News: Civil War Chaplains' Museum To Host Fredericksburg Film

The film The Angel of Marye's Heights, (2010, 29 minutes)will be shown Saturday September 18 at 7:30 in room 113 of the De Moss Learning Center on the campus of Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virgina. This half-hour dramatic Civil War documentary covering the life and legacy of Confederate Sgt. Richard Kirkland who climbed the stonewall at one of the bloodiest battle of the war to give water to his wounded enemies. The image of this young South Carolina soldier holding a canteen to the lips of a fallen foe has been memorialized in many mediums but never in film. In essence, the memory of Richard Kirkland as a 'Southern Samaritan' is even larger than the selfless act he performed. This moment of mercy has become a major symbol of light amidst the darkness of war. This film examines both Kirkland's act and the commemoration of it. Tickets are $5 and $3 with the proceeds going to the Civil War Chaplains Museum. This new endeavor can be found online at http://chaplainmuseum.org/

CWL: The film was funded by the Fredericksburg, Virginia based Foundation of Civil War Life. It can be found online.

Text Source: Internet Movie Database

Trail Plaques, Animated Maps and Film: Breaking the Rebel's Right Flank at Fredericksburg

The site of the Meade's Pennsylvania Reserve Division breakthrough of the Confederate right flank commanded by Jackson at Fredericksburg is now open with an interpreted walking trail. The 1.75-mile "Slaughter Pen Farm" trail takes visitors over some of the bloodiest ground on the Dec. 13, 1862, battlefield. This assault over mostly open ground was supposed to be the main Union attack that day, with the now more famous assault on Marye's Heights to follow. More than 9,000 Federal and Confederate casualties were sustained on this ground south of Marye's Heights, giving the area its name. The property was acquired recently by the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT). Though recently and generically labelled "The Slaughter Pen" the farm fields are still part of a working farm.

The entrance to the property is located just off Route 2 south of Fredericksburg, 11232 Tidewater Trail, Fredericksburg VA 22408. The Civil War Preservation Trust asks that groups of more than five register at the Fredericksburg National Park visitor center or with CWPT (800-298-7878) and to use caution since this site is still an operating farm.

Here are the highly illustrated trail plagues. Here is the link for the animated maps. The units move according to the battle clock.
Frank O'Reilly's ten minute orientation film is here. He presents the notion that Confederate authors emphasize the Stonewall beneath Marye's Heights where losses were 1 to 8 against the Federals. O'Reilly reminds the audience that the losses on this farm were 1 to 1, something the Southern authors wish to ignore. It was at this farm that Lee was gazing when he said to Longsteet, "It is well that war is so terrible otherwise we would grow to fond of it." Best results come with George Rable's Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! or Frank O'Reilly's The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock nearby and open.

Image Source: The Assault of Meade's Pennsylvania Reserves is from fusiliers.wordpress.com.

News---Archaelogy at Fredericksburg Reveals Washington's Boyhood Home

CWL: A Civil War battlefield holds George Washington's childhood home. The location is directly across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. The Ferry Farm is not a part of the National Park Service's military park. From my exploration at the Ferry Farm and my reading of Rable's and O'Reilly's books on the battle, Washington's home is below (southwest) of the railroad trestle and the site of Sumner's crossing.

Text:Washington’s Boyhood Home Is Found, John Noble Wilford, New York Times, July 3, 2008

Researchers announced Wednesday that remains excavated in the last three years were those of the long-sought dwelling, on the old family farm in Virginia 50 miles south of Washington. The house stood on a terrace overlooking the Rappahannock River, where legend has it the boy threw a stone or a coin across to Fredericksburg. On the subject of legend, the archaeologists who made the discovery could no more tell a lie than young George. No, there was not a single cherry tree anywhere around, not even a stump or a rusty hatchet. The tale of the boy owning up to whacking his father’s prized cherry tree, the one thing most people think they know of Washington’s youth, has long since been discredited as apocryphal.

But finding the house, archaeologists and historians say, may yield insights into the circumstances in which Washington grew up. Actual documentary evidence of his formative years is scant. “What we see at this site is the best available window into the setting that nurtured the father of our country,” Philip Levy, an archaeologist and associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, said in an announcement of the discovery.

Dr. Levy and other members of the excavation team said the foundations, stone-lined cellars and other remains suggested that this was far from being the rustic cottage of common perception, but instead one befitting a family of the local gentry. It was a much larger one-and-a-half-story residence, with perhaps eight rooms and an adjacent structure for the kitchen. David Muraca, director of archaeology for the George Washington Foundation, said the size, characteristics and location of the structure, as well as many artifacts from the time of Washington’s youth, had led experts to conclude that this was indeed the house they were looking for. “This is it,” Mr. Muraca said firmly.

