corn, wheat, tobacco, and sawn boards that urban merchants, warehouse-
men, and shippers needed. During the s a dynamic group of planters,
lawyers, and financiers from the counties surrounding West Point brashly
decided to add to the town’s shipping business the enormous grain mill-
ing, tobacco processing, iron manufacturing, and cotton transferring that
had grown up in the extraordinary metropolis of Richmond, forty miles
westward, near the falls of the Pamunkey. A rail line to West Point and the
York would hasten Richmond’s considerable transport of goods to the sea,
West Point being on the shorter route, compared with James River steamers
bound from the capital down to Hampton Roads. So the York valley entre-
preneurs created the Richmond and York River Railway Company, hired the
redoubtable naval officer and scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury as consult-
ing engineer, and by had constructed a last bridge over the Pamunkey
to West Point, completing the line. Enlarged wharves and ship tonnage ac-
commodated the boom, which included a quickly expanded population of
workers and professionals, and more rooming houses and hotels, restau-
rants, and agencies of many sorts. Soon came another dose of luck, how-
ever, worse than awful.
In , during General George McClellan’s massive and costly attempt
to capture Richmond and end the rebellion by marching up the peninsula
between the James and the York, retreating Confederates burned the rail-
road bridge at West Point, and then McClellan’s army occupied the town.
Both sides ravaged the strategically unfortunate Richmond and York River
Railway much of the summer. By the end of the war the railroad was in
ruins, its company bankrupt, and West Point was virtually derelict. As late
as , only about seventy-five people lived there.
About this time one of my great-grandfathers, Captain James Kirby, re-
cently a battery commander of field artillery in the Army of Northern Vir-
ginia, and his young wife, Susan Moore, migrated to West Point from York
County. Their families had long been mainstays of Charles Parish, near
Grafton, a short distance inland from Yorktown. Both families were modest
farmers and small-scale slaveholders before the war. Susan’s people were
the Moores whose farmhouse was the scene of Lord Cornwallis’s surren-
der to Washington in October . (The rehabilitated house is now part of
the Yorktown Battlefield Park, and the little graveyard outside includes the
remains of Susan’s brother and James’s friend, Dr. Watkins Moore.) Such
farmers often engaged in other businesses, too—oystering, for example,
and small-time storekeeping. James and one of his siblings had run such
a store before the war. Afterward, according to my branch of the tribe’s tra-