Qualla: Naval Weapons Station Yorktown

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On August 7, 1918, a few months into America's involvement in World War I, the United States Navy bought a 4,000-acre DuPont dynamite plant on the York River. Before the company's production line could start, the Navy needed somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard to store, assemble, load, and test the mines for the planned North Sea Mine Barrage - and Yorktown fit perfectly. Eighteen square miles became Navy Mine Depot, Yorktown. Then the depot kept growing. Today Naval Weapons Station Yorktown sprawls across 20.7 square miles - roughly a fifth of York County's total land area of 108.5 square miles, with 14 miles of York River shoreline - and conceals beneath its forests a 17th-century brick house, the remains of a vanished town called Penniman, and the ground where Algonquian-speaking Kiskiack people lived before the English arrived.

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown: Before It Was the Navy's

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corvokarasu at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Long before the depot existed, the Kiskiack lived along this stretch of the York River. They were Algonquian-speaking members of the Powhatan Confederacy, displaced through the 1630s as English settlement expanded west from Jamestown. The English took the village's name for their...

Image: Corvokarasu at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown: DuPont, Dynamite, and Mines

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew W. King, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around 1914 the DuPont Company assembled 4,000 acres on the York River and built a dynamite plant. The community of Penniman grew up around it. Before production could begin in earnest, the war intervened. The Navy needed a place to lay the North Sea Mine Barrage - a massive ocea...

Image: Matthew W. King | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown: The Reservation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aude, CC BY-SA 2.5. Building the depot meant taking land. The government used eminent domain to acquire properties along the former Yorktown-Williamsburg Road through the community of Lackey, Virginia - an area whose landowners and tenants were primarily African American Virginians and which had bee...

Image: Aude | CC BY-SA 2.5

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown: An Explosive Corridor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sgt. Esdras Ruano, U.S. Marine Corps, Public domain. The Navy never closed the gate. The Mine Depot became the Naval Weapons Station, supporting the Atlantic Fleet through the Second World War and the Cold War and into the present. On October 1, 1998, as part of a Mid-Atlantic consolidation, Cheatham Annex - acquired by the Navy on...

Image: Sgt. Esdras Ruano, U.S. Marine Corps | Public domain