Lee Hall, Virginia: Confederate Headquarters on the Peninsula

Lee Hall takes its name from a plantation house built in eighteen fifty-nine by planter Richard Decatur Lee. The Italianate mansion was only three years old when the Civil War swept up the Peninsula. In the spring of eighteen sixty-two, Confederate General John Bankhead Magruder and then General Joseph Johnston used Lee Hall as their headquarters while holding the line against George McClellan's massive Union army.

A skirmish was fought on the property itself on May fourth, eighteen sixty-two. The Lees had already fled. After the war the community grew around the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

The Lee Hall Depot, built in eighteen eighty-one, is the last surviving station from the C and O's expansion into Warwick County, and on October nineteenth of that year the first passenger train from Newport News carried local residents and national dignitaries out to Yorktown for the centennial of Cornwallis's surrender.