Victoria was founded in 1906 as a planned community on what had been largely undeveloped land during the construction of the Tidewater Railway. This was a new east-west railroad chartered in 1904 with its right of way quietly secured in 1904 and 1905, so as to not alert the competition regarding plans to transport coal originated by its sister Deepwater Railway operating in southern West Virginia. The Tidewater Railway was chartered to cross Virginia from the West Virginia border near Glen Lyn, Virginia in Giles County by way of Roanoke and Suffolk to port at Sewell's Point on Hampton Roads near Norfolk, Virginia. Both railroads were planned and built by the team of mining manager and civil engineer William Nelson Page and industrialist and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, and added a third Hampton Roads coal exporting railhead to the existing Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (with coal piers at Newport News) and the Norfolk and Western Railway's similar facilities at Norfolk's Lambert's Point.