfinder of the Seas” for his contributions to oceanography as an officer in the U.S. Navy before the Civil War, including one of the first modern oceanography textbooks.
The museum’s first board of trustees voted to name the lake in his honor because of those contributions. Before the war, he advocated for colonies in Central and South America where slave owners could relocate. He resigned from the U.S. Navy when his home state of Virginia seceded in April 1861 and joined the Confederate Navy at the start of the war.
After the war, he served as Imperial Commissioner of Colonization to Mexican emperor Maximilian. Maury promoted a plan to bring former Confederates to the country to start a new colony reviving the practices of the antebellum South.
“When they named Lake Maury, there is no indication that they were naming it to honor his Confederate service or to make a statement to anyone in the community,” Hoege said. “It’s pretty clear to us that the original trustees were trying (to) recognize his maritime contributions.”
The original marsh was called Water’s Creek by English settlers — researchers don’t know what the area’s Algonquin-speaking tribes called it before that. Edward Waters was the first settler to receive a land grant around the creek in 1624. The creek later was known as Watts Creek after a surveyor incorrectly labeled the creek on a map in the mid-1800s. Lake Maury is just the most recent iteration.
“It was that generation’s opportunity to kind of put their mark on history and the community, and they chose to do it in the way that they did,” Hoege said. According to Hoege, the name of the lake has been on museum leader’s minds for several years as part of the museum’s mission to better engage and represent the community.
He cites the museum’s lowered admission price from $14 to $1 as an example. The first month they tried that in August 2016, the number of visitors jumped 700% over the month’s average attendance. The idea of community ownership, Hoege said, is part of why the museum chose The Mariners’ Lake — plural and possessive.
“We have this really powerful narrative about how we’re bound together as a community, and that’s this shared connection to the water,” Hoege said. “If we can awaken that in people, if we can awaken that sense of shared history, of a shared identity, then maybe people identify a little bit more strongly together.”