by Jeremiah Morton, a pronounced secessionist, but when secession was an accomplished fact, he became an ardent supporter of the southern cause, and all his four sons entered the Confederate army.
Parks, Marshall, born in Norfolk, Virginia, November 8. 1820, son of Marshall Parks, a famous steamboat owner, and Martha Boush, his wife. He left school at the age of fifteen to accompany his father to his grist and lumber mills in North Carolina, and before he had attained his majority was postmaster and major of militia. After his father's death, he gave himself largely to steamboat enterprises, and built an iron steam vessel, the Albermule. which was famous in its day. In 1842 he was given command of the Genu, built at Norfolk, by the government, and which he sailed by bay, rivers and canals, from the Atlantic coast to Oswego, on Lake Ontario, in the first trip made by a steam vessel between the Atlantic and Great Lakes. He was the author of the method of ferrying railroad cars across rivers and bays, en specially constructed boats with iron rails set upon the deck. He was also the originator of the Albemarle and Chesapeake canal—the first in which steam dredges were used in construction, in place of ordinary picks and shovels—and he was president of the operating company for upwards of twenty-five years. In 1861, after the secession of Virginia, he was made state provisional commodore, and charged with the removal of more than three thousand pieces of artillery from the Norfolk navy yard to a place of safety. He was then appointed a special commissioner of North Carolina to create a navy, and was well along with the construction of several gunboats, when he was ordered to turn them over to the Confederate government, and he delivered them to Gens. Gwinn and Huger, at Norfolk. His years forbade heavy responsibilities, and from that time on his service to the Confederacy was in an advisory capacity only. After the war, he busied himself with railroad, steamboat and canal enterprises; served one term in the legislature; and under President Cleveland's administration, was for four years a supervising inspector of steamboats. He married, in 1853. Sophia Jackson.
Crenshaw, William G., born in Richmond, Virginia, July 7. 1824. son of Spotswood Dabney Crenshaw and Winifred Graves, his wife, daughter of Isaac Graves. He was a man of great ability, and at the age of thirty-seven years was senior member of Oenshaw & Company, whose business extended over a large part of the world, much of their foreign trade being carried on in vessels built and owned by himself and his brothers. When Virginia seceded, he forsook his business and recruited a company of artillery, providing its guns and equipment at his own expense, and which became famous as "Crenshaw's Battery." He bore a gallant part in every engagement from Mechanicsville to Sharpsburg, in 1863, when he was sent to Europe as a confidential commercial agent for the Confederate government, a position which he held until the end of the war. He was remarkably successful in his mission, not only shipping to the southern ports great quantities of ordnance, ammunition, clothing, provisions, etc., but also securing the building of vessels for their transporting them, as well as
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