Classic Restaurants of Coastal Virginia by Evans-Hylton Patrick;

Author:Evans-Hylton, Patrick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Monroe Duncan at Simply Divine Dahlings, Norfolk, 1977. Author’s collection.

VIRGINIA BEACH

Although colonists had landed here in 1607, the area—then known as Princess Anne County—was sparsely populated even into the early twentieth century. There was a larger community in Kempsville (formerly Kemps Landing), but the region was largely agricultural, with a few hamlets here and there; by the 1880s, there were fewer than ten thousand citizens. But as seaside resorts were entering their golden age, an eye turned toward a nice area of land just south of Cape Henry for possible development.

The Seaside Hotel and Land Company, headed by Colonel Marshall Parks (whose father had managed the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point Comfort), formed in 1880 and purchased property along the oceanfront. A clubhouse for sportsmen was built the following year in the yet-to-be-named town of Virginia Beach. In 1882, with the name then secure—tradition says through a contest—a railroad was organized and an eighteen-mile-long route broken ground to connect the new area with Norfolk. The line opened on July 16, 1883, and “between July and September, several thousand visitors danced on the (newly constructed) pavilion floor, waded into the ocean, and dined at tables which only weeks before had been part of the pine forest crowding the shoreline,” according to Stephen S. Mansfield’s book Princess Anne County and Virginia Beach.

The VIRGINIA BEACH HOTEL opened in 1884, and the likes of President Benjamin Harrison, politician Williams Jennings Bryan, capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt and luminary Alexander Graham Bell came to call, noted Mansfield. By 1888, the hotel was significantly altered and expanded and re-christened as the PRINCESS ANNE. Virginia Beach would continue to develop as a seaside resort, with other hotels opening, as well as a number of cottages. It became not just a resort but a true community and incorporated as a town in 1906; the county then had a population of around 11,000. Four years prior, an electric rail line linked Norfolk along the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Henry, and soon Cape Henry and the resort area were linked by rail too. Virginia Beach continued to grow, and the grande dame CAVALIER HOTEL opened in 1926. Over the next few decades, scores more hotels and restaurants opened. The Town of Virginia Beach and Princess Anne County would consolidate in 1963 to form what is today the city of Virginia Beach, the most populated city in the state, with approximately 450,000 residents. More than 6 million people visit here annually according to the Virginia Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Guinness Book of Records says it is the largest pleasure beach in the world.

Cape Henry Casino

By the first decade into the twentieth century, two distinct resort areas were emerging on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean: Virginia Beach and Cape Henry. The latter started on July 4, 1903, when WILLIAM o’KEEFE opened the CAPE HENRY CASINO with much fanfare just under the shadow of the two lighthouses on that curve of land where settlers had first landed almost three hundred years prior.

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