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Norfolk Highlights 1584 - 1881
By George Holbert Tucker
Chapter 7
The Birth of "Norfolk Towne"
The date 1682 on the Norfolk City Seal, purporting to be the year the
town was founded, is incorrect. The correct date is 1680, as the following
information taken from the original records shows.
In June of 1680, Thomas, Lord Culpeper, the royal governor of Virginia,
informed the Virginia Assembly at Jamestown that King Charles II, who
had bestowed the name "The Old Dominion" on Virginia because
of its loyalty to the throne during the English Civil War, had commanded
him to urge the establishment of towns in Virginia. Culpeper added that
no nation had ever begun a colony without them and that no colony had
ever prospered until they developed.
On the strength of this suggestion, the Assembly passed "An Act
for Co-habitation and the Encouragement of Trade and Manufacture,"
providing that a towne be established on a fifty-acre site in each of
the twenty then existing counties. In specifying the various sites for
these settlements, the act provided for a town "in Lower Norfolk
County on Nicholas Wise his land on the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth
River at the entrance of the Branch."
The site chose for "Norfolk Towne" was well-protected, having
a fort at its western extremity which had been provided for by an act
of the Assembly in 1678 and which had been built shortly thereafter.
The site was also almost an island, being bounded on the west and south
by the Elizabeth River and on the north and east by two creeks named
Back Creek and Dun-in-the-Mire Creek, respectively. A narrow isthmus
where City Hall Avenue and St. Paul's Boulevard now intersect then connected
the proposed townsite with the country to the north of these two bodies
of water.
On August 18, 1680, the justices of Lower Norfolk County, acting on
the strength of the act passed by the Virginia Assembly two months earlier,
instructed the sheriff of the county to notify John Ferebee, the county
surveyor, to begin the survey of the townsite on October 7, 1680. The
justices also requested that all interested citizens be notified from
the pulpits of the churches of the proposed establishment of the town,
adding that anyone who cared to be present when the survey began was
welcome.
By October 19, 1680, the survey had been made, and Ferebee was paid
"for surveying the towne land and officiating as Cl(erk) of the
Militia." Exactly one year later, on October 19, 1681, Ferebee
received another payment "as Clerke of the Militia & laying out
the Streets of the Towne."
These were Main Street; "the street that leadeth down to the waterside,"
later known as Market Square, the Parade, and Commercial Place; "the
street that leadeth into the woods," later known as "the street
that leadeth out of town" and still later as Church Street; "the
street that leadeth to the publique spring," later known as Metcalf
Lane; and a small right angle of a street north of the eastern end of
Main Street that later became East Street and Bermuda Street.
In the meantime, word was received that King Charles II had changed
his mind about establishing towns in Virginia and had suspended the
1680 act of the Virginia Assembly on December 21, 1681, on the advice
of his Privy Council. But the Lower Norfolk County justices decided
to go ahead with the project anyway. And on August 16, 1682, Lieutenant
Colonel Anthony Lawson and Captain William Robinson, acting on behalf
of the county court, bought the already surveyed townsite with its five
clearly designated thoroughfares for ten thousand pounds of tobacco
in cask from Nicholas Wise the younger, a shipwright, who had inherited
the land from his father, Nicholas Wise the elder, who had owned it
since 1662.
Besides handling the transfer of the fifty-acre site from Wise to the
county, Lawson and Robinson were appointed feoffees by the court with
the power to grant each half-acre lot in the purchased area to any person
who would build a dwelling or warehouse thereon and settle on each lot
so granted within three months, the price of each lot in the new town
being one hundred pounds of tobacco.
 Chapter
8
Watching Norfolk's First Steps
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