Seatack is a historic African American neighborhood in Virginia Beach, located just over a mile west of the Atlantic oceanfront. The Seatack Historic District is focused around Birdneck Road and features modest vernacular dwellings and other popular residential styles. The district includes a school, cemeteries, a park, and a historic church. The street pattern and housing evolved organically as families sold larger parcels and the makeup of the community moved from largely agricultural to mostly working-class. The citizens of Seatack, through family and church connections, have kept the community intact through intense periods of intrusive development. Significant for its African American ethnic heritage, the Seatack Historic District’s core historic period spans from 1915, the date of the oldest house, to 1969, when large-scale apartment complexes began to populate the edge of the older area. The origins of Seatack may well go back into the 1800s and earlier, a period when Princess Anne County had free and enslaved African Americans. After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period, African American communities organized in several areas of the County (Princess Anne County became the City of Virginia Beach in 1963). In the 1890s Georgie Anne Williams and William Newton Williams Sr. owned approximately one hundred acres along what is now Birdneck Road. As one of the founding families, they farmed the land and raised horses. Georgie was a former enslaved person and served as a midwife in the community of mostly freedmen. Over time, the Williams family divided the property and various generations helped develop the Seatack of today. Other significant Seatack people noted in the historic designation include Sarah Parsons Daughtry, teacher and founder of the first Seatack School (c. 1908); members of the first Seatack Volunteer Fire Department, which was created in 1948; Emma Hairston, the first principal of the consolidated Seatack Elementary School (1952) and a founding member of the Virginia Beach branch of the NAACP; Reverend Clarence Morgan, who hosted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at his home in Seatack during King’s four local visits in the 1960s. Four historic cemeteries are included in the district and mark the many names of Seatack residents from early years to the present.