On a Monday evening in September, the lights at Bayville Farms Park click on for another Coastal Virginia Disc Golf Club league round, the same weekly ritual that's been drawing regulars to this 68-acre park off First Court Road for years. A few miles away on Parish Road, a guide is locking up the Thoroughgood House for the night after the last tour of the day. And down along the Lynnhaven River, a waterman is pulling cages before the tide drops too far to wade. Three completely different Monday nights, three completely different crowds. Almost nobody doing any of them realizes they're all standing on the same family's land.
That's not a metaphor. It's a property record. The park, the house, and the oyster farm's name all trace back to Captain Adam Thoroughgood, a 17th-century colonist whose land holdings and family name still shape how this stretch of Bayside identifies itself three centuries later. Once you see the thread, you can't stop noticing it every time you drive Shore Drive or walk your dog past the disc golf tee pads.
A Park Older Than Most of Bayside's Houses, on Land Older Still
Bayville Farms Park was established in 1978 through a joint effort between the City of Virginia Beach, the National Park Service, and Virginia's Department of Conservation and Recreation. That's the modern part of the story. The land itself was once part of Captain Adam Thoroughgood's holdings dating to 1643, and by the early 19th century it had become the Bayville Farms estate, which is where the park gets its name.
The disc golf course inside the park has its own overlapping history. It was designed in 1977 by Ed Headrick, widely credited as the inventor of the modern disc golf basket, which makes it one of the oldest courses on the entire Atlantic Coast. Eighteen holes wind through mostly wooded terrain with two baskets per hole, and it's free to play on a first-come, first-served basis. It's not a museum piece either. The Coastal Virginia Disc Golf Club runs a regular Monday Night League on the course, and the club's Bayville Bash tournament reached its 21st year in 2026.
The park also sits directly next to the Bayside Recreation Center, which closed August 31 through September 6, 2026 for its annual maintenance week (the pool closed even earlier, on August 23) and reopens September 8, the day after Labor Day. If the parking lot has looked emptier than usual the past week, that's why. Bayside's rec-center rhythm and its disc golf rhythm run on completely different calendars, but they share a fence line.
The House That Gave the Land Its Name
Drive a few minutes from the park and you land on Parish Road, where the Thoroughgood House still stands. Built around 1719 by Argall and Susannah Thorowgood, with later Georgian woodwork and the dramatic central staircase added by their son John, the house is one of Virginia Beach's oldest surviving colonial structures. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and the City of Virginia Beach acquired it in 2003.
Tours are free and run every 45 minutes on the days it's open: Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Walk-ins are welcome, though the museum encourages reservations, especially for groups. It's one of four sites under Virginia Beach History Museums, alongside the Francis Land House, the Lynnhaven House, and the Princess Anne County Training School/Union Kempsville High School Museum, but it's the one whose name shows up on a property deed a mile and a half away at a public park most people know only for its dog runs and pickleball courts.
Here's a quick reference if you're plotting a fall afternoon around this corner of Bayside:
| Landmark | What it is | Access | Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bayville Farms Park | 68-acre park with 18-hole disc golf course, off-leash dog park, tennis and pickleball courts | Free, first-come, first-served | 4132 First Court Road |
| Thoroughgood House | Circa-1719 colonial home, National Historic Landmark | Free guided tours, Thu-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 1-5pm | 1636 Parish Road |
| Pleasure House Oysters | Working oyster farm with boat tours on the Lynnhaven River | Tours by reservation, Waterman Tour typically runs May through September | Departs from Lynnhaven River access points |
Where the Family Name Ends Up on a Menu
The third landmark in this triangle doesn't look historical at all. Pleasure House Oysters is a working aquaculture farm on the Lynnhaven River, founded in 2010 by the Ludford brothers. But the name isn't a marketing invention. It's a direct reference to Ye Old Pleasure House, a historic tavern started by the same colonist, Adam Thoroughgood, whose land grant put the family name on the park and the house.
The oysters themselves have their own comeback story worth knowing if you've never taken one of the farm's tours. Lynnhaven oysters were famous enough in the 1800s that they were served to European royalty, but by 1990 the river's oyster population had collapsed to just 1 percent of its historical levels. A sustained restoration effort brought the beds back, and operations like Pleasure House Oysters now run Chef's Table, Tasting, and Waterman tours that put visitors in waders, standing in the river, watching cages get pulled and oysters get shucked on the spot.
So the same 17th-century family name shows up on a city park's disc golf scorecard, a museum's tour brochure, and an oyster farm's shipping label, all within a couple of miles of each other in Bayside.
Why the Overlap Actually Matters
It would be easy to file this under neighborhood trivia and move on, except the pattern underneath it says something real about how this part of Virginia Beach names things. None of these three landmarks were named by a developer looking for a marketable brand. Bayville Farms Park is named for a 19th-century farm estate that grew out of Thoroughgood's original grant. The Thoroughgood House is named, obviously, for the family that built it and lived in it. And Pleasure House Oysters didn't invent a name either. It borrowed one from a 300-year-old tavern.
Even the beach a short drive north follows the same logic. Chesapeake Beach, better known locally as Chick's Beach, gets its everyday name from Luther "Chic" Ledington, a hot dog vendor who worked that stretch of sand in the 1950s. Bayside keeps naming its landmarks after the people who actually worked the land and the water, not after whoever happened to be selling it.
That's useful to know if you live here, because it changes how you read the neighborhood. This isn't a corner of Virginia Beach that got dressed up with colonial-sounding street names after the fact. The history is load-bearing. The disc golf course you play on a Monday night sits on ground a sea captain owned in 1643. The oysters on your plate carry the name of a tavern that same captain's descendants ran. And the museum tour you've been meaning to take with your kids explains exactly how all of it connects.
If you're heading out this fall, the Waterman Tour season at Pleasure House Oysters typically runs through September, so there's a real window closing on that one before it goes quiet for the year. The Thoroughgood House keeps its Thursday-through-Sunday schedule year-round. And Bayville Farms Park, whose rec center reopens tomorrow after its maintenance week, doesn't close for anything.
Living in a place is different from just passing through it, and part of what makes Bayside worth the long game is exactly this kind of layered detail: the way a Monday night disc golf round and a colonial land grant and a working oyster farm all turn out to be the same story, told three different ways, a couple of miles apart.
If you're thinking about what your own corner of Virginia Beach is actually worth, or you're weighing a move into a neighborhood with this kind of texture, Alison McCarthy can walk you through it block by block. Get Your Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what makes your part of Virginia Beach worth knowing this well.
