History
During the American Civil War, the current park was the site of the Battle of Dam No. 1, part of the Battle of Yorktown (1862). In the days prior to the battle, the Confederate forces constructed rifle pits and other earth works from which they held off the Union Army forces commanded by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. The earth works were preserved; though overgrown with woods, they are accessible from the White Oak nature trail on the camping side of the reservoir.
In the 1960s, as Newport News grew, the city found itself taxing its water supply. The solution to the problem was to purchase several lakes in the Lee Hall area and pump the water into the city. To protect the cleanliness of the water, a watershed around the new Lee Hall Reservoir was created. The watershed was developed into Newport News Park in 1966, primarily through the efforts of City Manager Joe Biggins, who considered the development of a large park important as the city continued to grow.
Read more about this topic: Newport News Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)