This is a place with glowing credentials. On their way to Jamestown, where they would build the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Englishmen landed at Cape Henry in 1607 where 26-year-old Master George Percy was moved to write, "Heaven and Earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitations than Virginia." The settlers were impressed with the area's natural beauty and observed, "flowers of divers kinds and colors and goodly trees." They also encountered Chesapeake Indians who left them a fire with oysters roasting on it. These oysters were to become our famous Lynnhaven oysters.

This was also a place where notorious pirates lured unsuspecting ships' crews to Cape Henry, poun cing on them and taking their cargo. Tales of Blackbeard and his buried treasure still swirl. If treasure was hidden here, it has yet to be found.

Now to the twentieth century. Before Point Chesapeake was developed, the land upon which it was built belonged to Duck-In, a popular waterfront restaurant and banquet facility. Duck-In began as a small roadside diner and carry-out store right on the shoulder of Shore Drive, next to the old Lesner Bridge and train trestle. Duck-In's unusual name was the result of an informal naming contest held on a Friday evening in 1952, when it was pointed out that the place was so small you had to "duck-in" and "duck-out" of the door.