Frank Wilkinson Darling (7 October 1865–1 February 1941), oyster packer and entrepreneur, was born in New York City and was the son of James Sands Darling, who built racing yachts, and his second wife, English native Mary Anne (or Annie) Daulman Darling. In October 1866 the family moved to Virginia (according to legend, bringing a boatload of lumber), where his father purchased a gristmill and half-interest in a lumber-planing mill in Hampton. Darling's father prospered and for several years operated a menhaden fish oil factory that extracted oil and sold the residue as fertilizer, and by 1881 he was engaged in planting and harvesting oysters on a large scale.
Oyster Dealer
Darling was educated in Hampton and in 1884 graduated from the Episcopal Academy of Connecticut (later Cheshire Academy), in Cheshire, Connecticut. He then joined his father's business which they renamed J. S. Darling and Son. That year they leased 350 acres of the state's public oyster beds. The company increased its leases to more than a thousand acres by the end of the century and to more than four thousand in 1927. By the time Darling's father died in April 1900, the firm was often referred to as one of the largest oyster shippers in the country. In Stowe, Lamoille County, Vermont, on 16 November 1892 Darling married Mary Mahala (or Mollie) Gorton. They probably met while she was teaching in the Indian school at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). They had one son. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing for about the next forty years the Darling family was wealthy enough to travel often in Europe and Asia.
About 1888 Darling became superintendent of Powhatan Oyster Company, which had been chartered by his father and four partners. He bought out the other partners and their heirs in 1912, when he also built a new state-of-the-art processing plant of his own design in Hampton at a cost of more than $30,000. The workforce in J. S. Darling and Son's packing plant, as was common in Virginia, was overwhelmingly African American. In one year Darling's oyster house generated a pile of oyster shells four stories high. It was one of the largest in the Chesapeake area and represented a harvest of about 200,000 bushels, or about 5 million oysters. In June 1916 the National Geographic magazine published a picture of the oyster shell mountain, and several companies printed postcards. In addition to selling the shells for use in road construction and as fertilizer, Darling used them to create new oyster beds and continued his oyster-planting experiments in different locations around the region.
Darling sued the city of Newport News for disposing of raw sewage near his beds on Hampton Bar and rendering the oysters unhealthy for human consumption. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in 1918 that the city had a legal right to discharge its sewage into the navigable waterways because it had no way to purify it, and the following year the Supreme Court of the United States sustained that ruling. In 1925 the surgeon general of the United States appointed Darling to an advisory committee on shellfish sanitation. Darling also served from 1 July 1925 until 30 June 1940 as one of two non-physicians on the State Board of Health.
After losing the Hampton Bar to pollution, Darling leased about 4,000 acres of grounds and planted more than $25,000 worth of oysters in Mobjack Bay, located between Gloucester and Mathews Counties. Oystermen there protested and unsuccessfully challenged the legality of his leases, for which he used surrogates to avoid the acreage limit imposed by state law. In September 1927 outraged clammers threatened Darling's employees at the site and in October hundreds of oystermen began destroying Darling's buoy markers and taking his oysters. Threatened with arrest on charges that he had received too large a lease, had taken possession of some public oyster beds, and was depriving the men of their livelihood, Darling sought aid from the state. The governor ordered National Guard units to Gloucester and deployed the state's oyster patrol boats to protect the area. Two surveys of the oyster grounds confirmed Darling's leases, but in January 1928 he agreed to relinquish a portion of his leased oyster grounds to allow public access.
For a variety of reasons, including water pollution and a pest known as the oyster drill, the oyster business in Hampton Roads deteriorated during the early decades of the twentieth century. J. S. Darling and Son lost between $360,000 and $420,000 because of pollution during the years 1926 to 1933. By the 1930s oyster production in Virginia had declined to about half of what it had been at the turn of the twentieth century.
From 1908 to 1911 Darling was president of the Virginia Oyster Packers and Planters' Association, which worked to expand markets for Virginia's oysters, and served on its board of directors until 1914. Elected a vice president of the Oyster Growers and Dealers' Association of North America at its organizational meeting in March 1908, he was reelected nearly every year through 1939. Darling's son, James Sands Darling, was president of the national organization for several years until his death in 1951.
Hampton Development
Like his father who had purchased real estate and invested in several Hampton Roads businesses, Frank Darling bought a Hampton boat-yard and marine railway about 1924, which his descendants owned until 1980. He was general manager in 1893 of the Hampton and Old Point Railway Company and in 1894 he became president and superintendent of both it and the Newport News Street Railway Company, which merged in 1897. They also owned the Buckroe Beach Hotel, a popular place of recreation. On 25 June 1895 and on 24 March 1896 Darling received patents for improvements to car fenders to prevent pedestrians from being injured when walking in front of streetcars. After selling the streetcar company to the Newport News and Old Point Railway and Electric Company in 1898, Darling remained a member of its board of directors for many years. Early in the twentieth century he was also a director of the affiliated Norfolk and Atlantic Terminal Company, which operated rail and steamboat lines to connect Newport News with Hampton and Norfolk. Darling incorporated the Newport News and Norfolk Transportation Company in 1899 and the Hampton and Yorktown Railway Company in 1904, although neither endeavor came to fruition.
