On April 9, 1865, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrended to Union general Ulysses S. Grant in this town in south-central Virginia.

The American ship Appomattox was a wooden bulk steamer, and one of the largest wooden ships ever built. The Appomattox had a length of 97.2 meters (319 feet). It was built in 1896 by James Davidson of West Bay City, Michigan.

Appomattox is a project to build a set of cross-platform mapping objects for the .NET framework. It is also a desktop GIS application. It currently supports the following data sources: shapefiles, raster data , and PostGIS.