Norfolk Botanical Garden

The Norfolk Botanical Garden began with a Works Progress Administration grant of seventy-six thousand dollars announced in June nineteen thirty-eight. Because most male laborers were occupied on other city projects, more than two hundred African American women and twenty men were assigned to the work, clearing dense swampland, carrying the equivalent of one hundred fifty truckloads of dirt by hand to build a lake levee, all for twenty-five cents an hour.

By the spring of nineteen thirty-nine they had planted four thousand azaleas, two thousand rhododendrons, and one hundred bushels of daffodils. The garden opened to national acclaim as the Norfolk Azalea Gardens. For decades the workers who created it went largely unnamed; a bronze sculpture called Breaking Ground now honors them near the entrance, though fewer than half have been positively identified. The garden today covers one hundred seventy-five acres and includes one of the largest collections of azaleas in the United States.