In-Your-Face History

Saturday was a day off at the dig I am currently participating in at James Madison’s Montpelier, in the Piedmont country of Virginia.  Most of the volunteers my first week had either left Friday or early Saturday morning, leaving only myself, my young friend Taylor (who starts at Sweetbriar College near Lynchburg in the fall and was at the dig the same time as me last year), and three of the four resident interns at Arlington house, where we stay.  Taylor’s folks came to take her to lunch, James had lab duty, and Emily and Bobby had a cleaning-blitz to do in preparation for the next batch of volunteers, due Sunday evening.  So I took the opportunity to get out of their hair and do a little motoring in search of History and stuff.  (See ubiquitous photo essay on my Ash Lawn/Highlands visit) 

Stuff

I was, understandably in an early Presidential mood, given where I was staying and what I was doing.  There was always Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in the hills above Charlottesville; but I have been there twice already.  The first time was when I was 16 on a road trip to Virginia with my parents and younger brother in our fabulous white VW camper bus.  My father being an architect, and my parents being the kind of parents who wanted their kids educated beyond school, a visit to T.J.’s beloved house and estate was de rigeur.  This house tour soon became legendary in my family; almost as famous as the time we were touring an old plantation mansion somewhere in the South where the nice southern lady docent informed us “now, you know, most of the best antebellum houses were built befowa the woawa.”  That still slays us even after years of retelling.  On the Monticello tour, as another nice southern lady docent had finished showing off the gadgets and clever furniture in T.J.’s study, she made the mistake of asking if anyone had any questions. Now, this was the early 1980’s, and the issue of slavery was still touchy in such places, but nonetheless my mother piped up with: “That door there in the corner, doesn’t that lead to the room where Jefferson kept his SLAVE MISTRESS SALLY HEMMINGS?”  (Needless to say, she didn’t actually shout, but it sure seemed that way).  The poor docent blushed a half dozen shades of red, hemmed and hawed, and quickly moved us along, no doubt fulminating to herself about rude busy-body Yankees.  Being 16 at the time, I of course wanted to crawl into old Tom’s clever dumbwaiter and lower myself into the basement where I would be safe from my embarrassing mother.  Looking back on that incident now,however, I feel downright proud – way to lay on some real, in-your-face history, Mom!

Incidentally, last year after I finished up my week’s dig at Montpelier, I made a T.J. pilgrimage: first, a return visit to his serenely beautiful UVa campus in Charlottesville, then to his retirement estate at Poplar Forest, outside of Lynchburg.  (I skipped Monticello last year as my wife and I had spent a day there on our trip out here seven years ago.  Besides the house tour,  we braved an enervating heat wave to take a very well done slave quarters tour.    They had clearly updated their spiel in the intervening 20 years.).  Poplar Forest was a new experience forme, and turned out to be an absolute gem of a house, relatively modest in scope and size and one of the most perfect spaces I have ever been in.  The tour started on the back lawn, where yet another nice southern lady docent pointed out the woodwork on theroof balustrades, the Chinese railings on the upper balcony and the shutterswhich, she informed us, had all originally been done by an enslaved carpenter fromMonticello called John Hemming. And she left that name sitting there and started to lead us across thelawn.  Being my mother’s son, and arude busy-body Yankee, I simply couldn’t just leave it lying there, so I caughtup to her and asked her if this John Hemmings was any relation to Thomas Jefferson’s SLAVE MISTRESS SALLY HEMMINGS?**    My family, the bane of nice southern lady docents everywhere….

(I love docents, by the way, whether they are nice southern ladies, or friendly mid-western gentlemen.  I learn a tremendous amount from them – as you will soon see – and I think they provide a valuable and underappreciated service to tourists across this great nation, many of them on a strictly volunteer basis.  Just want to get that straight.)

All of this is mere lead-up to the fact that this time around I once again decided to give the Monticello docents a break and forego a return visit for the time being.  Instead, having seen both of Jefferson’s houses, and having toured and, indeed, dug in James Madison’s Montpelier estate two years in a row now, I had one more local early President to do, the third and least known Virginia Piedmont President, James Monroe.  

The Nice Southern Gentleman Docent told us about
Monroe's nearly fatal shoulder wound at the Battle
of Trenton.  He didn't mention the finger...

Monroe was from a much more modest, though up-and-coming family, than his two mentors and predecessors Jefferson and Madison.  T.J., eager to create a congenial neighborhood around his estate filled with interesting people (namely, people who would listen appreciatively as he pontificated), encouraged both J.M.'s to buy property and build near Monticello.  Madison demurred, either because he already had his hands full with the sprawling estate he had inherited some 40 miles to the north, or he didn’t want to have to listen to Jefferson pontificating all the time.  Monroe, on the other hand, who was much more the protégé of Jefferson, bought an estate abutting Monticello, called Ash Lawn. There he built a home he called Highlands, which both evoked his Scottish heritage and at the same time distinguished the plantation from land he also bought in the valley below, some of which later became part of the University of Virginia. 

