Located at the junction of the Appomattox and James rivers, Hopewell dates from 1613, when it was established as Bermuda City. In 1622 a colony-wide attack by Native Americans wiped out the settlement. The town was reestablished in the 1630s but grew very slowly into the mid-nineteenth century. During the Civil War it was a strategic center of activity, and the population boomed. After the war the town returned to its former small size until 1913, when E. I. du Pont established a munitions factory. During World War I the town grew almost overnight to nearly 40,000. Some of the housing in the town came from the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, which supplied about 165 individual homes and a variety of other accommodations, delivered in fifty boxcars. After the war the population again plummeted, but since World War II it has become a center of synthetic textile and nitrogen production. The town has grown to a 2000 population of 22,354.
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