Appomattox Manor is a former plantation house in the City Point neighborhood of Hopewell, Virginia, built in 1751 on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the James River and Appomattox River. The Eppes family resided at the manor, from which they presided over a 2,300-acre plantation with four farms on all sides of the confluence of the two rivers. By 1860, Richard Eppes owned 113 African-American slaves ranging in age from a few months old to 79 years old, and he hired two men as overseers and one free Black man before the American Civil War broke out. His skilled enslaved men worked as carpenters, blacksmiths, and sawyers, and the enslaved community worked on Eppes' Bermuda Hundred farm, on Eppes Island, and at the Appomattox and Hopewell farms. In 1862, the arrival of US Navy gunboats on the James River forced the Eppes family to relocate to the safety of Petersburg, and nearly all of their slaves left with the Union forces, a few of them even joining the Union Army. From November 1864 to March 1865, during the Siege of Petersburg, the Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant lived in a modest cabin on the estate's grounds, directing Union armies in the climactic final campaigns of the war and hosting major figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. President Lincoln himself stayed at the manor during his visits to Petersburg in June 1864 and from March to April 1865. After the war, Grant's cabin was moved to Philadelphia, where it remained on display for 116 years. In 1981, the National Park Service returned the cabin to City Point and reassembled it on its original site; however, only 10% of the structure was original, and it was one of the few vestiges of the Union occupation of City Point during the war.
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