This is the third in a six-part, yearlong series called Disappearing Virginia in Distinction magazine. This story originally appeared in the June issue as “The Sons and Daughters of Slabtown.”

The letter was bureaucratically frank. “I have been advised that you have refused to give permission to enter upon your land for inspection purposes,” a National Park Service representative wrote to Sherman Hill, a resident of Slabtown, in 1976. “Therefore, I have instructed my staff to prepare a condemnation proceeding, which I will recommend be filed by the local United States Attorney.”

At issue was not only Hill’s home but also the homes of his neighbors. Congress had approved funds to relocate Slabtown’s residents. Their homes, about 100 of them, sat on coveted ground in what would become a key part of the Colonial National Historical Park: the Yorktown battlefield.

Many took the offer. Some, like Hill, refused. So officials used the cudgel of eminent domain to compel the unwilling to forfeit their homes. And though the residents were compensated, the money did not make up for the loss of homes that were more than simply shelter. These modest estates represented progress, triumph and history.

L: Sherman Hill, photo by Keith Lanpher. R: Sherman Hill’s Slabtown home. Photo supplied by Sherman Hill.

Today, the area that used to be Slabtown is a quiet expanse, with wayside signage and driving tours that usher visitors through the scene of the Revolutionary War’s climactic engagement.

Forty years ago, it was Troy Griffin’s playground. He and playmates would scale the snaking trenches, stand on the bank of the York River in the shadow of Cornwallis Cave, where legend holds that the British general hid from American guns. The kids would pick crabapples and spend idle days amid historic cemeteries where war dead, and onetime Slabtown residents, rested in peace. That dreamy freedom fueled the wild imagination of a 5-year-old boy.

It was beyond a child’s comprehension how he had arrived at this place in the world. It simply was the way of things, like the fact that his family moved soon afterward, in the late 1970s. “I didn’t know why I lived on a battlefield,” says Griffin, a U.S. Navy veteran who now lives in Los Angeles. “It didn’t dawn on me until adulthood.”

That revelation presented a proud, complicated history. Griffin’s great-great-grandparents, the Braxtons, were among the founders of Slabtown. In the Civil War, Union soldiers occupied Yorktown as they clawed their way up the Peninsula toward Richmond. Thousands of slaves found themselves behind Federal lines, liberated. Union brass ordered a grid of streets laid out to accommodate local freedmen, and the able-bodied among them constructed homes out of planks of wood, or “slabs.” The name stuck, and so did the place, a town settled by people freed from bondage. In later years, the alternative moniker “Uniontown” would likewise honor that origin.

The former slaves and their descendants lived in Slabtown for more than a century. Alice C. Washington, now 92, grew up nearby and was a frequent visitor. She lives just a couple miles from the vanished town, and she carries vivid memories of the place.

Historic map of Slabtown. Colonial National Historical Park.

She recalls an especially tight-knit town, neighbors who looked out for one another. Slabtown had a corner store, juke joints, and dozens of houses. At its height, some 100 families lived in Slabtown, which occupied 115 acres adjacent to Yorktown National Cemetery. “There were nice homes in there that people were very proud of,” she says.

Nevertheless, Department of the Interior officials sought to relocate Slabtown ahead of Yorktown’s 200th anniversary in 1981. The town was, after all, in the heart of the battlefield, and the funds were available to complete the long-discussed acquisitions.

The government offered fair market value for the homes and property, and assisted in relocation. In the case of Sherman Hill, that amount was $15,500, which Hill put toward the purchase of a home in Newport News. The government bought – and razed – every single home, and the physical vestiges of Slabtown vanished.

Many residents didn’t go far; the area was their lifelong home. Shiloh Baptist Church, founded by a former chaplain in the United States Colored Troops, moved a mile away. Among its parishioners today are a few former Slabtown residents. The church’s old cemetery, however, remains behind, where loved ones were laid to rest on Yorktown Battlefield.

L: Slabtown’s corner store. R: Shiloh Baptist Church. Photos supplied by Sherman Hill.

No matter where Slabtown’s residents ended up, they remained connected by pride – and also a hint of sadness. “Slabtown was built by a community of people with a new sense of their own freedom, literally by people who built their own homes,” says Kelley Deetz, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Randolph College.

Deetz wrote the only academic study to date of Slabtown as an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. The establishment of Slabtown as a thriving community was a monumental gain, a testament to resilience. “That’s a proud moment in their history,” she says, “so when you take away that history, that moment in time, it stings in a way that other situations don’t.”

Though, really, Slabtown’s story is not unique; similar ghost towns dot Virginia’s landscape, remnants of lives lost to time and circumstance.

Twelve miles northwest of Slabtown is the site of Magruder, founded in antebellum days when people simply wanted to get on with living without the hardships of war looming over them. Most of Magruder’s residents were African American, though not all.

When the federal government needed the land to establish a training facility for Navy Seabees during World War II, the race of residents mattered not. All were required to accept a promised buyout and relocate, in some cases with only two weeks’ notice.

Fifty African American families could not find ready lodging, and had to stay in unused Civilian Conservation Corps barracks nearby. Today, any remnants of Magruder are within the secure perimeter of Camp Peary, long rumored to be a Central Intelligence Agency training facility.

Other Peninsula towns endured a similar fate – Biglers Mill, also on the grounds of Camp Peary; Lackey and Penniman, on what’s now the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station

For all the towns that were abandoned wholesale, others were simply washed over, enveloped by progress. And the only thing that remains is memory.

For Griffin, that counts for a lot, because it breathes life into places that are no longer on the map. “We are the sons and daughters of Slabtown,” he says. “We still exist, and because of that, Slabtown still exists.”

L: Location of Slabtown on the Yorktown Battlefield. R: Old cemetery at Slabtown. Photos by Keith Lanpher.