![cape charles va cape charles va](http://www.easternshorevablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/DSC_0363.jpg)
The population density was 309.4 people per square mile (119.3/km 2). Demographics Historical populationĪs of the census of 2000, there were 1,134 people, 536 households, and 278 families residing in the town. The Cape Charles Historic District and Stratton Manor are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The town hosted the Northampton Red Sox in the old Eastern Shore Baseball League. The Bay Coast Railroad ceased operations in 2018. Cape Charles served as a terminal for railway freight barges that carried rail cars from the former Eastern Shore Railroad which later became Bay Coast Railroad across the mouth of the Bay to Norfolk. The last ferry left Cape Charles in 1963. By 1912 the Engineer Corps estimated that Cape Charles harbor handled 2,500,000 tons of freight a year."Ĭape Charles was, for many years, the terminal for the Little Creek-Cape Charles Ferry, providing passenger and car ferry service across the mouth of the Bay to Norfolk Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake on the SouthSide / Tidewater and across Hampton Roads harbor to Hampton - Newport News on the northern Virginia Peninsula. The appellation "City" for any place on the Eastern Shore was romantic, a vision of the future that the railroad might make possible.In 1890, the United States Army Corps of Engineers dredged the harbor basin, its entrance, and a channel through Cherrystone Inlet and built stone jetties protecting the harbor outlet.
![cape charles va cape charles va](https://blueheronva.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Gordons-Photos-4-1536x1024.jpeg)
R.R.) was dredging a new harbor out of a large fresh-water lagoon between King's and Old Plantation creeks in lower Northampton County, and Scott planned to develop a new town around it called Cape Charles City. Thomas writes, "At a cost of nearly $300,000, the New York, Pennsylvania, and Norfolk Railroad (N.Y.P. The original layout of the Town is still very visible today. Seven wider avenues which run from east to west were named for Virginia statesmen and political leaders the streets which run north and south were named for fruits. The original Town was surveyed, platted, and laid out with approximately 136 acres divided into 644 equal lots. In Cape Charles, the Railroad Company built a harbor port to handle steamships and freighters from Cape Charles to Norfolk. In that same year, construction of the railroad began. Some of this land, named Cape Charles for the geographical cape found on the Point and headland to the south, Scott sold to the Railroad Company to serve as the southern terminus of the line on the Delmarva Peninsula from the Northeast states. Of this land, 40 acres were ceded to the NYP&N, and 136 acres went to create the Town of Cape Charles (technically known as the "Municipal Corporation of Cape Charles").
![cape charles va cape charles va](http://www.easternshorevablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Cape-Charles-railroad-and-ferry-stop1.jpg)
In 1883, William Lawrence Scott became president of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad Company (NYP&N), and purchased three plantations comprising approximately 2,509 acres from the heirs of former Virginia Governor Littleton Waller Tazewell. Cape Charles, located close to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, was founded in 1884 as a planned community by railroad and ferry interests.