South Hampton Roads is a region located in the extreme southeastern portion of Virginia's Tidewater region in the United States with a total population of 1,191,937. It is part of the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC MSA, which itself has a population of 1,724,876. Hampton Roads is the common name for the metropolitan area that surrounds the body of water of the same name. The land portion of Hampton Roads has been historically divided into two regions, South Hampton Roads on the south side and the Virginia Peninsula on the north side. As of the 2010 Census, the Hampton Roads MSA is the fifth largest metropolitan area by size in the southeastern United States, and is the second-largest between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia.
is located in Portsmouth, as are the Naval Medical Center, Portsmouth, two historic and important facilities, as well as several smaller facilities. The shipyard was founded as the Gosport Shipyard on November 1, 1767, and has the country's first dry dock. The name was changed after the American Civil War.
is a U.S. Navy facility in Chesapeake on the Southern Branch Elizabeth River. It began operations in 1849 and occupies approximately, including of land, of marsh, and of surface water. It is currently considered part of the Norfolk Navy Base. Chesapeake is also home to U.S. Naval Auxiliary Landing Field Fentress, an auxiliary landing facility for NAS Oceana. The decision to call the region "Hampton Roads" was a political one. The area was referred to as "Tidewater" for many years by the local residents. The local baseball team was called the Tidewater Tides for years but is now called the Norfolk Tides. When they first came to Tidewater, they adopted the local name to draw more fans.
Local government
In Colonial times, and even in the first 150 years of the United States, much like Virginia as a whole, South Hampton Roads was in an almost constant state of change in terms of local government, largely due to growth, as counties were divided and towns were formed as the population grew. Some towns grew to become cities. Under the state constitutional changes in 1871, extant and future cities in Virginia became independent cities of the counties they had formerly been located within. However, in the second half of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of city-county-town local government consolidations took place in South Hampton Roads and on the Virginia Peninsula. Nowhere else in Virginia have rural areas and more dense cities been combined in such a manner as these two areas. The changes resulted in the area having Virginia's cities with the largest land areas and the most farming, even over 30 years after the consolidations in some instances.
Current cities, counties and towns
The South Hampton Roads region includes five independent cities, three counties, and five incorporated towns with a total population of 1,191,937 people. There were also a number of political subdivisions which are now extinct, primarily due to growth and consolidation of local government.
Independent cities
Chesapeake
Norfolk
Portsmouth
Suffolk
Virginia Beach
Counties
Currituck County, NC
Gates County, NC
Isle of Wight County
Incorporated towns
Isle of Wight County
Town of Smithfield
Town of Windsor
Extinct political subdivisions
Exclusive of towns which became cities and still have the same name, no less than 2 shires, 6 counties, 1 town, and 2 entire cities no longer exist in the South Hampton Roads area. For search of genealogical, land, and other historical records, it may be necessary to find these old names. The following is a listing of these 11 extinct shire, counties, towns, and cities, with the approximate dates they existed:
Generally surrounded by water, the South Hampton Roads region is accessed from the north by a network of highways, bridges, tunnels and bridge-tunnels across the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the harbor of Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay. The area is bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the State of North Carolina, and on the west by several counties which are considered to be in the Southside Virginia region.
