Virginia Peninsula

• 1. Introduction

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  The Virginia Peninsula juts into the waters of southeast Virginia, bounded by the York River, the James River, Hampton Roads, and the Chesapeake Bay. It is a strip of land where the oldest English foothold in North America meets one of the largest shipyards in the world, where Spanish explorers once mapped a bay they called Bahia de Madre de Dios, and where the decisive battle of the American Revolution was fought in 1781. How did a patch of tidewater land become the site of so many turning points in American history? And what does it look like today, as part of a metropolitan area of about 1.8 million people stretching across the seventh-largest metro region in the Southeast?

• 2. Before Jamestown

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  Early in the 16th century, Spanish explorers became the first Europeans to lay eyes on the Chesapeake Bay. They were searching for the Northwest Passage to India and the Orient, and they called the bay Bahia de Madre de Dios, or Bahia de Santa Maria. The land now known as Virginia they named Ajacán.

  The Spanish did not linger on the Peninsula, but they were far from idle in the broader region. By 1565 they had planted a colonial settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, the first European town in what is now the United States. Outposts spread up the eastern coast into present-day Georgia and the Carolinas. The northernmost of these was Santa Elena, at the site of today's Port Royal, South Carolina.

  From Santa Elena, a commander named Juan Pardo was commissioned to push inland. Between 1567 and 1568 he established Fort San Juan at the chiefdom of Joara, a Mississippian culture site in present-day western North Carolina. That fort holds the distinction of being the first European settlement in the interior of North America, a fact that tends to get overshadowed by later English arrivals to its north.

• 3. First Footings

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  In 1607, the first permanent English settlement in North America took shape at Jamestown on the Virginia Peninsula. But Jamestown was not the only early settlement on this stretch of land. The first continuously occupied settlement was at Kecoughtan, in Elizabeth City County, in what is now the City of Hampton.

  Nearby stood Old Point Comfort, home to Fort Monroe, once described as the country's oldest military base still in use. Old Point Comfort carries another singular distinction: it is the site of the first landing of Africans in America, in 1619.

  After independence from Great Britain, Virginia's first state capital was Williamsburg, on the Peninsula's interior. That capital city later witnessed one of the most consequential events of the Revolutionary War. The siege of Yorktown, fought in 1781, played out on Virginia Peninsula soil and delivered the decisive blow to British forces in America.

  Jamestown itself, for all its founding importance, was largely abandoned as a town after 1699, when Middle Plantation was renamed Williamsburg and assumed the capital's role.

• 4. Civil War on the Peninsula

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  In 1862, the Virginia Peninsula became the corridor for one of the most ambitious Union campaigns of the Civil War. The Peninsula Campaign launched from Fort Monroe at the entrance to Hampton Roads, a post that had remained in Union hands even after Virginia seceded in 1861.

  At the very start of that campaign, near the mouth of the James River off the eastern tip of Warwick County, the Battle of Hampton Roads unfolded between the first ironclad warships ever to face each other in combat. Along the York River, the 1862 Siege of Yorktown added another chapter to that ground's already crowded history.

  The campaign's ultimate failure came not in a single dramatic clash but in a slow-motion standoff. The largest Union Army of the war, under General George B. McClellan, chased retreating Confederate forces westward along the Williamsburg Line, pushing them all the way to what the source describes as the "Gates of Richmond". There, the swampy upper reaches of the Chickahominy River formed a natural barrier behind which Confederate defenders held their capital and, in doing so, extended the war for three more devastating years.

• 5. Coal, Rail, and Newport News

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  After the Civil War, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, led by entrepreneur Collis P. Huntington, drove its tracks from Richmond all the way to the Ohio River by 1871. The Peninsula itself had been without a railroad for decades, as rail technology had only begun developing in the 1830s.

  That changed in 1881, when the Peninsula Extension of the C&O pushed through from Richmond, passing Williamsburg and reaching Newport News Point. Huntington, through his Old Dominion Land Company, had a vision for what that terminus could become. Within fifteen years, a rural farm community in Warwick County had transformed into the independent city of Newport News by 1896. New coal piers brought oceangoing ships to what would grow into the world's largest shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company.

  The rail line seeded growth far beyond Newport News. In Elizabeth City County, tracks reached Old Point Comfort, where resort hotels and Buckroe Beach brought visitors. A new town incorporated there took the name Phoebus, after one of its early leading citizens, Harrison Phoebus. Further inland, Oyster Point became a shipping hub for watermen, and Lee Hall emerged as a significant stop due to its closeness to Yorktown and later to Fort Eustis.

  In James City County, the village of Norge arose in the early 20th century, a planned development by a C&O land agent designed to attract farmers of Scandinavian descent from the colder regions of the American Midwest.

• 6. Military Expansion and Colonial Williamsburg

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  During the two world wars, the Virginia Peninsula was reshaped by military need. Vast reservations were carved out for what became Langley Air Force Base, Fort Eustis, Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, and Camp Peary. To make room, entire communities vanished: Lackey, Halstead's Point, Penniman, Bigler's Mill, and Magruder were erased, as was all of Mulberry Island. Many displaced Virginians relocated to Grove in James City County and nearby areas.

  At the same time, a very different kind of construction was underway in Williamsburg. After Virginia's capital moved to Richmond in 1780 for wartime security, Williamsburg had slowly faded. By the early 20th century it was described as a "sleepy little hamlet", known mainly for the College of William and Mary, Eastern State Hospital (successor to the country's first mental hospital), and its decaying colonial buildings.

  Beginning in 1926, the Reverend Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin championed a sweeping restoration of the colonial capital. He found a partner in John D. Rockefeller Jr., patriarch of the Rockefeller family, whose wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller also played an active role in the project. The resulting Colonial Williamsburg became one of the largest historic restorations ever undertaken.

  The restoration, the U.S. National Park Service's construction of the Colonial Parkway, improvements at Jamestown and Yorktown, and the arrival of theme parks including Busch Gardens Williamsburg from the 1970s onward combined to make the Historic Triangle area one of the most-visited tourist destinations in the United States by the close of the 20th century.

• 7. A Peninsula of Cities

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  The Virginia Peninsula today comprises four independent cities and two counties: Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson, and Williamsburg form the cities; James City County and York County make up the county tier. Unlike much of Virginia, the Peninsula has no incorporated towns.

  That tidy present-day map was reached through decades of consolidation. In 1960, the U.S. Census Bureau designated the Newport News-Hampton Metropolitan Statistical Area, covering Newport News, Hampton, and York County. By 1983, the MSA had absorbed Poquoson, Williamsburg, Gloucester County, and James City County before merging with the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Portsmouth MSA to form what became the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News MSA.

  Behind those boundary changes were real communities being folded into larger governments. Elizabeth City County, which had existed since 1643, became part of the city of Hampton in 1952. Warwick County, equally ancient, became part of Newport News in the same year. The City of Warwick then survived only until 1958, when it too merged into Newport News. No fewer than eleven shires, counties, towns, and cities have ceased to exist by their original names within the Virginia Peninsula area.

  The state constitutional changes of 1871 had set the template for this process, making future Virginia cities independent of the counties they once belonged to. That legal structure, combined with explosive 20th-century growth, produced a region where some cities still contain significant farmland more than thirty years after their consolidations.