The announcement was made by the foundation, owner of the National Historic Landmark site called Ferry Farm. Archaeologists described the excavations in a telephone news conference arranged by the National Geographic Society, a supporter of the research.
George was 6 when the family moved to the farm in 1738. His father, Augustine, had bought the farm, which then covered 600 acres, to be closer to an iron furnace that he managed. The father and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington, and their six children occupied a house that had been built earlier in the century.

Among the few things known of that period are the death of a baby sister, a house fire on Christmas Eve 1740 and the death of Augustine, in 1743. George eventually inherited the farm and lived in the house until his early 20s, though he took to spending more time with his half-brother Lawrence at another family property, later known as Mount Vernon. Washington’s mother lived in the house until 1772, when she moved to Fredericksburg, and the farm was sold five years later. The house was demolished sometime in the early 19th century; an 1833 painting shows its ruins. Other old buildings and newer ones were destroyed, their timber probably burned as fuel, when the farm was occupied by Union soldiers in the Civil War.

The search for anything left of the boyhood home began in earnest seven years ago. Three likely sites were excavated, Mr. Muraca said. At the first, two years of work turned up ruins from the 17th century. The second set of ruins proved to be from a house built in the mid-19th century. For the last three years, the research team — sometimes as many as 50 workers in the field and laboratories — turned over the stones and soil at the remaining site. “If we didn’t hit here, we had no other place to look,” Mr. Muraca said.

From sections of foundation stones, the bases of two chimneys and remains of four cellars, the archaeologists determined the dimensions of the main house, a rectangle 53 by 37 feet, not counting the separate kitchen. Other evidence from debris indicated that the house had a clapboard facade and wooden roof shingles. Mark Wenger, an architectural historian for Ferry Farm, said the house appeared to have had a central hallway with front rooms and back rooms on each side and possibly three rooms upstairs under the slope of the roof. The front rooms faced on the river, which in those days was navigable to large sailing ships.

“It was a very nice gentry house,” Mr. Wenger said, at a time when most people made do with houses of only one or two rooms. The team found some charred ruins from the documented fire, but they seemed to be confined to one small area of the house. So stories that the family was forced out into the cold winter to live in outbuildings are suspect, the researchers said. By the end of last year, Mr. Muraca said, “all our data lined up, and we felt that beyond a doubt we had found the Washington house.”

Artifacts from the Washington period were crucial. These included wine bottles, knives and forks, pieces of small figurines, wig curlers, bone toothbrush handles and a clay pipe with a Masonic crest that just possibly was George’s. Fragments of an elaborate Wedgwood tea set, presumably belonging to Mary Washington, showed that the family’s fortunes had revived after the hardships immediately following the father’s death. The Washington foundation said archaeologists would continue the search for other buildings and gardens at Ferry Farm. The ultimate goal is to reconstruct the house young George grew up in.

Source of Text: New York Times, July 3, 2008

See the slide show on the the archaelogical work.

Illustration: A rendering of George Washington's family house and surrounding land at Ferry Farm in Stafford County, circa 1738. A ferry, which gave the farm its name, crosses the Rappahannock River in the foreground. Illustration by Mesick, Cohen, Wilson, Baker Architects.

Photo of Ferry Farm sign: SimplyFredericksburg.com

News: Army of the Potomac's Winter Huts Location To Be Preserved

Park Proposed For Civil War's 'Valley Forge', Clint Schemmer, Free-Lance Star, March 26, 2008.

Central Stafford County needs a public park, historians and preservationists say, but not of the usual kind. This one, set atop ridges overlooking Accokeek Creek, would feature the most significant remaining set of unprotected Civil War forts and camps in the northern part of Virginia. That's what they recommended yesterday to area officials meeting at the University of Mary Washington's graduate-studies center in Hartwood.

County Administrator Anthony Romanello convened the ad-hoc group, which included Stafford supervisors, archaeologists, historians, planners, private citizens, and officials from the public utility that runs the regional landfill where the historic sites are located. To protect the sites as the landfill grows, the R-Board--or Rappahannock Regional Solid Waste Management Board--intends to preserve 14 to 20 acres of the 760-acre facility.

"The important thing is to convey this land unimpaired for our children--that's the first priority," said John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. "The R-Board has done a great thing by setting this property aside." In January, R-Board members voted unanimously to reshape an 80-acre landfill expansion, giving up 3 to 5 acres, to preserve one of the forts, R-Board Superintendent Andrew J. Mikel said. The other forts and winter camps sit on land nearer the creek, where environmental rules preclude landfill development.

Many participants in yesterday's meeting favored creating a park on the property so the public can see and appreciate the Civil War and 18th-century sites, which include four Union Army forts and two camps where soldiers spent the winter of 1862-63. Supervisor Paul Milde, whose Aquia District includes the tract, strongly supports the park concept.

