Old Point Comfort

Previously known as Point Comfort, it lies at the extreme tip of the Virginia Peninsula at the mouth of Hampton Roads in the United States.

The Second Charter of the Virginia Company, granted in 1609, gave the company:all those Lands, Countries, and Territories, situate, lying, and being in that Part of America, called Virginia, from the pointe of lande called Cape or Pointe Comfort all alonge the seacoste to the northward two hundred miles and from the said pointe of Cape Comfort all alonge the sea coast to the southward twoe hundred miles; and all that space and circuit of lande lieinge from the sea coaste of the precinct aforesaid upp unto the lande, throughoute, from sea to sea, west and northwest .

[4]Because of the ambiguity as to which line was to run west and which northwest, the charter gave the Virginia Company either about 80,000 square miles (210,000 km2) of eastern North America, or about one-third of the entire continent, extending to the Pacific Ocean.

Those enslaved arrived in the White Lion, a privateer owned by Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, but flying a Dutch flag, which docked at Point Comfort.

[10][11] The humid conditions and exposure to Atlantic coastal storms caused the plank and timber forts at these locations to constantly deteriorate.

[12] In 1665, Colonel Miles Cary, a member of the Virginia Governor's Council, was assigned to place armaments at the fort during heightened tensions resulting from the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

[14][15][16] Without a fort to protect the waterway from warships, the lighthouse was captured by the British during the War of 1812, when a Royal Navy fleet sailed into the Chesapeake.

After their futile attempt to seize the town of Norfolk, the British landed at Old Point Comfort and used the lighthouse tower as an observation post.

[20] In the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries Old Point Comfort served as the terminus and connection point for passenger and express freight ships connecting cities of Chesapeake Bay by both water and rail routes with Boston, New York and along the southeastern coast.

At Cape Charles, land route connections to points north could be made with the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad (and its successor parent company, the Pennsylvania Railroad) on the eastern peninsula to Wilmington, Delaware and Philadelphia.

[27] For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Old Point Comfort was a summer and winter resort in the town of Phoebus in Elizabeth City County.

[30][31] It was near Old Point Comfort that the USS Missouri (BB-63), then the only U.S. battleship in commission, was proceeding seaward on a training mission from Hampton Roads early on January 17, 1950, when she ran aground 1.6 miles (3.0 km) from Thimble Shoal Light,(near Old Point Comfort.