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Norris, Robert Vincent

 Person

Dates

  • Existence: August 17, 1888- August 30, 1978

Robert V. Norris was widely known as a La Plata storekeeper, a farmer, and was an honorary director of the Charles County Farm Bureau. Born in 1888, the son of a man who managed the Hotel Sentinel in Port Tobacco, he worked for F. Brooke Matthews in his farm implement store starting in 1904. Norris kept diaries for most of his life which detail the many years he spent in various parts of the United States early in this century. He worked in Nashville, in Oklahoma City, then at a "selling job" in Texas follwed by employment in 1915 as a landscape artist in Kansas. In Denver, he was selling magazines on the street when a German torpedo sank the Lusitania on May 7, 1915.

In 1917, he returned to the family homestead, Laurel Springs. Laurel Springs burned down in 1975. Norris opened a farm implement, general hardware, fertilizer, and seed store in La Plata in 1919. He soon added a car sales and repair shop where he sold Hudson and Essex cars from 1920 until 1929. "Dorothy made me stop," he told a Times-Crescent reporter. "She didn't like me around all the ladies.

In 1977, at age 89, Norris sold produce he raised at his farm at the La Plata Farmers' Market. He regularly attended St. Joseph's Church in Pomfret every Sunday until shortly before his death. He is buried at St. Jospeh's Church cemetery.

Found in 1 Collection or Record:

Interview with Robert Vincent Norris

 Collection
Identifier: OH-00101