The idea was first proposed two years ago by Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites, a private group that has worked with builders and county officials to protect and memorialize other Union sites in eastern Stafford. FSCWS made supervisors and planning commissioners aware of the Civil War sites in 2006, presenting a 100-page report on them and urging that they be preserved as a park with a one-lane, one-way road to provide access for visitors. Officials were asked to keep the information confidential to help save the sites, which are little known to the general public but have been dug by relic hunters since the 1950s.

Having waited two years for officials to act, FSCWS is now "impatient" to see the sites made into a park, said Glenn Trimmer, the group's director. Trimmer said the tract is the best surviving piece of the "Valley Forge of the Civil War," the winter camps where the Union Army recovered from its defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and in the humiliating "Mud March," and gained the strength to fight again.

"You've got to remember," he said, "soldiers left these camps and went straight to Gettysburg. If they hadn't kept this army intact, and gotten it well trained and well drilled here, Gettysburg would have been a defeat." Author and University of Richmond instructor John W. Mountcastle and Stafford historian Al Conner urged Stafford, Fredericksburg and the R-Board officials to work quickly so the public can enjoy the sites during the Civil War's 150th anniversary, which begins in 2011. Mountcastle said the park could be a boon to regional tourism, much like two Civil War redoubts that Williamsburg saved and opened as a park last year during Jamestown's 400th anniversary.

Kerry K. Schamel-Gonzalez, research supervisor with Dovetail Cultural Resource Group, described two archaeological studies the Fredericksburg firm has done of the tract for the R-Board. Dovetail surveyed 12 sites, including four Civil War forts, two winter camps, a "corduroy" road built by Union troops, an 18th-century road trace and bridge site, two sandstone quarries, and 18th- and 19th-century home sites.

The forts were built to defend against a feared attack by Confederate cavalry, Schamel-Gonzalez said. A network of such earthworks protected the Union encampments in Stafford, home to at least 120,000 troops, and the army's bustling supply depot at Aquia Landing on the Potomac River. Hennessy and others urged that the sites be put on the National Register of Historic Places, to attest to their importance and help preserve them.

Romanello, county Historical Commission Chairwoman Anita Dodd and others said it's imperative to do more archaeology on the whole tract to make sure officials know what historic sites--including Indian and Colonial ones--might be there. At Romanello's suggestion, the principals agreed to form a small study group to hammer out the details of archaeology, preservation and park development. In the meantime, Mikel warned that the historic area, which is posted, is being patrolled by the county Sheriff's Office. Trespassers will be arrested, he said.
Segments from reports by Dovetail Cultural Resource Group and the Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites:

The proposed park tract in central Stafford features 12 archaeological sites, including: FORT 1: This two-faced, 248-foot-long Union Army battery has two gun platforms that may have held 3-inch ordnance rifles or 12-pound Napoleons. At its center is a square, 9-foot-deep supply pit or blockhouse. The fort area includes a zigzag trench and rifle pits.

FORT 2: This three-faced, 210-foot-long battery would have had four or five cannon.

FORT 3: This three-faced battery, which may have held six guns, included a heavily built blockhouse with below-ground storage for powder and shell.

FORT 4: Originally about 200 feet long, this earthwork has been damaged by logging.


WINTER CAMPS: A picket post and two dug-in winter camps, which had log shelters with fireplaces for the soldiers, neighbor the forts. One camp has what is believed to be an officers' quarters made of sandstone.

CORDUROY ROAD: Part of the area's wartime road network included a corduroy road built of logs so the Army of the Potomac could move wagons and heavy guns through boggy areas. Part of one such road, built of pine logs, is perfectly preserved in one swampy site.

BRIDGE ABUTMENTS: Sandstone abutments survive from a bridge that crossed a creek for a well-preserved 18th-century road that was a major route for the Union Army's 11th Corps.

QUARRIES: Two late 18th-century sandstone quarries, one of which appears to have later become a mill, speak to Stafford's role as a provider of building stone. Cut stone was put on skids and pulled by oxen or horse, or loaded onto shallow scows and taken downstream on Accokeek Creek. (The quarry at Government Island, on Aquia Creek, provided sandstone for the White House and the U.S. Capitol.)

Source: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/032008/03262008/366225
Contact: cschemmer@freelancestar.com

Photo: (Top) A Union blockhouse (left) like one found near Accokeek Creek defends Stafford's Potomac Creek railroad bridge. Library of Congres

Photo: (Bottom) Dale Galleon, artist.

