Historic Point of Rocks

Point of Rocks, named for a sixty-foot-high sandstone cliff along the Appomattox River, was used by Native Americans as a camp and observation point, was mentioned by Captain John Smith in his notes on Virginia, and became the site of a trading post established in 1642 by Abraham Wood. The land remained in his family’s heirs for 371 years, making it one of the oldest properties in the country continuously owned by one family. At the time of the Civil War, it belonged to Rev. John Alexander Strachan, founder of Enon Baptist Church and minister to several local congregations. Fighting reached the area on June 28, 1862, when Federal gunboats led by the ironclads USS Galena and USS Monitor fired on the bluffs during an unsuccessful raid to destroy a railroad bridge upriver. The Union army occupied Point of Rocks when the Army of the James landed at Bermuda Hundred in May 1864, and a hospital built there grew into one of the largest of the Civil War. By war’s end, more than 2,500 soldiers were buried in a cemetery established there, and in 1866 their bodies were removed to City Point National Cemetery in Hopewell; rock from a large outcropping on the southern end of the property was quarried after the war to build the fence around that cemetery. During the first weeks of the siege of Petersburg, Red Cross founder Clara Barton served there as superintendent of nurses, and on March 27, 1865, Abraham Lincoln visited the hospital just days before the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. After Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater eighteen days later, Rev. Strachan petitioned the Freedman's Bureau for the return of his land, proved his ownership in court, and returned with his family in 1866, spending the rest of his life there. In 2013, his descendants sold the property to Chesterfield County.

Virginia · United States