Qualla: Chesapeake, Virginia

Chesapeake, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Voters in two different jurisdictions went to the polls in 1962 and chose to disappear them both. The independent city of South Norfolk and the remnants of old Norfolk County, founded in 1691, agreed to merge themselves into something new with a name they had to invent. They picked Chesapeake. The Virginia General Assembly ratified the result, and on January 1, 1963, Norfolk County - one of the oldest political units in English North America - quietly ceased to exist. The new city it became is now the second most populous in Virginia, the second largest in land area, and home to the headquarters of Dollar Tree. Chesapeake is also where George Washington surveyed a canal that still carries boats from Virginia into North Carolina.

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Image: Public domain

Chesapeake, Virginia: Why the Merger Happened

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wiseman, CC BY 3.0. Norfolk County had been losing territory for nearly a century. As Norfolk, Portsmouth, and other cities annexed land from the surrounding county, the county shrank. By the 1950s the small city of South Norfolk - which had become an independent city in 1922 to escape annexation by...

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Image: Andrew Wiseman | CC BY 3.0

Chesapeake, Virginia: Washington's Ditch

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Army Corps of Engineers, photographer not specified, Public domain. The Dismal Swamp Canal runs through Chesapeake. George Washington was one of the surveyors who laid it out in the 1760s - he was an investor in the Dismal Swamp Company and walked the swamp himself - and a section of the route is still informally called Washington's Ditch. The ca...

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Image: US Army Corps of Engineers, photographer not specified | Public domain

Chesapeake, Virginia: The Dismal Swamp

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Much of southwestern Chesapeake is occupied by the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge - one of the largest remaining intact swamps on the East Coast. The refuge stretches across the Virginia-North Carolina border, harboring Lake Drummond at its heart, and supports black ...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Chesapeake, Virginia: Water from the Northwest

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SchuminWeb, CC BY-SA 3.0. Chesapeake's water supply is a challenge the city's geography keeps making harder. The Northwest River in the southeast of the city supplies most of the drinking water, but the river is brackish - the salt content fluctuates with the tides and the weather - so in the late 1990s t...

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Image: SchuminWeb | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chesapeake, Virginia: What the City Carries

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Some of what Chesapeake carries is hard to talk about lightly. In 2003 the city hosted the first trial of Lee Boyd Malvo, then seventeen, one of the two D.C. snipers - a change-of-venue case from northern Virginia. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. ...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain