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Stonewall Jackson's arm is buried in the family cemetery
This stone pyramid, constructed in 1898 where Jackson's troops repulsed a Union attack in December 1862, preceded the Smith markers.
This marker indicating Lee's headquarters is at Spotsylvania Courthouse.
This marker near Mine Road, memorializing Lee's headquarters in the winter of 1862-63, is 250 yards south of the actual site.
The Lee/Jackson bivouac stone marking where the generals met in May 1863 is at Orange Plank and Furnace roads.
'Jackson on the Field' stone at Prospect Hill was moved from Mine Road. |
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.
By the turn of the 20th century, the process of memorializing had begun even in Fredericksburg, although Congress would not establish Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefield Memorial National Military Park until 1927.
The first local monument, possibly placed as early as 1876, was a large granite boulder moved to the site on the Orange Turnpike, State Route 3, where Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had been mortally wounded. In 1888, a more formal and finished monument to Jackson was erected. A monument placed by Union veterans the year before, marking the site where Union Gen. John Sedgwick had been killed at Spotsylvania Court House, served as impetus for its construction.
A rough granite stone had also been placed by local residents at the Widow Tapp farm on the Wilderness battlefield. Available documentation suggests this stone had been set about 1891. Without an inscription, though, it is all but forgotten. It has also fallen over.
Two other battlefield sites also were marked at about that time. In 1888, a monument was placed on Fredericksburg's Sunken Road, where Confederate Gen. T.R.R. Cobb had been mortally wounded. Ten years later, workers constructed a pyramid of stones along the RF&P Railway at the site where Stonewall Jackson's troops had repulsed a Union assault during the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Between 1899 and 1902, however, Union veterans placed five monuments around the area's battlefields to memorialize specific Northern units and formations.
Pastor leads charge
As the 20th century dawned, a group of citizens and veterans considered the need to mark the places in and around Fredericksburg that had gained significance during the war. Among them was an elderly preacher named James Power Smith, who had been an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson.
This committee had formed in response to an offer from a businessman named Thomas F. Ryan, who had connections to New York as well as Virginia. Ryan generously offered to sponsor the purchase of stone markers.
Initial discussions acknowledged that suitable markers were needed in many places in Virginia, including Manassas, Culpeper, Petersburg and the battlefields around Richmond. Not surprisingly, coordination with other localities proved elusive, so the Fredericksburg group decided to begin by placing markers on the Spotsylvania County battlefields.
The local firm of Cartwright & Davis, of the Fredericksburg Granite Works, prepared 10 markers, paid for by Ryan. Smith knew the area well and personally directed the installation of nine of them during the summer of 1903. He left the 10th one, to be placed at Spotsylvania Court House, for someone else to handle.
Smith set his granite markers near roads to be visible to travelers. Where events had unfolded at a crossroads or along a roadway (Pelham's corner, the Lee/Jackson bivouac site, the Widow Tapp field or Salem Church), the stones marked the actual scene of action.
Other sites, however, were at a distance from the roads, like Lee's winter headquarters location and some of the places associated with Jackson. In these cases the markers were not sited at the precise locations, but instead were placed to be seen from the right of way.
Smith was quite familiar with the scenes he sought to memorialize. Jackson had sent him to awaken Lee at his winter headquarters on April 29, 1863, to report that the Union army had marched, initiating its spring campaign. He had slept at the crossroads bivouac where Lee and Jackson conversed for the last time early on May 2, 1863. That night, he helped to carry the wounded Jackson from the field and held a lantern at Wilderness Tavern as surgeons amputated his commander's arm.
Markers moved
The Fredericksburg area, however, remained quite rural, dominated by woods and a confusing road network. Before the days of modern signs, National Park Service wayside exhibits or even good maps, visitors needed all the help they could get.
The stone pyramid constructed along the RF&P tracks was visible to passengers, but the Smith markers were the first cohesive set of guides to direct visitors to the area's wartime scenes.
The 10 markers were originally placed so the inscriptions could be read by someone on horseback or in a carriage in the road. With the growth and dominance of automobile travel, almost all of the markers have since been moved. They have been relocated to allow roads to be widened or reconfigured, to accommodate visitation patterns and to be oriented so they can be read from the interior of a site rather than from a travel lane.
New and colorful wayside exhibit panels have been added to the various sites, greeting the modern visitor at well-marked tour stops.
For those who look for them, though, the 1903 granite markers are still there, silent reminders of a period when veterans themselves marked sites of their trials and triumphs in a great war.
Erik F. Nelson is a founding member of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and senior planner for the city of Fredericksburg. E-mail him in care of
Email: gwoolf@freelancestar.com.