Other Voices: Fredericksburg's 145th Anniversary

Historian Leads Brigade Through Streets Of City; 145th Anniversary of Battle of Fredericksburg, Corey Byers, Writer, Robert A. Martin, Photographer, Free-Lance Star, 12/10/2007

Sprigs of boxwood shrubbery were tucked into the caps of Civil War re-enactors gathered at the city dock yesterday morning. The sprigs were worn by actual Union soldiers more than 140 years ago--chosen for the green color to compliment the North's own Irish Brigade.

National Park Service historian and author Frank O'Reilly led a tour of about 125 people, in addition to some re-enactors, through the streets of Fredericksburg yesterday afternoon, recounting the brigade's hellish trip from the Rappahannock River to the front lines at Marye's Heights. Throughout the weekend, battle re-enactments played out on city streets along with living-history camps and other historical tours. The next five days mark the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Fredericksburg, fought Dec. 11-15, 1862.

For two hours, O'Reilly's group made their way from Sophia Street to the Kirkland Memorial on Sunken Road. The National Park Service held an anniversary ceremony for the Battle of Fredericksburg at the memorial site. O'Reilly read historical accounts of the brigade's arduous trip, recounting how soldiers from New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had to watch and listen to their compatriots die as they made their way to the front.

Despite low morale and heavy artillery fire coming at them, members of the brigade tried to keep it light. O'Reilly recounted one tale of a general who was grazed by a bullet, only to joke with his men about what had happened. "Only the Irish can laugh in the face of what is coming," O'Reilly said.

O'Reilly said 565 men in the brigade were killed, wounded or went missing in a battle that "destroyed troops physically but elevated them spiritually." "Today the military considers ten percent lost a disaster," O'Reilly told the crowd. "The Irish Brigade lost almost fifty percent." Those who followed O'Reilly's lead braved the brisk 50 degree weather, overcast skies and misty conditions. Ann Marie Keech, of Newport News, came for a weekend of Civil War events and described the park service walk as "you-are-there type of history." She described herself as a little bit of a Civil War buff.

"They paint the picture for you, so if you want to get into it you can," Keech said of the Park Service tour and the re-enactors. "When I close my eyes I'm not sleeping, I'm visualizing." Michael Beard, of Stafford County, said he went from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday, taking in various historic events. Beard, like his friend Keech, didn't mind the weather, which was similar to what Civil War soldiers encountered so many years ago--minus a sky darkened by gun smoke from Union and Confederate forces. "It's more realistic because this is the weather they had."

Source: http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/122007/12102007/339975

CWL --- O'Reilly on Burnside

McClellan's 'I can do it all' statement to his wife regarding his ability to be both the commander of the Army of the Potomac and co-ordinator of all the field armies of the Union contrasts well with Burnside's hesitancy and reluctance in accepting the position of commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Also, McClellan's decision to move the army as wings worked well but immediately before a battle he dispensed with the grand division command and relied on his corps commanders. Conversely, Burnside, who also used the grand division command system to move the army, kept the wing commanders during the battle of Fredericksburg. This decision was a detriment to the successful completion of his battle tactics, especially during the Prospect Hill attack. Franklin's non-support of Meade, as Burnside ordered it, is a case in point. Additionally, Franklin allowing Reynolds to focus upon the artillery and not his troops, worked to the disadvantage of the Pennyslvania Reserves under Meade.

Faced with the delay of the pontoons, Burnside waited until all was ready. McClellan may have done the same. Faced with similar situations, such as Yorktown, and June 1862 in front of Richmond, and after Sharpsburg, McClellan was deliberate and constantly addressed the issues of readiness. I suspect that faced with the delay of pontoons at Fredericksburg, McClellan too would have waited until they arrived. But instead of attacking over them, it appearsly probably that McClellan would not have attacked at all. Of course, McClellan may not have chosen Fredericksburg as a destination in November, 1862. Though, he successfully managed to get the Army of the Potomac between the wings of the Army of Northern Virginia in late October and early November, Rafuse is unsure what course McClellan would have taken if he would have stayed in command during November.

O'Reilly's choice of adjectives on several occassions in 'Winter War on the Rappahannock' lends a degree of triteness to his writing style. Fortunately, he holds close to the primary sources and quotes observers' impressions of Burnside as the battle slips beyond his grasp. A condition 'akin to desperation,' 'unbalanced,' 'dead with sleep,' having a 'great nervous exhaustion' led to Burnside's decision to personally lead the next day's attack. Stamina appears to be a major difference between McClellan and Burnside. McClellan kept his head during his times exhaustion though during these times he had the tendency to shove blame upon others shoulders. Burnside lacked the stamina that McClellan had, but Burnside did have a positive characteristic that McClellan did not have. He could accept blame and admit his faults. I can not recall an instance when McClellan accepted blame and admitted his faults, after reading Rafuse's 'McClellan's War'.

Next, Rable on Burnside.