History of Norfolk

ity. The patriots destroyed the remaining buildings for strategic reasons in February. Only the walls of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church survived the bombardment and subsequent fires. A cannonball from the bombardment (fired by the Liverpool) remains within the wall of Saint Paul's.

Following recovery from the Revolutionary War's burning, the 19th century began inauspiciously for Norfolk and her citizens. In 1804, another serious fire along the city’s waterfront destroyed some 300 buildings and the city experienced a serious economic setback.

During the 1820s, agrarian communities across the American South suffered a prolonged recession, which caused many families to migrate to other areas. Many moved west into the Piedmont, or into Kentucky and Tennessee. Such migration also followed the exhaustion of soil due to tobacco cultivation in the Tidewater. Virginia made various attempts to phase out slavery, either through law (see Thomas Jefferson Randolph's 1832 resolution) or through "repatriation" of blacks to Africa. Many emigrants to Africa from Virginia and North Carolina embarked from the port of Norfolk. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a native of Norfolk, was an emigrant who became the first president of Liberia.

On June 7, 1855, the 183-ft. vessel Benjamin Franklin put into Hampton Roads for repairs. She had just sailed from the West Indes where an outbreak of Yellow Fever had struck, so the port health officer ordered the ship quarantined. After eleven days a second inspection found no issues, so she was allowed to dock. A few days later, the first cases of Yellow Fever were discovered and a machinist died from the condition on July 8. By August several people were dying per day and a third of the city population had fled. With both Norfolk and Portsmouth being infected, New York banned all traffic from those sites