On July 2, 1961, Walter Lewis Haynie, 51, a grocery store owner on Tangier Island, drowned in a boating accident in Tangier Sound. Tourists reported seeing him fall from his 15-foot outboard motor boat and disappear. His body was found the next day.
On July 2, 1959, the Peninsula Enterprise reported that Virginia House of Delegates member Melvin L. Shreves of the Eastern Shore had criticized sharply a proposal to dump atomic waste 37 miles off the Virginia coast.
On July 2, 1959, the Peninsula Enterprise newspaper reported that 15 forest fires during the previous two weeks had burned more than 350 acres, including 150 acres of marsh and 200 acres of woods on the north side of the road from Sanford to Saxis.
On July 2, 1948, Joseph H. Conquest, a farmer residing near Atlantic, had his clothing stripped off and was bruised and mangled by the paddles in a combine while threshing wheat at his home. He was hospitalized.
On July 2, 1948, the Peninsula Enterprise reported that Eddie Stevens, 17, a 1948 graduate of Onancock High School, signed a contract with the Chicago Cubs and was assigned to the team’s farm system in Elizabethton, Tenn., in the Appalachian League.
On July 2, 1947, U.S. Navy Ensign Stanley C. Munson, a New York native who was living on Chincoteague Island while he was stationed at the Chincoteague Naval Auxiliary Air Station, died in an airplane crash near Snow Hill. He was survived by a wife and a 2-year-old son.
On July 2, 1946, John W. Taylor, 80, a successful farmer, businessman, and the owner of canning factories on the Eastern Shore, died at his home, “Red Bank,” near Mappsville. According to the Peninsula Enterprise newspaper, Taylor “had the distinction of starting the first factory for canning sweet potatoes in the world.” Taylor purchased all of the stock of Greenwood Cemetery, which today is named Taylor.
On July 2, 1944, First Lt. Thaddeus Wallace Jones Jr., 22, of Cheriton, was piloting an airplane when it took off July 2, 1944, from Papua New Guinea to take photographs over battlefields. The aircraft never returned and Jones’ body was never recovered. He served with the U.S. Army Air Forces. Jones is memorialized at the Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery, Manila, Philippines.
On July 2, 1942, Samuel Spencer Smith, 21, of Hopkins, a community near Parksley, a technician fourth grade in the U.S. Army, died at the Japanese Cabanatuan Prisoner of War Camp in the Philippines. Smith’s remains are interred in the Liberty Cemetery, Parksley.
