Chesapeake: Born from a Merger

The city of Chesapeake didn't grow up slowly, it was invented at the start of nineteen sixty-three, when two existing governments voted to become one.

For a decade before that, Norfolk County and the small city of South Norfolk had been losing land to their neighbors through annexation suits. Between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty, the county alone lost large amounts of land and population. Faced with slow dissolution, officials from both places sat down in the fall of nineteen sixty-one and worked out a merger. Citizens approved it in a special election the following year, then chose the name Chesapeake that June.

The result was one of the largest cities by area on the East Coast, more than three hundred and fifty square miles of tidal creeks, farmland, and Great Dismal Swamp, all stitched together in a single overnight act of civic self-defense.