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reasure-trove Photographer's archive yields previously unseen post-Civil War views of Fredericksburg T Review by ROBERT K. KRICK Images courtesy of JERRY BRENT I

December 17, 2005 1:28 am

N THE FALL of 2004, the annual issue of the local journal Fredericksburg History and Biography printed a dozen images taken in 1874 by photographer F. Theodore Miller and released as stereoviews. Those extremely important historic views focused on battlefield scenes, but also illustrated other buildings and sites in and around Fredericksburg.

Most of them had never been published before, nor even seen by modern historians and residents of the region. Fredericksburg collector Jerry Brent had purchased the stereoviews at auction, and allowed their reproduction in Fredericksburg History and Biography.

Backmarks on the stereoviews listed by name several other scenes in the series, in addition to those actually among the photographs discovered in 2004. Eric J. Mink, the accomplished Fredericksburg historian who wrote last year's article explaining the freshly discovered photographs, concluded by expressing the fond hope that some of those missing views would turn up eventually.

Amazingly, that happened within a fortnight after the 2004 journal appeared. Fredericksburg antiques dealer and bookman Bill Beck acquired nearly 200 Miller photos from an estate in Mathews County, and conveyed most of them to Jerry Brent. The prints proved to be the photographer's personal archive, Miller having moved from Fredericksburg to the Northern Neck and eventually to Mathews County.

Fourteen views from the latest Miller collection richly illustrate the newly released 2005 version--volume IV in the series of annual releases of Fredericksburg History and Biography. Several of them accompany this review. Historian Mink again wrote the accompanying journal article, which he titled "Southern Exposure: Miller's Photographic Images of Fredericksburg, Part II."

Mink traces photographer Miller's family to origins in Prussia, from whence they emigrated to Michigan before settling in 1853 just west of Five-Mile Fork in Spotsylvania County. By 1868, Theo, as Miller called himself, was practicing the photographic trade in Fredericksburg. The next year, he married a Morrison girl from near Salem Church. Early in 1870, the photographic business moved into a building on Main Street.

For almost a decade, Theo Miller monopolized the photographic trade in town, but in 1880 a competing Baltimorean set up business on the same street. Ten years later, at least six photographic artists operated in Fredericksburg; by then, Miller had moved on down the Northern Neck. He had been working intermittently in that vicinity already, and after the death of his first wife and their baby, he had married a Heaths-ville teenager.

For many more decades, Theo Miller photographed people and places on the Northern Neck, and eventually in Mathews County. Early in the 20th century, he bought what apparently was the first automobile ever owned in Mathews County. His archive contains many images of primitive cars and of other machinery (some of which he invented and patented).

Mink's article focuses on the Fredericksburg photos, which date from about 1868 to the 1880s, many of them evidently taken in 1874. Three images reproduced in Fredericksburg History and Biography illustrate Miller's own story: one of Miller himself; one of the novel "Photographic Palace Car" he used for field work; and one of a stereocard's backmark that shows his business heading and lists views for sale. The other 11 reproductions in the journal article unveil samples from the recently unearthed cache.

Two photos depict Chatham, the one of the rear (eastern) elevation being the earliest by far of that side of the house. Other buildings shown include Clearview on Stafford Heights; the Mary Washington House; and the Lewis Wrenn House near the intersection of Sunken Road and Hanover Street.

The most interesting photograph with Civil War associations is a view looking up toward Brompton, taken from about where the Richard Kirkland Monument now stands. It reveals a post-and-rail wooden fence along the east edge of Sunken Road. A large white-sheeted wagon top is visible in the road. The old flat roof on Brompton, before the current gable-ended replacement went on, helps to establish the early provenance of the photograph.

A group of four images printed in the journal shows Fredericksburg National Cemetery. Those taken inside the cemetery have such sharp definition that the inscriptions on some of the old, original wooden headboards are legible.

The other four articles in Fredericksburg History and Biography all use rich primary materials and evidence to illuminates local stories of interest and importance.

Russell P. Smith, superintendent of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, contributed an article on the 2nd Delaware Infantry at the Battle of Fredericksburg. It draws on a first-rate collection of contemporary letters and a diary kept by one of the soldiers. "Cyrus Forwood and the Crazy Delawares at Fredericksburg" reproduces diary entries beginning on Nov. 10, 1862, as Gen. George B. McClellan bade farewell to the Federal Army of the Potomac, and running through Feb. 3, 1863, in the aftermath of Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's "Mud March" fiasco. The young soldier's bright and literate letters home date from Nov. 19 to Feb. 14.

