REEDVILLE The venerable smokestack, once part of a fish processing plant and long a beacon for boat captains, is perhaps Reedville's most iconic structure, a towering monument to the industry that built this town.
It has weathered dozens of hurricanes, as well as fires and who-knows-what-else thrown at it over the past century at its position near the Chesapeake Bay. But when lightning scored a direct hit on the crumbling stack in early August and was followed by a violent windstorm a few days later, bricks around the top of the tower tumbled into Cockrell's Creek, and those fighting to save this tall piece of history wondered if the battle was lost.
"We were a month away from starting restoration," said Monty Deihl, general manager of Omega Protein, the company that owns the long-dormant stack and a member of the Save The Stack committee, "and we were afraid . . . that something was going to happen and it was going to crash the effort."
Read the complete story from The Richmond Times-Dispatch.