Penniman, Virginia
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Penniman, Virginia was an unincorporated town in northwestern York County, Virginia on the south bank of the York River.
Prior to World War I, the area was lightly populated and used primarily as farmland. Then, in 1916, the E.I. DuPont Nemours company announced that it would develop a large black powder and shell-loading plant facility at Penniman. The publicity department of the DuPont Powder Company, Wilmington, Delaware estimated that there would possibly be about 200 men employed at the new powder plant. In fact, the plant as built was large enough to have ten thousand employees, The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway built a spur track on the Peninsula Subdivision from Williamsburg to the York River site, the C&O depot to be used for the DuPont station which opened on June 1, 1916.
In the fall of 1916, the first unit of the plant at Penniman was completed. Commonly known as the Penniman Plant or as Dupont plant #37, the high wages paid at the plant affected labor in the surrounding area. Farmers were greatly handicapped in putting in their crops owing to the exodus of farm labor to the munition plants. Rents and food prices rose.
In July, 1916, the Williamsburg Chamber of Commerce requested the C&O establish passenger train service between the city and Penniman. By the fall of 1918, Penniman was a town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and there were three passenger trains a day each way between Williamsburg and Penniman.
After World War I, Penniman was used for demilitarization activities. The population of Penniman left with the jobs after the Great War. During the approximately 20 years between 1923 and 1943, the land was in private ownership and was used for farming or left idle.
During World War II, the land was placed into war use again, this time as government-owned storage and shipping facility for the U.S. Navy. Cheatham Annex was commissioned in June 1943 as a satellite unit of the Naval Supply Depot in Norfolk, Virginia to provide bulk storage facilities in the Hampton Roads area. The supplies handled there included bulk storage of gasoline, diesel and other fuels. The rural location was also used to dispose of toxic waste such as medical materials from Navy ships.
Cheatham Annex continued as a supply depot after World War II. A portion of the bulk fuel storage facilities was transferred by the federal government to the Commonwealth of Virginia for use during the domestic fuel crisis periods of the 1970s. Due to extensive pollution, this turned out to be a bad deal for the state. In 1998, oversight of the Cheatham Annex facility was shifted to the adjacent Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.
Cheatham Annex, site of the lost town of Penniman, is bordered to the northwest by Camp Peary, which is reportedly a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) training facility often referred as "The Farm." Much like Penniman, the government takeover of the land into a military facility consumed two other lost towns, Magruder, and Bigler's Mill.
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[edit] Trivia
- Penniman Road, which forms a border of James City and York counties, largely follows the northern portion of the Old Williamsburg Road which led from Yorktown to the old colonial capital city.
See also article Lost counties, cities and towns of Virginia
[edit] Sources
[edit] Publications
- McCartney, Martha W. (1977) James City County: Keystone of the Commonwealth; James City County, Virginia; Donning and Company; ISBN 089865999X
[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
