It’s one thing to declare your independence and quite another to actually attain it. Today we celebrate the latter on the 231st anniversary of the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia. It marked the end of the last major battle of the Revolutionary War and essentially the end of the war (although it took a couple more years to get all the treaties sorted out and written – it was a very complicated time).
In the summer of 1781 the British army under Lord Cornwallis camped at Yorktown to establish a protected harbor on the York River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. By October, a French fleet had them cut off from escape by water and American troops had them surrounded on land. After several weeks under siege, Cornwallis proposed surrender on October 17th and the “Articles of Capitulation” were signed by both sides on October 19th, 1781.
Ten days after the surrender the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for a Yorktown Monument on the site of the battle. A hundred years later the land had been purchased by the federal government and the cornerstone of the monument was laid. At the end of the Civil War a portion of the Yorktown grounds were set aside to become Yorktown National Cemetery, where 2,204 soldiers and civilians were buried.
Yorktown Battlefield is part of the Colonial National Historical Park, created as part of the National Park Service in 1930. The park also includes Historic Jamestowne, the Colonial Parkway (a scenic road which connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown) and the Cape Henry Memorial (the site in Virginia Beach where the Jamestown colony first touched North American soil). Of course, the most popular attraction in the neighborhood is Colonial Williamsburg, the re-created Revolutionary-era portion of the town that is also home of the College of William and Mary.
