Markers of History

State Historic Marker
Virginia Z-265
York County/Warwick County

Location: East side of US-17, at the bor­der between Newport News and York County, just S of Commerce Cir, Yorktown, VA 23693

Visited: July 4, 2009, 10:45am

Transcription of marker:

York County side:

York County

Area 136 square miles

One of the eight orig­i­nal shires formed in 1634. First called Charles River, which was named for King Charles I. The name was changed in 1643 to York for Yorkshire, England. Cornwallis’s sur­ren­der, October 19, 1781, took place at Yorktown.

Warwick County side:

Warwick County

Area 69 square miles

One of the orig­i­nal shires formed in 1634, it was given the name of Warwick River. The river itself was named for the Earl of Warwick.

My impres­sions: So this is the sec­ond time today that we found a state his­tor­i­cal marker at the bor­der of a city. This is from the Z series of mark­ers (from the let­ter in their alphanu­meric code). These are double-sided mark­ers, placed at bor­ders of coun­ties with infor­ma­tion on both juris­dic­tions. This one is not found in the cur­rent edi­tion of the marker book. If I had to guess, I might guess that it’s because Warwick County doesn’t exist any longer. In 1958, in con­sol­i­dated with the City of Newport News.

I also found it inter­est­ing that the let­ters were larger on the Warwick County side than the York County side. It was obvi­ously an adjust­ment made to ensure that both sides were filled, given that the York County side has more text on it.

There was a small piece of inter­est­ing his­tory I found in the Wikipedia arti­cle on the for­mer County. In 1949, Newport News attempted to annex the county. Warwick County was able to fend it off by ced­ing 4 square miles to York County, which Wikipedia calls “a clever legal maneu­ver which was seen as a narrowly-won tech­ni­cal vic­tory.” In 1952, the county suc­cess­fully peti­tioned the General Assembly to become an inde­pen­dent city (since Virginia’s inde­pen­dent city sta­tus guar­an­tees that land can’t be annexed by adja­cent com­mu­ni­ties). Without the threat of annex­a­tion, nego­ti­a­tions on annex­a­tion con­tin­ued and six years later, the vot­ers of both cities (Warwick and Newport News) approved con­sol­i­da­tion in a referendum.

Markeroni sta­tus: Logged.