The Gosport Shipyard was founded on November 1, 1767, by Andrew Sprowle on the western shore of the Elizabeth River in Norfolk County in the Virginia colony.

Following Governor Dunmore's retreat from Portsmouth in May 1776, Sprowle was exiled along with other Royalists to Gwynn's Island (now Mathews County, Virginia), where he died 29 May 1776 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

[5] In 1794, United States Congress passed "An Act to Provide a Naval Armament," allowing the Federal Government to lease the Gosport Shipyard from Virginia.

"[7] Some idea of the human scale can be found in this excerpt from a letter of Commodore Lewis Warrington dated 12 October 1831 to the Board of Navy Commissioners (BNC).

[8] Warrington's letter to the BNC was in response to various petitions by white workers to curtail or end enslaved labor on the Dry Dock.

His letter attempts both to reassure the BNC in light of Nat Turner's Rebellion which occurred on 22 August 1831 and to serve as a reply to the Dry Dock's stonemasons who had quit their positions and accused the project chief engineer, Loammi Baldwin Jr., of the unfair hiring of enslaved labor in their stead.

[12] Opposition to enslaved labor was never able to effectively challenge the status quo and suggestions or recommendations to end the practice met fierce resistance.

One such effort in 1839, was countered by a petition signed by 34 shipyard slaveholders, pleading with the Secretary of the Navy to continue it less they suffer economic harm.

[13] In 1846 Commodore Jesse Wilkerson felt the need to confirm the continuation of slave hiring to the Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, “that a majority of them [blacks] are negro slaves, and that a large portion of those employed in the Ordinary for many years, have been of that description, but by what authority I am unable to say as nothing can be found in the records of my office on the subject – These men have been examined by the Surgeon of the Yard and regularly Shipped [enlisted] for twelve months" [14] George Teamoh (1818–1883) as a young enslaved laborer and ship caulker worked at Norfolk Navy Yard in the 1830s and 1840s and later wrote of this unrequited toil: "The government had patronized, and given encouragement to slavery to a greater extent than the great majority of the country has been aware.

He bluffed the Federal troops into abandoning the shipyard in Portsmouth by running a single passenger train into Norfolk with great noise and whistle-blowing, then much more quietly, sending it back west, and then returning the same train again, creating the illusion of large numbers of arriving troops to the Federals listening in Portsmouth across the Elizabeth River (and just barely out of sight).

In the haste to abandon the shipyard, Merrimack had only been destroyed above the waterline, and an innovative armored superstructure was built upon the remaining portion.

As such, the then Norfolk Navy Yard served as the official Homeport for ships stationed in the Hampton Roads region.

[citation needed] No major expansion occurred at the facility until World War I when it was expanded to accommodate 11,000 employees and their families.