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READING HISTORIC LANDSCAPE BATTLE OF BRANDY STATION DRIVING TOUR: Saturday, June 14, 10 a.m., depart from Graffiti House, 19484 Brandy Road, Brandy Station. Tour focuses on the Union river-crossing at Kelly's Ford, the route of march to Stevensburg and the mortal wounding of Capt. William Farley, J.E.B. Stuart's volunteer aide-de-camp. Personal vehicle caravan; no registration required; cost is $10. 540/727-7718.
The 1903 Smith markers were in response to veterans and citizens seeking to memorialize key spots on the Fredericksburg-area battlefields. By Erik F. Nelson
Date published: 6/7/2008
IN THE YEARS following the Civil War, nature and man reclaimed the land across which the military campaigns had unfolded. Farmers filled in earthworks to plant new crops. Weather softened the edges of the trenches where cultivation would not resume or had never occurred. Families and hired workers disinterred battlefield graves for reburial at home or in newly established military cemeteries. The ground, already hallowed by blood, retained forgotten graves, and those fallen soldiers rest there still. Enterprising individuals harvested vast amounts of metal from the scarred fields, initially for resale as scrap, but later as collectibles. And, in time, came the memorials. A few monuments were erected on battlefields during the war, and a few more in the years immediately after. As the veterans aged, they exhibited a growing interest in marking the scenes where they had fought the largest conflict the republic had ever experienced. By 1890, there were already more than 300 monuments at Gettysburg. That year, President Benjamin Harrison, himself a Union veteran, signed a bill establishing Chickamauga/Chattanooga as a national military park, the nation's first. Over the next 10 years, the federal government brought three more military parks into being, at Shiloh, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Antietam also received federal designation, although as a site rather than a park. This bureaucratic definition limited public acquisition to token tracts of land where monuments could be erected, leaving the battlefield landscape in private hands and in agricultural use. As veterans and states memorialized their respective units and heroes, monuments and statuary came to dominate these early parks, which were administered by the War Department. area still rural The battlefields around Fredericksburg stood in stark contrast to the new parks. The area remained as it had been before the war came: a primarily rural region characterized by farms and woodlands and a river town where the local population found employment in mills and factories. The area had also been a scene of slaughter and defeat for the Union army, and the Northern veterans understandably preferred to place their memorials in places of triumph. Still, the photographs taken at the memorial dedication ceremonies in the national parks show a large number of white beards. The living memory of the Civil War landscape was passing.
Date published: 6/7/2008
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