VA, USA
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.
Sources
Primary & Secondary Sources
General Woodford to the Virginia Committee of Safety, January 4, 1776
Library of Virginia · PRIMARY · TIER1
Library of Virginia homepage. Woodford letter is in the Virginia State Papers; specific item not digitized online. Woodford's report on Norfolk burning is cited in secondary literature.
HMS Fowey Log: Lord Dunmore's Naval Operations off Norfolk, January 1776
Public Record Office (National Archives, United Kingdom) · PRIMARY · TIER1
British naval log documenting the bombardment of Norfolk on January 1, 1776. The ship's log records times, targets, and ammunition expenditure, providing the British account of the action that burned Virginia's largest colonial town.
Norfolk Borough Records and Court Order Books, 1750-1780
Library of Virginia · PRIMARY · TIER1
Pre-war and wartime municipal records documenting Norfolk's status as Virginia's largest commercial port, its Loyalist population, and the administrative collapse following the bombardment and fire.
Virginia Committee of Safety Minutes, November 1775 - February 1776
Library of Virginia · PRIMARY · TIER1
Official minutes of the Patriot governing body during the Dunmore crisis. Covers the decision-making around Norfolk, the naval threat, and the eventual order that led to the burning of the town to deny it to British forces.
Virginia Gazette: Reports on the Burning of Norfolk, January-March 1776
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Rockefeller Library · PRIMARY · TIER1
Colonial Williamsburg Digital Collections — Virginia Gazette 1736–1780. Jan-March 1776 issues (Norfolk burning coverage) included. Confirmed live 2026-07-08.
Chrysler Museum of Art / Norfolk History: Revolutionary Period
Norfolk History Collections · INSTITUTIONAL · TIER2
The Norfolk museums collectively hold colonial-era artifacts, maps, and documentary materials on the town before and after the 1776 destruction. Useful for physical context on the pre-war town layout.
History of Norfolk, Virginia
O.L. Bumgardner (Thomas J. Wertenbaker) · SECONDARY · TIER2
Authoritative city history by a Princeton historian covering Norfolk from its founding through the Civil War. The Revolutionary chapter remains the most detailed scholarly treatment of the Dunmore crisis and the town's wartime destruction.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-burning-of-norfolk/
encyclopediavirginia.org · SECONDARY · TIER2
Discovered by agentic enrichment for Norfolk
The Burning of Norfolk: British Bombardment and American Destruction, January 1776
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography · SECONDARY · TIER2
Scholarly article carefully reconstructing the sequence of events using Woodford's letters, British naval logs, and the Virginia Gazette. Establishes that American militia burned the bulk of the town, not the British bombardment.
The Chesapeake Bay in the American Revolution
Tidewater Publishers (Ernest McNeill Eller, ed.) · SECONDARY · TIER2
Edited volume of scholarly essays on naval operations in Chesapeake Bay from 1775 to 1783. The chapter on Dunmore and the Norfolk bombardment provides essential naval context for the January 1776 events.
Virginia Historical Society: Norfolk and the Tidewater in the Revolution
Virginia Museum of History and Culture · INSTITUTIONAL · TIER2
Manuscript collection with Norfolk merchant papers, committee correspondence, and Loyalist claims filed after the war documenting property losses in the 1776 fire. Useful for quantifying the destruction.
Burning of Norfolk -- Wikipedia
Wikipedia · TERTIARY · TIER3
General reference entry on the January 1, 1776, destruction of Norfolk. Covers both the British bombardment and American militia burning. References Selby's article and Wertenbaker's city history.
Norfolk, Virginia: Colonial and Revolutionary History
Visit Norfolk · TERTIARY · TIER3
Tourism site with brief historical overview of Norfolk's colonial and Revolutionary origins. Identifies surviving colonial-era sites and contextualizes the town's maritime heritage.