The Town That Burned Twice

The conventional story of Norfolk's destruction goes like this: Lord Dunmore bombarded the town from his ships on January 1, 1776, and the fires destroyed most of the buildings. The reality is more complicated and more uncomfortable. The British bombardment started the fires along the waterfront, but patriot forces burned far more of the town than the British did. A legislative investigation later concluded that the patriots had done most of the damage.

Why did American forces destroy an American town. The answers are tangled. Some of the burning was military — denying buildings and supplies to the enemy. Some was punitive — Norfolk's Loyalist merchants were targets of patriot anger. Some was opportunistic — the chaos of fire provided cover for settling personal scores and seizing property. The destruction of Norfolk was not a clean story of British villainy. It was a messy story of war, politics, revenge, and divided loyalties.

In our archives, we have fragments of what was lost. Property claims filed after the war. Letters from displaced residents trying to establish their losses. Records of the committee that investigated the burning. What emerges from these documents is a picture of a town that tore itself apart along the fault lines of loyalty and commerce.

The Dunmore proclamation is the other piece of Norfolk's story that complicates the standard narrative. The offer of freedom to enslaved people who joined the British was the most radical act any official in Virginia had taken, and it came from the representative of the Crown, not from the revolutionaries who claimed to be fighting for liberty. The irony is sharp enough to cut.

Norfolk eventually rebuilt, but it took decades. The prewar commercial elite — many of them Loyalists — were gone. The town's economy had to be reconstructed from scratch. The Norfolk that emerged after the war was a different place from the one that had been Virginia's busiest port. That transformation is the real story of the Revolution here: not a single dramatic event, but a slow, painful process of destruction and rebuilding that changed everything about the town and its people.