HAMPTON, a city of south-eastern Virginia, U.S.A., 15m.
N.W. of Norfolk, on Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the James river; the county seat of Elizabeth City county. It is served by the Chesapeake and Ohio railway and by ferries to Norfolk. The population was 6,138 in 1920 (35% negroes) and was 6,382 in 1930 by the Federal census. The city ships large quantities of oysters, fish, crab meat, and garden truck. It is the seat of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (for negroes and Indians), founded in 1868 by the American Missionary Association and chartered independently in 1870. The institute has been a very influential factor in the development of educational theories and opportunities for negroes, training many of their leaders (includ ing Booker T. Washington), publishing The Southern Workman, and stimulating the establishment of numerous other industrial schools on the same principles. Langley field, headquarters of the Second Wing of the Army Air Corps and of the Air Corps Tactical school, is at Hampton; and at Ft. Monroe, which guards the entrance to Hampton Roads, 3m. S.E., is the Coast Artillery school. There is a branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers at Hampton, and a national cemetery con taining over 13,000 graves. Hampton was settled in 1610 on the site of an Indian village, Kecoughtan, a name it kept for some time, and was represented at the first meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619. It was incorporated as a town in 1887, and became a city in 1908. Since 1920 it has had a com mission-manager form of government. It was fired by the British in the war of 1812, and by the Confederates in Aug. 1861. During the Civil War a large Union hospital was maintained here in the building of a college established in 1857. St. John's church, built in the year 1727, has the original communion set presented by the Crown.