Hampton

Hampton is a city in southeastern Virginia, at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula on the harbor of Hampton Roads. The Kecoughtan village site was settled by the English in 1610, and the city is counted among the oldest continuously settled English communities in the United States.

The settlement was named after Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, a backer of the Virginia Company. St. John's Episcopal Church holds a parish that has met since the year of the founding, in a brick church of the 18th century. Hampton University was founded in 1868 to teach freed African Americans, and Booker T. Washington studied there before he founded the Tuskegee Institute. Its museum, opened in the same year as the school, is the oldest African American museum in the United States. In the early 20th century the federal government opened an aeronautical laboratory at Langley Field, which later became the Langley Research Center of NASA.

At Langley the Mercury astronauts trained in the early 1960s, and the mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated flight paths for the first American orbital flights, a story told in the film Hidden Figures. Blue crabs and oysters from the Chesapeake Bay are landed and packed in the city, where seafood houses once lined the harbor.

The Virginia Air and Space Science Center, in the downtown waterfront, shows the Apollo 12 command module and aircraft hung from its ceiling. The Hampton Carousel, carved in the 1920s, turns in a glass pavilion by the river, with its original horses and band organ. Buckroe Beach, on the Chesapeake Bay, began as a resort reached by streetcar at the end of the 19th century and has a sandy shore and a small fishing pier.