Battle of Big Bethel

In the spring of 1862, Union Gen. George B. McClellan led his 100,000-man Army of the Potomac west from Hampton past Big Bethel in a campaign to capture Richmond, and the battlefield of June 9, 1861, soon faded into obscurity. Little remains of the Big Bethel Battlefield today, with the last publicly accessible segment here. The U.S. Army flooded Brick Kiln Creek in the 1890s to provide drinking water for Fort Monroe, submerging many key portions of the battlefield, including the church site and most of the Confederate fortifications, beneath Big Bethel Reservoir. In 1916, the National Advisory Council for Aeronautics sought a site for a new airfield and proving ground for Army and Navy aircraft and chose a location five miles east because it was near water, flat, and sparsely populated for take-offs, landings, and expansion. The proving ground was named for aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley. In the years that followed, the growth of the airfield, Hampton, and Newport News profoundly changed this rural landscape. Today, Langley Air Force Base occupies much of the remaining battleground, housing covers the site where Maj. Theodore Winthrop made the final Union assault, and a store stands where Lt. John Greble was killed. The first monuments, the obelisk and the marker noting the spot where Pvt. Henry L. Wyatt was killed, were erected here in 1905. Another Confederate memorial and the 1st Vermont Infantry monument were erected when the Civil War Centennial began in 1961.

Hampton, Virginia · United States