Pvt. Forwood crossed the Rappahannock River into Fredericksburg on Dec. 12 with the 2nd Delaware, part of Zook's Brigade of Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock's sturdy division. Although a spent ball struck Forwood, he escaped the slaughter that felled so many others in his division. The Confederate fire seemed "murderous" to Cyrus, "the worst ever our troops yet had to encounter," he declared in his diary.

In a letter to his father, written four days after the battle, Forwood fumed at the poor leadership he saw ("surely a heavy responsibility will rest on some one"), talked at length of cowardly Federal units and men, and vividly described how he and his comrades fired toward the Confederate heights as bullets rained down around him and shells burst overhead.

Smith's article is particularly gratifying because it attests to the author's deep and knowledgeable interest in the battle. That makes him the first superintendent of the battlefields in more than a half-century with such credentials, after a long succession of random government job-holders of one ecru shade or another. One can only hope that the bureaucrats in regional and central offices do not learn of Smith's interest, as knowledgeable and dedicated people make such creatures uncomfortable.

Erik F. Nelson, who has edited the journal since its inception, also prepared an article for this year's issue. The abolition of slavery by 1865 left freedmen in large numbers throughout central Virginia. Among the projects undertaken by the government's Freedmen's Bureau, which was devoted to aiding in the transition from slavery to freedom, was an enumeration of former slaves in various localities. The 1866 register taken in Caroline County survived at the courthouse for years and now is preserved at the Central Rappahannock Area Heritage Center.

Nelson arranged the 5,066 names on the list (the 1860 census enumerated 10,672 slaves in Caroline) in alphabetical order, with ages. The original manuscript includes where each person was living in 1866, and the names of former owners. Those two columns do not appear in the article for reasons of space, but the alphabetical listing will make it easy for researchers and genealogists to find individuals and follow them back to the original for more information.

Fredericksburg professor Gary Stanton has transcribed the manuscript, making its contents legible and readily accessible. There seems not to be a similar listing in print for any other Virginia county. It provides a valuable, and unusual, resource for the point midway between the free/slave census of 1860 and the all-free census a decade later.

Professor Clarence R. Geier of James Madison University has supervised a succession of interesting and successful archaeological projects on the battlefields around Fredericksburg. His focus on early military sites has resulted in two scholarly books on the subject, and made him a pre-eminent expert nationally. Geier's chapter in the journal, co-written with his student Cora Brien, recounts the struggle to pin down the location of the Spindle farm on the Spotsylvania battlefield. The house burned during the Civil War, and its surviving traces, proved to be elusive.

"Third Time's the Charm: Historical Archaeology and the Sarah Spindle House On the Battlefield of Spotsylvania Court House" recounts the tenacious investigations--prosecuted with steely determination, one might say in tribute to the late John Goolrick--between 1997 and 2004 that finally located the battlefield landmark, situated on the ridge that runs westward toward the Po River from the Brock Road.

A chapter by Fredericksburg historian Donald C. Pfanz, the author of a superb biography of Gen. Richard S. Ewell, describes the attempts in 1865 by the Union army to locate, identify and bury the dead on the battlefields around Fredericksburg. That ghastly chore pre-dated the creation of the national cemetery on Marye's Heights, so the burial crews created temporary cemeteries in some locations. Many bodies, of course, were entirely unidentifiable by 1865. Others, identified when interred in 1865, lost that identity before they could be moved to the national cemetery later in the decade.

In a pathetic anecdote typical of all too many Civil War results, the burial teams met a Northern woman looking for her son's body at Spotsylvania--and, surprisingly, found the remains and delivered them to the mourning mother. Fourteen contemporary photographs nicely illustrate Pfanz's article.

The Fredericksburg-based Central Virginia Battlefields Trust publishes Fredericksburg History and Biography and distributes it to its premium-level members. Copies are available to the general public for $11.95. A donation from the Sunshine Lady Foundation, arranged by Robin Haymes, provided the means to produce the 2005 journal on high-quality paper that ensures crisp reproduction of the images, and with enough space to print the Miller photographs on single pages. The result is a publication both of immediate interest to anyone who cares about Fredericksburg history, and of lasting value.

ROBERT K. KRICK of Fredericksburg was chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park for 30 years. He is the author of 14 books; the most recent, "The Smoothbore Volley that Doomed the Confederacy," was published by Louisiana State University Press.