Malvern Hill was the estate of the prominent Cocke family and featured a brick house built about 1720 on the site of an earlier frame dwelling. The Marquis de Lafayette camped on the property in the summer of 1781 during the Revolutionary War, and Virginia militiamen also camped there during the War of 1812. Before the Civil War, a workforce of 10-15 enslaved African Americans labored there. Nearby on 1 July 1862, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee attacked Maj. George B. McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac as it retreated from the outskirts of Richmond, but the Union forces prevailed. The Malvern Hill house, half a mile northwest of here, survived the battle as a Federal headquarters but burned in 1908.
