Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Bounded by Elizabeth River, Crawford Street, Portsmouth General Hospital, Parkview Avenue, & Scotts Creek, Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Virginia

Significance: Located on a peninsula of land on the Elizabeth River, the present Portsmouth Naval Hospital Complex was originally part of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plantation. The strategic peninsula, known from the early nineteenth century on as Hospital Point, was the site of a fort during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and of a Confederate battery during the Civil War. The construction of other defensive positions in Hampton Roads in the early nineteenth century made the fort at Hospital Point obsolete. The peninsula's prominent location, however, made it desirable as a site for the first in a series of medical facilities built by the Navy in the 1820s and 1830s. The Portsmouth Naval Hospital, constructed 1827-33 on Hospital Point, was the earliest Naval Hospital built in America, and has provided medical facilities for Naval personnel for more than one hundred and fifty years, through the majority of America's wars and conflicts, beginning with the Civil War.
Survey number: HABS VA-1287