Captain Francis Eppes patented the land in 1635 — twenty-eight years after the colonists at Jamestown first stepped off the Susan Constant. By the time the Civil War came, the property had been in the Eppes family for 229 years and covered more than 2,300 acres. The current manor house dates to 1763, with later additions. The land was worked by enslaved people. Dr. Richard Eppes, who owned three plantations on the eve of the war, held nearly 130 men, women, and children in bondage — a fact the National Park Service now confronts directly in its interpretation. The historical record names few of them. They built the wealth that built the house.

Richard Eppes was a reluctant secessionist — a man who profited from slavery but doubted the wisdom of armed rebellion. When Virginia seceded in April 1861, he joined a local cavalry unit anyway, then transferred to surgeon's duty at a Confederate hospital in Petersburg. In 1862 Union gunboats steamed up the James River. The Eppes family fled to Petersburg, then north to Philadelphia. The enslaved people they left behind seized the chance and walked off the plantation with the Union forces — practical, immediate emancipation, two years before the Thirteenth Amendment. They were among hundreds of thousands of Black Virginians who made the same choice when the chance came.

In June 1864, Grant chose City Point as his headquarters for the long siege of Petersburg. Within months the sleepy port became one of the busiest harbors in the world. Quartermaster Rufus Ingalls used Appomattox Manor as his offices. Engineers built a seven-mile wharf complex with eight piers. The City Point Railroad — twenty-one miles of track laid over nine months of siege — ran flat-loaded supply trains right to the siege lines. Bakeries baked 100,000 loaves of bread per day. The Depot Field Hospital treated 10,000 wounded at a time. President Lincoln came down by steamer twice; on the second visit, in late March 1865, he spent two weeks at City Point and met with Grant on the eve of the final Confederate collapse.

Petersburg fell on April 2, 1865. Richmond fell the next day. A week after that, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House — and the war was effectively over. The last Union regiments left City Point in early 1866. When Dr. Eppes returned in March, he found the house standing but the plantation system gone forever. His wife and children came back from Philadelphia. They tried to rebuild what could be rebuilt with paid labor, but the antebellum world that had supported the property could not be reconstructed. The Eppes family donated the manor and grounds to the National Park Service in the twentieth century. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.

The bluff is quiet now. The wharves are gone; only stone piling stubs remain at the waterline. The manor house stands restored, white-painted clapboard with a wide porch overlooking the river confluence. The reconstruction of Grant's cabin sits at the spot where his tent stood — moved here from Philadelphia, where it had been on display for decades. The National Park Service operates Grant's Headquarters at City Point Museum on the grounds, part of Petersburg National Battlefield. From a small aircraft on a clear afternoon, the confluence of the Appomattox and the James shows as a perfect Y, with Hopewell's industrial waterfront wrapping the south bank and the manor's bluff rising above the joining rivers.