Norfolk, Virginia

• 1. Introduction

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  Norfolk, Virginia sits at one of the most strategically valuable pieces of coastline in the United States, where the Elizabeth River meets the Chesapeake Bay. A city of roughly 238,000 people, it is the third-most populous city in Virginia, yet most Americans have only a vague sense of what goes on there. That is partly by design. Norfolk is a city shaped more by ships and naval power than by any product it sells or celebrity it has produced.

  How did a colonial seaport founded in 1682 become home to the world's largest naval base? What happened when the city was burned to the ground during the American Revolution, not once but twice? And what does it mean to live in a city where more than a third of the regional economy traces back to military spending? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Chesepian to Colony

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  Before any European settler ever set foot here, the land belonged to the Chesepian people, who called it "K'che-sepi-ack." Historical accounts attributed to William Strachey record that the Chesepian settlements were wiped out by the Powhatan shortly before Jamestown was founded in 1607. By the time English colonists began pushing south from the Virginia Colony, the land was already marked by violence and displacement.

  When the House of Burgesses introduced representative government in 1619, governor Sir George Yeardley divided the colony into four jurisdictions, and the ground beneath present-day Norfolk fell under something called Elizabeth Cittie. King Charles I reorganized the colony into shires in 1634, and that designation became Elizabeth City Shire, a vast territory that today encompasses Hampton, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, and Suffolk.

  The man most responsible for naming Norfolk was Adam Thoroughgood, who had emigrated from King's Lynn, Norfolk, England in 1622. After persuading 105 people to settle in the colony, he was granted a large holding along the Lynnhaven River in 1636 through the head rights system. When the south Hampton Roads portion of the shire was separated into its own county, Thoroughgood suggested naming it after his birthplace. A year later he recommended splitting it again into Upper Norfolk and Lower Norfolk. Lower Norfolk is the direct ancestor of the present city.

  By the late seventeenth century, a "Half Moone" fort had been built and 50 acres of land were acquired from local Powhatan Confederacy members in exchange for 10,000 pounds of tobacco. The House of Burgesses formally established the "Towne of Lower Norfolk County" in 1680, and the town was incorporated in 1705. In 1736, George II granted it a royal charter as a borough, setting the stage for Norfolk to become one of the busiest ports in the colonies.

• 3. Burned Twice Over

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  Norfolk was, by 1775, a city with a complicated loyalty problem. Its roughly 6,250 residents were predominantly Loyalist, because the British government had granted trade monopolies to many of their businesses. When the Royal Governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, was forced to flee from Williamsburg, he made Norfolk his new capital.

  After Lord Dunmore's forces lost at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, he ordered naval cannonading of the city. A cannonball fired by HMS Liverpool struck Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, and it is still lodged in that wall today. On the 16th of January 1776, the Patriots' Fourth Virginia Convention agreed to burn most of the remaining homes so that Dunmore could not use them to shelter British troops and runaway slaves. Colonel Woodford eventually drove Dunmore into exile. Only the walls of Saint Paul's survived both the bombardment and the fires. Norfolk's destruction ended more than 168 years of British rule in Virginia.

  The fires were not finished with Norfolk. Thomas Jefferson later ordered the city destroyed by fire during the British occupation, and in 1804, another serious fire along the waterfront destroyed around 300 buildings. The city rebuilt after each disaster, each time in a different architectural style. The original wood-and-thatch structures of the colonial period gave way to Georgian brick. After the Revolution, the Federal style arrived, with its Palladian windows, oval rooms, and fanlight doorways. Greek Revival followed, then Gothic Revival in the 1830s, then Italianate elements in the 1840s. By the late nineteenth century, structures like the Commodore Maury Hotel and the Royster Building began forming a true skyline.

• 4. Yellow Fever and the Civil War

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  On the 7th of June 1855, a 183-foot vessel called the Benjamin Franklin put into Hampton Roads for repairs after sailing from the West Indies, where yellow fever had been active. The port health officer quarantined the ship. After eleven days, a second inspection found nothing alarming, and the ship was allowed to dock.

  Within days, the first cases appeared in the city. A machinist died on the 8th of July. By August, several people were dying each day. A third of the city's population fled. No one understood how the disease spread. It moved through mosquitoes and poor sanitation, affecting every family. By September, the number of infected had reached 5,000, and by mid-September, 1,500 people had died across Norfolk and Portsmouth. New York banned all traffic from both cities. When the cooler weather finally ended the outbreak, the dead numbered roughly 3,200.

  The city had barely recovered when the question of secession arrived. On the 4th of April 1861, Norfolk's delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention, George Blow, voted against secession. After the Battle of Fort Sumter, a second vote on April 17 went the other way, and Blow changed his vote. Virginia left the Union.

  The following spring, the Battle of Hampton Roads took place off Sewell's Point Peninsula, marking the first combat between two ironclad warships: the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia. The battle ended in a stalemate, but from that point forward, wooden warships were obsolete. In May 1862, Norfolk Mayor William Lamb surrendered the city to Union General John E. Wool. Under martial law for the rest of the war, thousands of slaves from the region escaped to Union lines; they established schools in Norfolk to learn to read and write before the war had even ended.

