manufactured ordnance and explosives for long-term storage and shipment to permanent U.S. ordnance depots. At the same time, E.I. duPont de Nemours Engineering Company was decommissioning military ordnance and dismantling the former shell-loading plant and TNT plant structures. From 1926 to 1942, the land was in private ownership and was used for farming or left idle. 1942 and WWII With the outbreak of World War 2, the US government construction began on August 27, 1942 at Cheatham with the erection of a supply pier. The pier consisted of an approach, 2,850 feet long by 28 feet wide, with an L-head at the extreme outboard end, 1,215 feet long by 42 feet wide, parallel to the river channel. Early in September, 1942, work began on the construction at Cheatham of 10 storehouses, an administration building, and all the appurtenant buildings and services needed to make the annex a secure and independent naval installation. The warehouses were of temporary construction, without heat or sprinklers, 120 feet by 828 feet, one-story, affording approximately 1,000,000 square feet of covered storage space. This area of land located in the Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown historical triangle was seized by the Navy on June 21, 1943. When commissioned and annexed to the Naval Supply Depot at Norfolk, the facility was renamed FISC Cheatham Annex in honor of RADM Joseph Johnston Cheatham, the 1929 Chief of the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, the forerunner of today's Naval Supply Systems Command. He was also the fifth and eighth commanding officer of Naval Supply Depot Norfolk. The first ten storehouses at Cheatham Annex were built in 1943. They were one-story cinder-block and timber-frame structures, 835 feet by 120 feet, with concrete ground-level floors. The second group of warehouses, built in 1945, were six storehouses, doubled the station's general storage capacity, by virtue of the buildings' 200-foot width on the 835-foot length. Steel-frame construction was used. The transit shed was of bolted-steel construction, 1,500 feet long by 240 feet wide. The cold storage building, originally built 677 feet by 200 feet, was later extended to 877 feet in length. It had concrete foundations, brick and cinder-block walls, wood frame, and concrete floors at car-door height. The Fleet Industrial Supply Center, Cheatham Annex, officially opened in 1943 as a storage depot, built on the site of a munitions plant. The 1,572-acre property included 7 archaeological sites, Colonial grave sites, DuPont Company buildings built