They say history is written by the winners, but it’s really the sum of those things we decide to remember and those we choose to forget.
We erase inconvenient or painful stories and repeat tales that make us feel good about ourselves. Well-written history is worth studying because good history is objective even when it tells uncomfortable stories. Without honest history, we forget where we came from.
Take the story of Edenton’s indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Much has been said recently about how much Chowan County needs an aquatic sports center and how difficult it would be to build and pay for one. Still, in 1959, the federal government provided Edenton and Chowan County with a seven-lane indoor swimming pool.
During the Second World War, Chowan County was home to the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station-Edenton. The base had 1,294 military personnel and 138 civilian workers. Edenton hosted bombers and fighter planes at the auxiliary landing field for Cherry Point Marine Base. When World War II ended, it became apparent that Edenton Field was too expensive to maintain.
Most of the base’s property was auctioned off or given to the community, which used the facilities as an industrial park. Boat companies and timber mills eventually took over the buildings, and new housing developments emerged near the airfield.
Old military housing was carted off to new locations, where families lived in those houses for decades, not knowing that their homes were built miles from where they stand today. I lived in such a home on Hobbs Acres Lane for more than 25 years.
Like most Marine bases, Edenton Field had a swimming pool as part of its training facilities, which is unsurprising for an amphibious military service. Leathernecks needed to be comfortable around the water, so swimming was a requirement.
But when the airfield closed, the Marine Corps swimming pool, with its domed roof, seven competition-length racing lanes, and spectator space, became obsolete. Washington offered both the pool and the airfield to the town of Edenton.
This was four years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education led to integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas’ public schools. One of the federal government’s conditions for ownership of the pool was that all community members, regardless of race, could access the pool.
It may be a mark of how much progress has been made during the last 65 years that Chowan County’s reaction seems shocking to us now, but the idea of white and Black people swimming in the same water was unthinkable at the time.
John A. Holmes High School could have mounted an unassailable swimming team with such a facility. The pool could have benefited almost every community member, but Edenton turned it down. The mental barriers were too high for leaders and residents, even when faced with such an astounding gift.
The pool languished, allowed to sit empty. Hydraulic pressure from Edenton’s notoriously shallow water table cracked the foundation. Today, no trace remains of the indoor swimming pool that could have served Edenton and Chowan County.
Almost seven decades later, as residents clamored for an aquatic sports center that could serve the county’s high school athletes and its citizens, the county’s commissioners said the cost of building one was too high.
But what if, for the last 65 years, we had already had one given to us for free? Similar structures have been in continuous service since the 1930s.
It’s useful to remember the stories that tell our past, even when they hurt. We need to remember and learn what history teaches us, even when it’s uncomfortable. We need to understand how we got to where we are today.
It could have been so different.
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