Grant's Headquarters at City Point: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Petersburg National Battlefield, National Park Service

NPS Northeast Regional Office

Grant’s Headquarters at City Point, a unit of Petersburg National Battlefield, is a twenty-acre historic designed landscape in Hopewell, Virginia, eight miles northeast of the main park unit. The property occupies a bluff approximately forty-five feet above the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers. The park is located within the village of City Point which is part of the industrial city of Hopewell. The periods of significance for Grant’s Headquarters at City Point are 10,000 before present [BP] to 1607, and 1607 to 1865, representing thousands of years of Native American presence on the property, early European settlement, continued ownership and discontinuous occupation by the family of the earliest landowner, and includes the nine and a half month period when the Union Army established City Point as its headquarters during the last year of the Civil War. The Eppes family created an agricultural enterprise beginning in the seventeenth century on thousands of acres surrounding City Point on both sides of the James River. By the late eighteenth century, City Point became the nucleus of the plantation, which employed the labor of over 100 slaves by the Civil War. The Eppeses also made full use of City Point’s location overlooking a deep channel on the James River and were involved in trade, shipping, fishing, and serving as customs officials. The family designed a functional and ornamental estate at City Point, complete with the family dwelling, vegetable gardens, stables, utilitarian outbuildings and formal garden elements. The family vacated the property between the years 1862-1866, during the Civil War, when its prominent location on the James River made it a magnet for military activity. During the war, an earthen lunette was placed on the property to guard the James River approaches. By 1864, the Union Army, seeking to end the war by seizing the rail lines leading into the city of Petersburg, and subsequently the Confederate capital of Richmond, used the Eppes estate as their base of operations. General Grant took up residence in a tent on the plantation lawn, and when winter set in, he used a log cabin in a cluster of log cabins constructed to house the general staff on the plantation grounds. The plantation house and possibly nearby Bonaccord house were used by the quartermaster general and his staff as their headquarters during the nine-and-a-half month siege. During this time, troop encampments and supply functions came to dominate the estate’s functional and ornamental grounds, and the adjacent village and port of City Point. After the conclusion of the war, the Eppes family returned to their City Point estate for several more generations and made small changes to the property to update it to the times, but its underlying organization remained the same. In addition to these periods and areas of significance, two buildings, Naldara (1908-1912) and Hunter House (1912-1915), contribute to the City Point Historic District (seventeenth century-1924) but not to the Civil War era. After the last family member left the property in 1955 and the National Park Service acquired the property in 1979. It was added to Petersburg National battlefield as the site of Grant’s Headquarters in the final year of the Civil War.Many features at Grant’s Headquarters at City Point persist from the time of the Civil War, including the plantation landscape with existing port facilities that made the Eppes plantation a compelling location for the Union command. Tangible remaining features constructed during the Civil War are General Grant’s wooden cabin that sits on the lawn east of the plantation house; the brick foundation of the fireplace of an officer’s hut, Grant’s Chief of Staff John Rawlins, to the west of Grant’s cabin; Civil War earthwork remains on the bluff to the northeast of Grant’s Cabin; and known and likely subsurface remains of Civil War features.

Grant's Headquarters at City Point: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Petersburg National Battlefield, National Park Service

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