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New online exhibit offers valuable Newport News history lesson

Old Dominion Land Company exhibit online

A new online exhibit detailing the development of the City of Newport News by the Old Dominion Land Company offers an invaluable resource to teach students about local history, and includes lesson plans and activities for both middle- and high-school teachers.

A new online exhibit detailing the development of the City of Newport News by the Old Dominion Land Company offers an invaluable resource to teach students about local history, and includes lesson plans and activities for both middle- and high-school teachers. 

The exhibit, “There is No Better Place in the Country for a City: The Old Dominion Land Company and the Development of Newport News,” provides original documentation of how the area that is now Newport News evolved from a rural community in 1880 to a major maritime city by the turn of the century. It is free and available on the Newport News Public Library System’s website, www.nngov.com/library, by clicking on “exhibit.”

Collis P. Huntington, one of the “Big Four” of the Transcontinental Railroad, visited the Virginia Peninsula as a young man and thought it was an ideal place for a city.  Later, after his involvement in the Transcontinental Railroad, Huntington remembered the area and decided to use it as a port and as the terminus of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.  During the 1870s he slowly purchased many farms in the area that had been devastated by the Civil War, and acquired control of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company.  In 1896 the City of Newport News was incorporated.  At this time the city already had become the terminus of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, which brought coal from Huntington’s West Virginia coal mines to the city, and had a large port with a dry dock.  Shortly thereafter, the dry dock company became the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, which is still one of the largest shipbuilding facilities in the world. 

The exhibit was created using more than 94,000 maps, blueprints, documents, and photographs of the Old Dominion Land Company.  These records were given to the city of Newport News in 1979 by the son of the last president of the company.  Today the records are housed at the Main Street Library’s Virginiana Room, where all the library’s documents and books related to local history, as well as genealogy resources and rare books, are kept.  The online exhibit was adapted from a freestanding, traveling exhibit. 

The online exhibit is a valuable tool to teach the history of how the city was developed and also a resource for students doing research on any of a number of aspects of the city’s history.  All graphics in the online exhibit can be enlarged by clicking on the picture, which allows viewers to read documents and maps, and see more detail in the images.  A bibliography listing all resources used to research the exhibit is also included on the website, so that students and researchers may find additional information.   

An extended lesson plan and PowerPoint presentation were prepared by Benjamin H. Trask, a Social Studies teacher at the Gildersleeve Middle School.  The PowerPoint presentation can be used as a supplement to the lesson plan to show students the history in a visual manner. The extended lesson plan includes: a Timeline of Newport News and Related National/Global Events, Comparative Timeline of Events between Newport News and World/Nation, Vocabulary, Lesson Sequence and Description, Lesson Extensions, Assessments, Extra Credit, and Key Questions and Bibliography. 

Jessica Mitchell, an Advanced Placement and Traditional United States History teacher at Menchville High School, prepared several projects and resources including:  “Timeline Project: History of Newport News,” “Mapping Project: Newport News Yesterday and Today,” “Document Analysis Lesson: Life in the Industrial City,” and “Suggested Uses for Selected ODLC Artifacts.”  All of these products can be downloaded free from the website, and they adhere to both federal and state education standards.

The exhibit was funded by the Library System’s Dr. Herbert H. Neisser Fund, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Friends of the Newport News Public Library. 

For more information about the exhibit, please call 757-591-4858 or email ggrunow@nngov.com.

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