The Charmed Life of York County’s Court Records

By

Frank Green

Among York County’s most treasured possessions are our court records. They are among the oldest in the nation; with the first entries being made in 1630. While they are virtually complete, they have lived a long and perilous life.
They first survived the famous battle of Yorktown in 1781. The town was occupied by the British and bombarded by French and American forces. The records survived because in 1777 they were moved to Richmond then to Dinwiddie County. After the war, they were ordered brought back to York County.
The records survived the "Great Fire of 1814", which destroyed the courthouse. How did they survive the fire? Again, they were not in Yorktown at the time, but at the home of the York County Clerk of Courts. They were hidden there in fear of Yorktown being raided or shelled by British ships who were in the Chesapeake Bay at the time. This was during the War of 1812. The records were ordered to returned to the clerk’s office on August 21,1815.
York County’s court records had their next brush with extinction during the Civil War. In the spring of 1862, Union general George McClellan planned to shorten the war by advancing up the Peninsula and take Richmond. Yorktown was directly in his path.
Most area localities felt that their court records were danger if they remained in the local courthouses and took them to Richmond for safe keeping. York County Clerk of Courts Boliver Shield had planned on doing the same thing with York County’s records. He leased a boat and had the records loaded aboard. As the boat was sailing up the York River towards Richmond, word had gotten out that there was a Union gunboat in the vicinity. The records were moved to an icehouse near West Point where they stayed for the remainder of the war.
This foresightedness saved York County’s Records. Most of the records from other counties that made it to Richmond were destroyed in fire during the 1865 evacuation of that city.
In fact most of these records might have be safe if they had of been kept at the local courthouses or hidden locally. This was not true of York County. On the night of December 16, 1863 the York County Courthouse exploded. The building and many surrounding buildings were totally destroyed. Needless to say the records would have perished.
In 1867 a group of York County citizens went to the West Point icehouse to find out the fate of the records. They found that the records had been scattered in the building and some had water damage but they were nearly complete.
When the county built a new courthouse in the 1870s, they ordered that a separate " fireproof" records office be built beside it. On the night of January 30, 1940, the York County Courthouse burned and was damaged so bad that the remainder had to be torn down. Because the records were kept in separate building, they were not damaged.
The records of Gloucester County, Mathews County, Warwick County, Elizabeth City County and James City County were among those destroyed, leaving York County with the most complete records in the area.