Description
This week on Tidewater Talk, we covered a wide mix of Coastal Virginia stories, from another round of flash flooding in Norfolk to West Nile virus turning up in mosquitoes across multiple Virginia Beach neighborhoods. We also talked through a headline-making lawsuit involving a former Norfolk police officer and her privacy complaint against the department, and then shifted into one of our favorite lanes: the strange and memorable corners of local history. This week’s “Strange and Odd of Tidewater” spotlight was Portsmouth’s long-running Winter Wonderland animatronic Christmas display, a community-loved holiday attraction with roots going back decades and a story that includes fire, restoration, and a second life at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center.
We also shared the latest local forecast, with comfortable mid-80s temperatures, storm chances building later in the week, and an eye on two tropical disturbances in the Atlantic. To wrap things up, we swapped a few Tidewater tips for the weekend, including Maker Fest Portsmouth, the East Coast Surfing Championships, a “dive-in” screening of Finding Nemo at Ocean Breeze Waterpark, and Moth Night at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Plus, we dropped a new local history trivia clue centered on the Great Dismal Swamp.
Where in Tidewater
- In 1763 a young George Washington rode down here, looked the place over, and called it a glorious paradise. Then he and eleven other Virginians started a company to drain it, cut it up, and sell it off. It did not work. Two hundred and sixty years later it still has not worked.
- The oldest hand-dug waterway still in use anywhere in this country runs right along its edge, twenty-two miles of it, dug by enslaved workers standing waist-deep in mud between 1793 and 1805. And there is a five-mile ditch cut straight through the middle of this place that still carries Washington's name.
- For about two hundred years, people who had freed themselves from slavery lived out on the dry islands in the middle of it. Whole communities, some of them born out there and never leaving. Archaeologists have dug up their cabins. Today the whole thing is a national wildlife refuge, a hundred and twelve thousand acres, and the line between Suffolk and Chesapeake runs right through it.