Accomac

Accomac is a small town and county seat on Virginia's Eastern Shore, a long peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. Accomack County was one of Virginia's eight original shires in 1634. Government remained near Eastville until the Eastern Shore was divided into Northampton and Accomack counties in 1663. The court met alternately at Pungoteague and Onancock before moving in the 1690s to the house of John Cole at the future town site, then known as Matompkin. A brick courthouse was built there in 1756.

Religious life brought further variety. Presbyterian Francis Makemie used a nearby plantation as a base for mercantile and missionary journeys, while Baptist Elijah Baker arrived before the American Revolution and was imprisoned for unauthorized preaching. On 7 December 1786, Richard Drummond and six others petitioned for an incorporated town; the legislature named it Drummond after its chief landholder. Its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and churches show Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival influences, and the settlement prospered as a Chesapeake ferry terminus. During the Civil War, Union forces occupied the Eastern Shore and established headquarters in a local church rectory, but the town escaped heavy damage.

An Indigenous word translated as on the other side survives in the name.