Whaleyville is located midway between the former county seat at downtown Suffolk and the North Carolina border along U.S. Route 13.
[2] In 1877, Seth M. Whaley bought a farm in the southern portion of Nansemond County, Virginia and opened a sawmill nearby.
He worked in cooperation with Jackson Brothers Lumber Company, which was established in the new village of Whaleyville, Virginia.
A branch line extended from Beckford Junction (on the Suffolk-Edenton section) to Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
Whaleyville had 500-600 residents, a cotton gin, peanut storage warehouses, two churches, and one of the best consolidated schools in Nansemond County."
[3] Although Whaleyville is now politically located within a modern city, it is still surrounded substantially by a farms and woodland.
Local Whaleyville residents strive to maintain a small town setting as one of the widely diverse types of communities in Suffolk, which at 430 square miles (1,100 km2), is the largest geographically in Virginia.
Among many parallel tracks considered redundant by the new SCL, the ACL trackage near Whaleyville was also abandoned.
[4] On July 1, 2006, the City of Suffolk assumed control of its roads including those in the Whaleyville area from the Virginia Department of Transportation.