Biohazard Cleanup Near South Accomac Accomac, VA

Accomac is an incorporated town in and the county seat of Accomack County, Virginia, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Accomack County was established as one of Virginia's eight original shires in 1634, and after the shore was divided into Northampton and Accomack counties in 1663 the court eventually settled in the 1690s at the site that became Accomac, then called Matompkin.

A brick courthouse was built at the site in 1756 and the surrounding settlement became known as Accomack Courthouse.

In 1786 the Virginia House of Delegates passed an act establishing a town at the courthouse under the name Drummond, and the town was long known as Drummondtown before the U.S. Post Office Department renamed it Accomac on August 9, 1893.

The population of Accomac was 526 at the 2020 census, and the town covers only about 0.4 square miles.

The 2000 census counted 547 people and 199 households in Accomac.

Accomac's Debtors' Prison was built in 1783 as the county jailer's residence, converted to a debtors' prison in 1824, and used for that purpose until 1849; it is the oldest public building in Accomack County, one of only three debtors' prisons in the United States on the National Register of Historic Places, and now serves as a local history museum.

The Accomac Historic District was designated in 1982 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992, protecting a town center of late Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival buildings built from the 1790s through the first half of the 1800s.

The town's Romanesque Revival courthouse was erected in 1899 on the site of the 1756 courthouse, and the Victorian brick Clerk's Office on the court green holds court records dating back to 1663.

When the railroad reached the Eastern Shore, residents of the new town of Parksley tried to move the county seat there, but Accomack County voters chose in an 1895 referendum to keep the court in Accomac, where it had sat for two centuries.