Pungo, Creeds & Red Mill

Pungo's name is documented as coming from Machiopungo, described as a chief of the Machipungo, a branch of the Chesapeake (Chesepian) people who lived in this part of southeastern Virginia before sustained English settlement.

Colonist George Percy recorded finding "fine and beautiful Strawberries, four times bigger and better than ours in England" near the First Landing site on April 26, 1607 — the same stretch of southeastern Virginia that includes today's Pungo.

Virginia Beach produces roughly 400 acres of strawberries a year, and most of that crop is grown on family farms in Pungo — a direct continuation of the 1607 record above, not just a similar coincidence.

Per Virginia Beach's own tourism site, the Cullipher family has farmed in Pungo for six generations spanning nearly 200 years — shifting over time from peanuts, cotton, and tobacco to the fruits and vegetables the farm is known for today.

The Pungo Strawberry Festival ran every Memorial Day weekend from the 1980s through 2019 — "36 years of a beloved, legacy festival," per one of its own organizers — but has been cancelled every year since 2020 (first for COVID-19, then for parking and land-use problems) and remains on hiatus while organizers look for a new venue.

Pungo's farmland drains toward Back Bay to its east. Per the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, draining former wooded swampland for farming — combined with discharge from large hog farms — contributed to a documented collapse of Back Bay's fishery in the mid-1980s, a reminder that this area's fields and its waters have never been separate stories.

Pungo was home to one of the historic waterfowl-hunting clubs that once ringed Back Bay and Currituck Sound — the Winchester (Pungo) Gunning Club, one of roughly 100 such clubs active at the sport's turn-of-the-century peak, per a 1997 Virginian-Pilot account of the clubs' decline.

Before a bridge crossed the North Landing River at Pungo Ferry, a ferry ran people, vehicles, and horses across; a steel turnstile bridge replaced it in 1928, and the high-rise bridge still used today opened in 1991.

Per the City of Virginia Beach's own African American history driving tour, Asbury Christian Fellowship Church at 1392 Princess Anne Road — originally Asbury United Methodist Church — was founded in the Pungo community in 1871 by African Americans. Its frame building was damaged by a hurricane in 1944 and rebuilt in 1949.

Creeds School was built for the 1939-40 school year with Works Progress Administration funding — a twelve-room building that served grades one through high school for the rural Creeds community until a countywide high school opened in 1954.

The Creeds Ruritan Club has served the community continuously since 1948 — "78 years of Service to Our Community," per its own site — today operating a community complex with a rentable barn and offering local scholarships, per the club chartered with Monroe Mayo as its first president.

Like Pungo, Creeds had its own historic waterfowl-hunting club — the Creeds Gunning Club, one of the roughly 100 clubs that once ringed Back Bay and Currituck Sound, per the same 1997 Virginian-Pilot account. Redhead Bay Café's own dining room, in Creeds, carries this heritage forward directly: it displays carved decoys by local artisans and vintage maps of the Back Bay region, per Coastal Virginia Magazine's feature on the café.

Today's Red Mill is anchored by the Red Mill Commons shopping center, which opened in 2001. Surrounding residential neighborhoods carry the "Red Mill Farm" name, suggesting the land was farmed before suburban development — but no source checked for this guide confirms exactly when, or whether an actual mill structure ever stood here.

Only at Renee's operated in Red Mill from its opening until relocating to Virginia Beach's Oceanfront in mid-2025 (see its own listing), and sat within a documented regional migration while it was here: from 1952 to 1991, roughly 35,000 Filipino nationals joined the U.S. Navy through a recruitment program that, despite initially limiting them to lower-paid roles, offered a path to citizenship. Businesses serving the growing Filipino American community "sprouted in the suburban strip malls of southeastern Virginia" from the 1960s onward — historically centered in Virginia Beach's Kempsville neighborhood, not Red Mill itself — and Hampton Roads is now home to an estimated 50,000-plus Filipino Americans, per National Geographic.

While at Red Mill, owner Emma Dizon said her family "make[s] everything by hand here" at Only at Renee's — with one specific exception: the longganisa (a Filipino sausage), which her father makes in New York and ships to her in Virginia Beach. (The restaurant has since relocated to Virginia Beach's Oceanfront — see its own listing for its current location; nothing sourced here confirms whether this practice continues at the new site.)

She-crab soup's origin is genuinely disputed. Charleston, SC's own account credits a butler, William Deas, with inventing it in 1909 for a presidential visit. A competing account from a Chesapeake-region chef holds that a similar bisque existed earlier in Maryland and Virginia, carried south later. Chesapeake Bay Magazine doesn't resolve which is correct — but notes that today, "almost every restaurant in Virginia's Tidewater region serves some version" of it, regardless of where it began.