Prior to English colonization beginning at Jamestown, remnants of the Algonquian-speaking Chesapeake native tribe traversed this area. In 1652, George Kempe acquired land at the terminus of the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River, where farmers from the interior moved tobacco, and later timber and grain, into Norfolk by longboat, and a drawbridge allowed oceangoing sailing ships to reach warehouses along the riverbank. By the 1740s, the small port had become one of the Virginia Colony's official tobacco inspection stations. In October 1775, Royal Governor Lord Dunmore unsuccessfully tried to seize militia weapons and gunpowder here, and in November a skirmish on the village's western edge pitted his British troops against locally assembled militiamen nicknamed the Tattered Shirt Brigade because they were so poorly equipped. The deaths of militiaman John Ackiss and six others, the first fatalities in Virginia, along with the imprisonment of Patriot leaders, gave Dunmore an excuse to declare the colony at war and impose martial law. His forces here included the Ethiopian Regiment, made up of formerly enslaved Virginians, and his proclamation offered freedom to slaves who joined the British while ordering area residents to swear loyalty to the Crown; many did so. In 1781, Benedict Arnold again assembled local citizens here to urge loyalty to King George III, but Patriot support remained strong throughout the Revolutionary War. In 1778, residents petitioned successfully to move the Princess Anne County seat from Newtown here, and after the war the village became the town of Kempsville in 1783, with existing irregular property tracts preserved rather than reorganized into a more formal commercial plan. A new courthouse stood by 1787 and a brick jail by 1788 behind Pleasant Hall. As county seat, the town became Princess Anne's only voting site and first post office, and although port activity declined, it remained a primary crossroads to Norfolk and the county's commercial center. The Reverend Anthony Walke III of Fairfield Plantation represented the county at Virginia's 1788 Richmond convention that ratified the United States Constitution, and the following January he served as one of the state's 12 electors and voted for George Washington as the nation's first President.
