Yorktown, VA

Yorktown is a town in York County, Virginia, United States. The 2020 census counted 221 residents. Yorktown is the county seat of York County, one of the eight original shires formed in colonial Virginia in 1682. The town is most famous as the site of the siege and subsequent surrender of General Charles Cornwallis to General George Washington and the French Fleet during the American Revolutionary War on October 19, 1781. The short version is that Yorktown carries an earlier story into the places people know and use now. That is the local read on Yorktown: its past remains attached to the places people use now.

Although the larger European war, Anglo-Spanish War, Fourth Anglo-Dutch War) would last for another year, this British defeat at Yorktown effectively ended the war in North America. Yorktown was founded in 1691 as a port on the York River for English colonists to export tobacco to Europe. When waterways were critical to transportation, Yorktown was thought to occupy a strategic location controlling upstream portions of the York River and its tributaries and their access to the Chesapeake Bay.