A cannon at Fort Morton. Image from the National Park Service's page.
The battlefield
Petersburg National Battlefield lies about 32 km (20 mi) south of Richmond, Virginia, in the cities of Petersburg and Hopewell and in Dinwiddie and Prince George counties. Established as a national military park on July 3, 1926, it was redesignated a national battlefield on August 24, 1962, and covers about 1,109 hectares (2,740 acres).
It preserves the sites, structures and landscapes of the Civil War campaign, siege and defense of Petersburg. The Union Army's 10-month campaign of 1864–1865 ended with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant cutting Petersburg's supply lines, ensuring the fall of Richmond in April 1865. The park includes Grant's Headquarters on the James River at Hopewell and the Five Forks Battlefield in Dinwiddie County, where the Confederate collapse led to the fall of Petersburg and then Richmond.
The James River. Image from the National Park Service's page.
The rocks
The battlefield sits in both the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain physiographic provinces, sharing their geologic history with a much larger region. The area's rocks run from ancient crystalline metasedimentary and metaigneous rocks of Neoproterozoic age, through Paleozoic metamorphic and igneous rocks, to younger Cretaceous and Quaternary sediments.
| Age | Unit | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Pennsylvanian–Permian | Petersburg Granite, named by Jonas in 1928 for a widely mappable granite body around Petersburg | under the Five Forks Battlefield, among the park's oldest bedrock |
| Cretaceous | Potomac Formation | near Soldiers Pond on Harrison Creek and near the Eastern Front Visitor Center |
| Miocene | gravel terraces and sedimentary rocks of the lower Chesapeake Group | |
| Pliocene | Yorktown Formation, Cold Harbor Formation | |
| Pleistocene | Bacons Castle Formation |
Geologic map of Petersburg National Battlefield. Image from the National Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory.
Maps and inventories
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory, which produces digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks, has a map and report for Petersburg; they are on the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Petersburg National Battlefield, Virginia," National Park Service Geologic Resources Inventory, which cites National Park Service (2016) and Jonas (1928); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The atlas spells the city "Peterburg" in two places; this page uses Petersburg. The Geologic Resources Inventory report cover shown on the atlas page is not reproduced.
In these publicationsPetersburg National Battlefield
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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