According to Norfolk city historian, Peggy Haile McPhillips, Larchmont-Edgewater was mostly farmland in 1906 when a group of Norfolk businessmen purchased about 200 acres in the northwest portion of Norfolk County. The developers began to lay out streets, sidewalks, a water system and landscaping for a new neighborhood.

Early access to the new neighborhood was by streetcar on tracks running down the length of Atlantic and Jamestown boulevards (now Hampton Boulevard), built to accommodate visitors to the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. Realtors T. Marshall Bellamy and J. Thomas Hough were hired to develop Larchmont-Edgewater. They placed a 1909 ad in the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch advertising the new subdivision as "Norfolk's only high class suburb." An article a year later noted that Larchmont was a city of homes beautified by trees and flowers.

Because of the new development's location five miles from the heart of downtown Norfolk, some naysayers predicted that the project would fail. Larchmont was considered to be in the country, and businessmen found it an inconvenient commute by streetcar and few of them owned automobiles. In order to entice purchasers, Bellamy instituted his own bus line, the Larchmont Transit Company, which ran from Commercial Place in downtown Norfolk to Larchmont for five cents a ride. A nickel was known as a "jitney" in those days, and so the bus became known as the Larchmont Jitney.