• 5. The Naval Colossus

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  In 1907, the Jamestown Exposition was held at Sewell's Point to mark the tricentennial of Jamestown's founding. President Theodore Roosevelt attended, along with members of Congress and diplomats from twenty-one countries. A large Naval Review at the event showed anyone paying attention that the peninsula was an ideal location for a major military installation. Southern Democrats in Congress made sure the Navy chose it.

  By 1917, as the United States prepared to enter World War I, the Naval Air Station Hampton Roads had been built on the former exposition grounds. Naval Station Norfolk was established that same year and has never stopped growing. Today it is the world's largest naval base. Located on Sewell's Point Peninsula in the northwest corner of the city, the station is headquarters to the United States Fleet Forces Command, comprising over 62,000 active-duty personnel, 75 ships, and 132 aircraft. It also serves as the North American headquarters for NATO's Allied Command Transformation.

  The military presence reshaped every dimension of life in Norfolk. Over 35 percent of the Gross Regional Product for the Norfolk-Newport News-Virginia Beach area is attributable to defense spending, and 75 percent of all regional growth since 2001 traces back to increases in that same spending. The gender imbalance visible in census data, where there were 104.6 males for every 100 females in 2010, is a direct consequence of the military population. Norfolk is also home to Maersk Line, Limited, which manages the world's largest fleet of US-flag vessels, and the Lambert's Point docks, the largest coal trans-shipment point in the Northern Hemisphere, with an annual capacity of approximately 48,000,000 tons.

• 6. Segregation and Resistance

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  In February 1959, seventeen black children entered six previously all-white public schools in Norfolk. That moment came only after years of legal combat and official obstruction. Following the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia adopted a policy called "massive resistance." The General Assembly cut off state funding for any integrated school. In 1958, when federal courts ordered Norfolk's schools to open on an integrated basis, Governor J. Lindsay Almond ordered them closed instead.

  The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals eventually ruled that the closure violated the state constitution and ordered all public schools funded regardless of their racial composition. About ten days after that ruling, Almond backed down and asked the General Assembly to rescind the massive resistance laws. Virginian-Pilot editor Lenoir Chambers had been editorializing against the policy throughout this period. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for that work.

  The upheaval came on top of other pressures already straining the city. White middle-class residents had been leaving for new suburban developments along the highway corridors that opened after World War II. The Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel opened in 1957, the Midtown Tunnel in 1962, the Downtown Tunnel in 1952 for Portsmouth connections, and Interstate 264 in 1967. As retail followed residents to the suburbs and malls drew business away from Granby Street, the downtown commercial corridor fell into decline. The social history of Norfolk in these decades is a story of departure, pressure, and slow reckoning.

• 7. Waterfront Revival and Rising Seas

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  By the 1980s, Norfolk's leaders had decided the waterfront was the city's best asset. Decaying piers and warehouses were demolished, and a new boulevard called Waterside Drive was laid out in their place, anchoring what would become the city's rebuilt skyline. In 1983, the city partnered with The Rouse Company and the Enterprise Development Company to create the Waterside festival marketplace, designed to pull people back downtown.

  Nauticus, the National Maritime Center, opened on the downtown waterfront in 1994. Since 2000 it has been home to the battleship USS Wisconsin, the last battleship built in the United States, which served in World War II and later in the Korean and Gulf Wars. Harbor Park baseball stadium, home of the Norfolk Tides Triple-A team, was named the finest facility in minor league baseball by Baseball America in 1995. In April 2007, a new $36 million cruise ship terminal opened adjacent to Nauticus, and passenger counts had more than doubled from 50,000 in 2003 to 107,000 in 2004 and 2005.

  The revival faces a physical threat that no urban planning can fully overcome. Norfolk sits on land that is slowly sinking, while the water around it is rising. Some neighborhoods already flood regularly at high tide. A study commissioned by the city in 2012 found that addressing a one-foot rise in sea level would cost around one billion dollars. Scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimated in 2013 that if current trends hold, the sea around Norfolk will rise by five and a half feet or more by the end of this century. The city that survived bombardment, epidemic, and closure now faces a slower, less dramatic, and far more permanent form of pressure.

• 8. Medicine and Culture

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  On the 1st of March 1980, Drs. Georgianna and Howard Jones opened the first in vitro fertilization clinic in the United States at Eastern Virginia Medical School. In December 1981, the country's first in-vitro test-tube baby was born there. That single achievement put Norfolk on the map of medical history in a way that has nothing to do with the Navy.

  Eastern Virginia Medical School was founded in 1973 as a community medical school by the surrounding jurisdictions. It sits in the city's major medical complex in the Ghent district, alongside institutions including Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. Norfolk Public Library holds the distinction of being Virginia's first public library. In 2005, Norfolk Public Schools won the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, having demonstrated the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps for poor and minority students. The city had been nominated for the same prize in 2003 and 2004.

  The Virginia Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1920, was led by JoAnn Falletta from 1991 until 2020. The Norfolk NATO Festival, formerly the International Azalea Festival, has run each spring since 1951, making it the longest continually running festival in the Hampton Roads region. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free person of color who grew up in Norfolk, emigrated via the American Colonization Society and was later elected the first president of Liberia. His story connects the city to the founding of an entire nation, a thread that stretches from Norfolk's dockside in the early nineteenth century to West Africa.