New Year's Day, Seventeen Seventy-Six: Norfolk Burns

New Year's Day of seventeen seventy-six began with cannon fire. Lord Dunmore, still anchored in Norfolk harbor with his fleet, ordered his warships to open on the town at three in the afternoon. The Dunmore, the Liverpool, the Otter, and the Kingfisher mounted more than one hundred guns between them. They fired on the waterfront buildings and the wharves, and Patriots on shore used the cover of the bombardment to begin burning loyalist warehouses.

What followed was one of the most complete urban destructions in American Revolutionary history. Patriot forces, having decided Norfolk was more useful as ash than as a British supply base, systematically torched the town over the following weeks. By February sixth, the work was complete, and nearly thirteen hundred buildings were gone. Eight hundred and sixty-three of them, worth one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, were burned deliberately by Patriot forces. The British cannon fire had directly damaged only nineteen properties. The rest were destroyed by the people who had just declared themselves defenders of liberty.

One structure survived. Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, built in seventeen thirty-nine, stood on high ground and its brick walls held against the flames. In the south wall you can still see a British cannonball fired from the HMS Liverpool on that New Year's afternoon, a small iron sphere lodged in the mortar, a souvenir of the day the city died.

Lord Dunmore sailed away from Virginia permanently in August seventeen seventy-six, his occupation of the coast at an end. Norfolk rebuilt slowly, over decades. It would become, in time, a city of the sea again, but that story had first to pass through fire.