Yorktown Naval Weapons Station, Virginia
Naval Weapons Station Yorktown is the Navy's premier weapons facility. Located in historic Yorktown, Va., it is operated by a professional team of 2,500 highly-trained officers, enlisted personnel and civilian employees.
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 31 tenant commands which include the Naval Munitions Command, the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity, the Marine Corps Second Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team, Fleet Industrial Supply Center Detachment, Naval Expeditionary Medical Support Command, Navy Cargo Handling Battalion One and 19 departments.
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.