Great Bridge

Battle

Dunmore believed, based on the best information reaching him, that his opponents fielded roughly 400 men. Overnight between December 8

Aftermath

Once both sides agreed to a temporary halt so the British could gather their dead and wounded, the Tory troops slipped away under cover of darkness and made their way back to Norfolk. The rebels gave Captain Fordyce a burial with complete military honors close to where he fell. Accounts of the casualties varied widely: Dunmore's own official tally put British losses at 62 killed or wounded, while a patriot who had escaped capture claimed the true figure reached 102, not even counting militia losses. On the rebel side, the only injury anyone claimed was a minor thumb wound suffered by a single soldier. Colonel William Woodford, describing the performance of the 2nd Virginia Regiment in the fight, put it this way in a letter that appeared in Purdie's Virginia Gazette on December 15, 1775: the engagement resembled Bunker's Hill on a smaller scale, except that this time the position was held, with just one man wounded, and only in the hand.

Soon afterward, North Carolina troops led by Colonel Robert Howe arrived to bolster the Virginia militia. Dunmore held Leslie responsible for attacking without the planned diversion, though given how badly outnumbered the British were, the diversion likely would not have changed the result. Within days, Dunmore and those loyal to him fled to Royal Navy vessels for safety, leaving Norfolk in the hands of the triumphant rebels. Yet the threat Dunmore represented to the rebel cause was far from over. Washington, the Continental Army's commander-in-chief and a fellow Virginian who understood Dunmore well, wrote to Charles Lee in late December cautioning that danger remained despite the governor's retreat to the fleet. He warned Lee that unless this man was stopped before spring, he would grow into the most dangerous enemy America faced, adding that only taking away his life or his freedom would bring lasting peace to Virginia.

Tensions kept rising after the rebels blocked supplies from reaching the crowded ships, until finally Dunmore and Commodore Henry Pellow chose to open fire on the town. On January 1, 1776, Norfolk was left in ruins, an attack that began with Royal Navy ships and their landing parties but was finished off by rebel soldiers who kept plundering and setting fire to what had been a Tory stronghold.

By February 1776, Dunmore had taken up position in Portsmouth, running raids from there until late March, when General Charles Lee drove him back onto the fleet. Dunmore carried out more raids throughout the Chesapeake before finally sailing with the British fleet to New York City in August 1776, never to set foot in Virginia again.

Virginia erected a highway marker near the site in 1934. When development threatened to encroach on the battlefield, local residents banded together in 1999 to protect it. Later, in 2021, the American Battlefield Trust joined with partner organizations to acquire and safeguard two-thirds of an acre of the historic ground.