In 1888 Darling subdivided the land that his father had purchased near Hampton's Little England neighborhood to create a streetcar community for his new street railway line. In 1984 the National Register of Historic Places listed it as the Victoria Boulevard Historic District. In 1916 Darling assisted three other local entrepreneurs in persuading the United States government to buy the land, including a large tract owned by Darling, that became Langley Field (later Joint Base Langley-Eustis) and the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center). Soon thereafter the government purchased an additional 3,259.25 acres from Darling for a bombing range and 113 acres of Virginia state oyster beds that the airfield polluted with its sewage discharge. It later became Plum Tree Island National Wildlife Refuge. During World War I he incorporated the Warwickshire Corporation in September 1917 to sell land to the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company that the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the United States Shipping Board then used to construct housing for shipyard workers at Hilton Village.
In 1928 Darling became president of the Old Dominion Land Company. It played a part in rebuilding the Chamberlin Hotel at Fort Monroe, which had been destroyed by fire in 1920. In cooperation with Vanderbilt hotel interests in New York, Darling's Hampton hotel company opened the new Chamberlin-Vanderbilt Hotel on 7 April 1928. He was vice president of the Bank of Hampton from 1903 until about 1925, when he became president and served until the bank went into receivership in 1933. From 1915 to 1932 he was vice president of the Schmelz National Bank in Newport News, and he was a member of the board and one of the largest stockholders in the Citizens National Bank of Hampton. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Home Fire Insurance Corporation of Virginia at Hampton from its incorporation in June 1905 until about 1928.
Community and Charitable Work
A member of the Elizabeth City County Board of Road Commissioners beginning in 1903, Darling was also an officer of the Virginia Good Roads Association and of the Virginia Peninsula Good Roads Association. He served on the Hampton Common Council from 1908 to 1922. A charter member of Hampton's volunteer fire department, he was elected chief in April 1911. The department refused his resignation in April 1934, instead naming him "Chief for life" while relieving him of active service. On 26 August 1922, Darling was elected to a one-year term as president of the Virginia State Firemen's Association.
Darling helped found the Newport News Rotary Club in 1915 and the Hampton Rotary Club in May 1921 and chaired the Elizabeth City County–Hampton chapter of the American Red Cross from 1917 to 1929. He and his wife supported numerous charitable organizations, including Janie Porter Barrett's Industrial Home School for Colored Girls (later Barrett Juvenile Correctional Facility), which opened in Hanover County in 1915. As a member of the board of managers Darling served as treasurer and annually donated oysters to the school. In 1927 he was named to the newly organized Virginia Industrial School Board for Colored Children to oversee Barrett's school and another for boys; he continued to serve until 1940. Beginning about 1910 he was president and a board member of the Weaver Orphan Home, which cared for African American children in Hampton.
Darling, his wife, and his son all supported educational institutions. He and his wife endowed a scholarship in his father's name at Hampton Institute, she raised funds for Indian education there, and he served on the board of trustees from 1909 until his death. For many years he was a director of the Hampton Training School for Nurses, generally known as Dixie Hospital, and served as the board's president from about 1914 until his death. He was a member of the executive committee of the Co-Operative Education Association of Virginia that sought to improve public education, and he served on the boards of Chatham Hall, an Episcopal girls' school, and the Episcopal Home for Boys at Covington. Darling served on the vestry of Saint John's Episcopal Church in Hampton and was a church warden for more than twenty years. He also sat on the governing boards of the Diocese of Southern Virginia and was a delegate to the Episcopal Church's triennial general convention five times.
Frank Wilkinson Darling died of a heart attack during a board meeting at Hampton Institute on 1 February 1941 and was buried in the churchyard of Saint John's Church in Hampton. J. S. Darling and Son continued to operate until the 1970s.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1891–1984), 31: 217–218, with date of birth; marriage license, Office of Town Clerk, Stowe, Vt.; Oysterman and Fisherman 8 (June 1911): 13 (portrait) and 9 (July, Oct., Dec. 1912); numerous references in James T. Stensvaag, Hampton: From the Sea to the Stars, 1610–1985 (1985) and Bronson L. "Bo" Parker, The Seventeen: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Founded the Rotary Club of Hampton, Virginia (1996); Darling v. City of Newport News in Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia 123 (1919): 14–41; Biennial Report of the Commission of Fisheries of Virginia (1928), 15–17; numerous photographs in Hampton Historical Collection, Hampton History Museum; obituaries in Newport News Daily Press and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, both 2 Feb. 1941, Newport News Times-Herald, 3 Feb. 1941, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 8 Feb. 1941; editorial tributes in Newport News Daily Press, 2 Feb. 1941, and Newport News Times-Herald, 3 Feb. 1941.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Emily J. Salmon.
How to cite this page:
Emily J. Salmon,"Frank Wilkinson Darling (1865–1941)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Darling_Frank_Wilkinson, accessed [today's date]).
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