East Along Main Street

Yorktown, founded in 1691, had a main street that had carried the tread of feet and the roll of wheels for more than three centuries. On August 2, 1781, Lieutenant Johann Ernst Prechtel of the Ansback-Bayreuth Regiment described Yorktown as a small but pleasant and well built little city close to the river, with an English church and a courthouse, and wrote that upon his arrival the inhabitants fled with their wives and children, leaving behind all their furniture and belongings. In the late summer of 1781, the scene along Main Street may have appeared this way as the British were setting up their occupation of Yorktown.

Yorktown, Virginia · United States