Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Port Royal, VA

Port Royal is a tiny incorporated town in Caroline County, Virginia — not to be confused with Port Royal, South Carolina, or the Jamaican port of the same name.

Port Royal is one of the area's oldest colonial settlements: English colonists established it in 1652 as a port at the head of sea-going navigation on the Rappahannock River, built to export tobacco, Virginia's cash crop.

Local tradition holds that Port Royal was named after the Roy family, early settlers in the area.

Port Royal was incorporated as a town in 1744, and for generations a ferry carried travelers across the Rappahannock between Port Royal and Port Conway in King George County.

The town's shipping trade declined after railroads arrived in the region in the 1830s, bypassing the old river port.

Port Royal's greatest claim to fame came on April 26, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was cornered and killed about two miles south of town at the Garrett farm after a twelve-day manhunt.

Booth and his accomplice David Herold had crossed the Rappahannock by ferry to Port Royal on April 24, 1865; after Booth was shot in the Garretts' tobacco barn by Sergeant Boston Corbett, he died on the farmhouse porch at dawn, and Herold was later hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865.

The poet Judith Lomax lived in Port Royal for some years in the early nineteenth century.

For most of its modern history the town covered only about a tenth of a square mile, until in July 2014 Port Royal quintupled in size to 481 acres (0.75 square miles).

The 2000 census counted 170 people in 72 households in Port Royal, and the town's population was 196 in the 2020 census.