Yorktown Naval Weapons Station Cheatham Annex, Virginia
York County encompasses 108.5 Square Miles or 69,440 Acres. Naval Weapons Station Complex (including Cheatham Annex) 20.7 Square Miles. Roughly 1/5 of the total land area of York County. Naval Weapons Station borders the counties of York and James City, the cities of Newport News and Williamsburg, and shares almost 14 miles of the York River shoreline (about half of the county's York River shoreline and wetlands) with the National Park Service.
The land of Naval Weapons Station Yorktown is rich in colonial history. The station sits amidst a setting of natural beauty surrounded by the distant echo of the first settlers in Virginia and the battle cries of the Revolutionary War. Long before the world ever conceived of such things as the testing and evaluation that now go on at the weapons station, the infantry of the American Revolution and the Civil War slogged along the Old Williamsburg Road where today it runs through the station. The oldest structure onboard the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station is the Lee House, built around 1649, where many generations of the family lived out their lives before the property was acquired by the U.S. government.
The site of the weapons station was acquired for the Navy by a presidential proclamation on August 7, 1918, and was at the time the largest naval installation in the world, its land area covering about twenty square miles. Over the years, the growth and expansion of the Navy's technical requirements and responsibilities have been reflected by corresponding developments at the station to support the Atlantic Fleet.
As part of the Navy's Mid-Atlantic installation claimant consolidation, Cheatham Annex, formerly an annex of the Fleet Industrial Supply Center, Norfolk, was incorporated with the station on October 1, 1998. This area of land located in the Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown historical triangle was acquired by the Navy on June 21, 1943.
Naval Weapons Station Yorktown hosts 25 tenant commands which include the Atlantic Ordnance Command, the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity, the Marine Corps Second Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team, Fleet Industrial Supply Center Detachment, Fleet Hospital Support Office, Navy Cargo Handling and Port Group and 19 Storefronts.
The station and tenant commands work together as a team to provide ordnance logistics, technical, supply and related services to the Atlantic Fleet. Today the station is a hub of activity. As one of the Navy's "explosive corridors" to the sea, supply, amphibious and combatant ships may be seen arriving and departing the station's two piers.
See Also:
Yorktown Naval Weapons Station