Kempsville, Virginia

Long before Virginia Beach existed, there was Kempsville. The site traces to the sixteen hundreds, when English immigrant George Kempe established a tobacco shipping wharf along the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River and called it Kempe's Landing. The landing grew into a modest courthouse town, and when Princess Anne County needed a seat of government in seventeen seventy-eight, Kempsville got the job, holding it for about forty-five years.

The town was formally chartered in seventeen eighty-three. When Virginia Beach consolidated with Princess Anne County in nineteen sixty-three, Kempsville became one of seven official boroughs in the new city, absorbed into a resort metropolis but a reminder that this inland river crossing predates the beachfront resort by centuries.