WACHAPREAGUE, Va. (Delmarva Now) — The Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Lab in Wachapreague is getting a $17 million upgrade and expansion to its campus that will include six new facilities.
Plans for the construction project were announced at a town hall meeting Oct. 26.
A groundbreaking ceremony is planned for June 2019.
The project includes a total of more than 22,000 square feet of construction and replacement of several existing structures, including the administration building, which dates to 1961, and the Castagna Shellfish Research Hatchery.
Also being replaced are the Owens House visitor center, along with maintenance and storage facilities.
A new education center, designed to expand the facility's research capabilities, will be added to the campus and will be built behind Seaside Hall.
Construction is expected to start in July 2019, with an estimated completion date of March 2021.
Additional land was purchased in August 2018 to allow for the expansion.
The Virginia General Assembly approved a capital budget request of $17.2 million for the project.
The project will be done in three phases in order to allow research work at the facility to continue.
"We're trying not to take anything offline through the whole thing," said Richard Snyder, director of the VIMS Eastern Shore Laboratory, which is part of the College of William and Mary.
"This is the original building here — this was the lab, and the offices and everything was in this one building," Snyder said, speaking inside the brick administration building.
"Five of these buildings are to replace existing capacity," he said, while the sixth, the education center, will allow for the addition of more researchers at the facility.
VIMS' Wachapreague campus previously added two new buildings — the Seawater Lab and Seaside Hall — in 2012.
The new buildings, for the most part, will be built farther back from the shoreline, with exception of the aquaculture lab.
"We're trying to move things up out of the floodplain," Snyder said.
Additionally, the new visitor center and education center will be built on stilts, as was Seaside Hall, and will be similar in architectural style.
The new administration building, being constructed in the same footprint as the existing building, will feature a public display area.
"Right now, there's no place for the public to go when they come in. So, there will be a new lobby and display area for the general public," Snyder said.
The Castagna aquaculture laboratory will be moved farther out onto the waterfront when it is rebuilt.
"The hatchery (the Castagna building) picks up the design of the Seawater Lab," Snyder said.
VIMS has a long history of doing marine science research in Wachapreague.
VIMS established the Eastern Shore Lab as a field laboratory in about 1960, but there previously also had been a small research facility in town during World War II.
"There was a building out here in 1941, a little clapboard building. It disappeared in 1946. I'm not sure where it went; somebody said it got moved and attached to somebody's house," Snyder said.
Researchers at the time were working under a contract with the DuPont Corporation to study methods of culturing ribbed mussels, which were then in demand as a source of vitamin D, according to a 1961 report of the Commission of Fisheries of Virginia.
Budget limitations after DuPont ended support for the project led to its abandonment in 1946.
VIMS established the field station in Wachapreague in August 1959 to monitor the spread of oyster pathogens in nearby waters, according to a history published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America in 1998.
The facility was temporarily located at the Wachapreague Marina, until the present-day administration building was constructed.
The facility served then, and continues to serve today, both as a field station to support research and education and as a location for resident research in aquaculture and coastal ecology.
A student intern program was established in 2009 for area high school students.
Among other accomplishments, research and development leading to today's thriving hard clam aquaculture industry was done at the Wachapreague lab.
Today's research at the facility includes, among many other topics, study into the restoration of seaside bay scallops.
