Naval Weapons Station Yorktown
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Naval Weapons Station Yorktown is a United States Navy base in York County and James City County in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. It provides a weapons and ammunition storage and loading facility for ships of the US Atlantic Fleet.
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[edit] Location
The Naval Weapons Station Complex (including Cheatham Annex) is 20.7 square miles (54 km²) in size, roughly 1/5 of the total land area of York County, in which most of it lies, although a small portion is within James City County as well. Naval Weapons Station borders the cities of Newport News and Williamsburg, and shares almost 14 miles of the York River shoreline (about half of York County's York River shoreline and wetlands) with the National Park Service. Adjacently located is Camp Peary, which also occupies a considerable tract of land and incorporates a large frontage on the York River on the northern side of the Virginia Peninsula.
The land of NWS Yorktown is rich in colonial era (1607-1776) history, as well as that of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The station sits amidst a setting of natural beauty surrounded by the distant echo of the first settlers in Virginia and the battle cries of the American Revolutionary War. Long before the world ever conceived of such things as the testing and evaluation that now go on at the weapons station, the infantry of the American Revolution and the American Civil War slogged along the Old Williamsburg Road where today it runs through the station. The oldest structure onboard the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station is the Lee House, built around 1649.
[edit] History
Prior to the outbreak of World War I, the DuPont Company acquired a 4,000 acre site on the banks of the York River for construction of a dynamite plant which came to be known as Penniman. However, before production actually commenced, the site was acquired for the Navy by a presidential proclamation on August 7, 1918, and was at the time the largest naval installation in the world. The original purpose was to establish the Navy Mine Depot, Yorktown. When the United States, during World War I, undertook stupendous operation of laying the North Sea barrage, it was necessary that there be a plant in the United States on the Atlantic Seaboard where mines, after being manufactured, could be stored, assembled, loaded, tested and issued to the Service in quantities sufficient to meet the insistent demands of war. Also a place was needed to build up and train personnel in the adjustment and operation of mines. A tract of land, about eighteen square miles of area near Yorktown, Virginia, was selected as the best location on the East Coast to concentrate the Navy's mine activities. The Bureau of Ordnance of the Navy Department assumed possession one month later.
The reasons for selecting Yorktown as a Mine Depot were many. It was conveniently located with respect to the Navy Operating Base at Hampton Roads, the Norfolk Navy Yard, and the Fuel Bases of the Fifth Naval District. Excellent transportation facilities are available, the main lines of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad forming one of the boundaries of the Depot, and five miles of waterfront on the navigable York River, where ocean-going vessels of largest size and deepest draft can navigate, forming another boundary.
To make way for the new Mine Depot, the property of many primarily African American landowners and tenants along the former Yorktown-Williamsburg Road in the community of Lackey (locally known since the 19th century as simply "the Reservation"), was taken to create the new military reservation. Assisted by self-educated farmer John Pack Roberts (born approximately 1860), many of the displaced residents of Lackey were able to obtain financial compensation for their property and many relocated to the community of Grove in nearby James City County. Another small community, also named Lackey, was later developed along the Yorktown Road a few miles away. However, the original Lackey is now considered one of the many lost towns of Virginia. As many as 10,000 persons worked at the facility during World War I with many living in the town of Penniman (est. pop., 15,000). It, too, has vanished, as has the community of Halstead's Point, which was located near the present main gate off State Route 143.
[edit] Current use
Over the years, the growth and expansion of the Navy's technical requirements and responsibilities have been reflected by corresponding developments at the station to support the Atlantic Fleet.
As part of the Navy’s Mid-Atlantic installation consolidation, Cheatham Annex, formerly an annex of the Fleet Industrial Supply Center, Norfolk, was incorporated with the station on October 1, 1998. This area of land located in the Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown area known as the Historic Triangle of Colonial Virginia was acquired by the Navy on June 21, 1943. Cheatham Annex includes the former site of the "lost town" of Penniman, Virginia.
Naval Weapons Station Yorktown hosts 25 tenant commands which include the Atlantic Ordnance Command, the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity, the Marine Corps Second Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team, Fleet Industrial Supply Center Detachment, Fleet Hospital Support Office, Navy Cargo Handling and Port Group and 19 Storefronts.
The station and tenant commands work together as a team to provide ordnance logistics, technical, supply and related services to the Atlantic Fleet. Today the station is a hub of activity. As one of the Navy's "explosive corridors" to the sea, supply, amphibious and combatant ships may be seen arriving and departing the station's two piers.
The USS Simpson (FFG-56) conducted the first frigate to frigate weapons transfer.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
[edit] Publications
- McCartney, Martha W. (1977) James City County: Keystone of the Commonwealth; James City County, Virginia; Donning and Company; ISBN 0-89865-999-X
[edit] Websites
- "Cast Down Your Buckets Where You Are" An Ethnohistorical Study of the African-American Community on the Lands of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station 1865-1918
