Hampton Bankruptcy Attorney — Chapter 7 & 13

Hampton is an independent city of approximately 135,000 residents anchoring the northern Peninsula of Hampton Roads. It holds the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously inhabited English settlements in America — English colonists established Point Comfort and then Elizabeth City (the precursor to Hampton) in 1610, just three years after the founding of Jamestown. For more than four centuries, Hampton has been shaped by the sea, by military power, and by the people who built it.

The city’s most significant geographic feature is Fort Monroe, the massive Union fortress at Old Point Comfort that juts into the Chesapeake Bay. During the Civil War, Fort Monroe became the site of a defining moment in American history: in May 1861, three enslaved men — Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Sheppard Mallory — escaped to the fort seeking freedom. General Benjamin Butler famously refused to return them to their Confederate owner, declaring them “contraband of war.” Word spread quickly, and within weeks thousands of freedom-seekers had made their way to Fort Monroe. The resulting Contraband Camp became one of the largest communities of self-emancipated people during the war. The camp’s teacher, Mary Peake, held the first known reading class for formerly enslaved people under what became known as the Emancipation Oak — a tree still standing on the campus of Hampton University, designated by National Geographic as one of the Ten Great Trees of the World. Fort Monroe was designated a National Monument in 2011 and today offers walking tours, a museum, and a remarkable window into American history.

Hampton University, founded in 1868 as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, is one of the nation’s premier historically Black universities. Booker T. Washington was among its earliest students. The university’s waterfront campus along the Hampton River and its historic buildings remain an anchor of the city’s identity and economy. Just east of the university, NASA Langley Research Center — established in 1917 as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory — is the nation’s oldest aerospace research facility. Langley’s engineers and scientists pioneered wind tunnel testing, shaped the aerodynamics of World War II aircraft, and designed the space capsules that carried American astronauts to the moon. The “Hidden Figures” — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — worked at Langley, and their contributions to spaceflight were immortalized in the 2016 film of the same name.

Joint Base Langley-Eustis — the merger of Langley Air Force Base and Fort Eustis — is one of the region’s largest employers, home to the F-22 Raptor and thousands of active-duty servicemembers and their families. Hampton’s military community is substantial, and veterans and military households represent a significant share of the city’s bankruptcy filings. The Buckroe Beach neighborhood along the Chesapeake Bay offers a public beach and waterfront park, while the historic Phoebus district features galleries, restaurants, and Victorian architecture. All bankruptcy cases from the city of Hampton are filed at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, EDVA Newport News Division, 2400 West Avenue, Newport News, VA 23607.