Occoquan uncovers meeting minutes dating back 90 years

While they always haven’t had a town hall in Occoquan, they’ve held regular town business meetings for years.

Town Mayor Earnie Porta tells us the town staff uncovered meeting minutes dating back about 90 years to the early 1930s. Porta says some meetings were held inside shops and inside people’s homes.

Some minutes show a New Deal project, a key public works program during the Great Depression. The project was a culvert for Ballywhack Creek, which runs into town down a slope from Old Bridge Road in Lake Ridge.

The Ballywhack flooded the town during Tropical Storm Lee in 2011, filling basements with water. The storm also damaged the Holly Acres trailer park in Woodbridge, leaving 300 homeless.

Porta notes he’s scanning the old documents for posterity and will make them available to the public, including researchers who want a glimpse of the river town’s past.

Today, the Town Council meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. in Town Hall, 314 Mill Street.

More in an email from Porta:

Town staff have discovered Occoquan Town Council meeting minutes going back, thus far, to 1933.  To preserve them and make them readily available for researchers and others, I am scanning the documents and placing them for public access on the Occoquan Historical Society web site (www.occoquanhistoricalsociety.org).

Thus far the site contains the minutes from 1933 through 1935.  Among the information that immediately stands out:

• In the absence of a Town Hall, meetings were held in businesses and even in personal residences.
• The town participated in the very brief Civil Works Administration (CWA), a New Deal program designed to provide jobs during the winter of 1933-1934.  Occoquan’s project appears to be related to a storm sewer and possibly involved “Ballawhack branch,” our Ballywhack Creek.
• Some will note that the scans reveal that on the reverse of some pages  (I included a direct scan of the reverse of one such page) is the letterhead of the American Surety Company of New York, including an image of its iconic 19th-century building that is today a New York City landmark.  The Town Clerk at the time, B.W., Brunt, was an agent of the company, and appears to have sometimes had the minutes of the Town Council meetings typed up on the blank side of his office letterhead.

To check out this collection of historical documents at your leisure go to  https://www.occoquanhistoricalsociety.org/documents.  I will attempt to  issue updates as more are scanned and uploaded.