The drive from Montpelier to Ash Lawn/Highlands was simply beautiful.  You can go by blue roads, or even bluer roads; I chose the latter route, partly over gravel roads, through rolling hills and verdant horse country, and still arrived at Monroe’s place in under40 minutes.  There I toured Monroe’s surprisingly modest house, this time with a nice southern gentleman docent, and learned a lot about the least known, ‘Last Founding Father.”  He was the youngest of the FF’s – he had just begun his classes at the College of William and Mary when he interrupted his studies to serve as a young officer in the Continental Army.  He was seriously wounded at the age of 18 at the Battle of Trenton; he almost bled out but by sheer luck was saved by a total anomaly at the time: a surgeon who knew what he was doing.  After all the excitement died down, he went back to the College to finish up with a Law degree.  I also learned that James Monroe held more public offices than any other president then or since.  He served as everything from Governor of Virginia and various other state offices, to US Senator, Ambassador to France and to England and Minister to Spain, and so on.  During the War of 1812, he served President James Madison as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War (the only person to have done so). Like his friends James and Dolly Madison, Monroe’s marriage to Elizabeth Kortwright was a loving and successful life partnership: she was beautiful, smart and vivacious, and, it turns out, courageous;  her only defect was having come from a family that remained Loyalist during the Revolution.  I was fascinated to learn that the two of them were present at Napoleon Bonaparte’s infamous Self-Coronation as Emperor.  This was the very public ceremony in 1804 during which, in the presence of the Pope (who usually officiates at such events), Napoleon placed the crown on his own head, and then crowned his beloved Joséphine as well for good measure.  Talk about in-your-face History.  One wonders what the ardently republican Monroes thought about that particular spectacle.

Napoleon crowning his empress.  Note Pope Pius VII, at far right, uncharacteristically 

at loose ends during a ceremony at which he usually officiates.

James went on to follow Madison as the young nation’s fifth President, and the fourth Virginian to hold that office.*  He served two terms and was such a popular and beloved figure that he was unopposed in his re-election and won all but one electoral vote; if I recall correctly, that one vote was cast against him merely so that he would not eclipse George Washington’s unanimous re-election to a second term. Such was the general prosperity of the times (if you were an adult, white male of property, in particular) and the mellow political climate that the period of James Monroe’s presidency is known as “The Era of Good Feelings.”  Even old G.W. couldn’t boast such an enviable legacy, for, in spite of being the Hero of the Revolutionary War and Father of his Country and all that, he struggled mightily with an intensely fractious cabinet and a deeply divided, even poisonous political atmosphere during his presidency. No wonder he refused a third term….

The nice southern gentleman docent who took us through Mr. Monroe’s house was a very fast talker who primarily seemed intent on making sure we knew precisely which chairs, desks, bookcases, paintings, busts, and so on were actually James’ and Elizabeth’s.  Along the way, he did fit in some good history, I have to admit.  Among other tidbits that I hadn’t known was that, while the Monroe’s were in Paris as Ambassador (and Ambassadress), they were in the thick of the Reign of Terror.  They sprang American citizens from the clutches of the Revolutionary Tribunals – including Thomas Paine – and sent them on their way home, often at the Monroes' expense.  James acted as a sort of 18^th century Raoul Wallenberg, issuing American papers to French friends of America who had fallen afoul of the Jacobins. The most dramatic example of this involves Elizabeth Monroe and the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, who was languishing in the notorious Plessis Prison awaiting the guillotine, a fate that had just befallen the Marquise's mother and grandmother.  While the Monroes were pondering how best to rescue the doomed woman without overly offending the French revolutionary government, Elizabeth proposed that she simply go to the prison herself and see what she could do.  And, over the protestations of her husband, who quite reasonably considered the mission dangerous in the extreme, she did just that.  La Belle Américaine, as she was known, took the Ambassadorial carriage, drove through the turbulent streets of Paris, walked through the bloodthirsty mob surrounding the prison, announced herself to the no doubt flummoxed jailers, and soon had Adrienne de Lafayette safely installed in their residence.  A few days later, the Marquis’ and Adrienne’s fourteen-year-old son, George-Washington Lafayette, similarly turned up at the Monroe’s doorstep.  James promptly issued the boy American papers under a pseudonym and put him and his tutor on a ship bound for the States and safety and the home of his godfather and namesake. 

La Belle Américaine

Lafayette himself narrowly escaped the guillotine, due in no small part to his honorary American citizenship and the urgent appeals of Monroe.  Americans today forget how important Lafayette was to this country and it’s founding.  As an impetuous young French aristocrat fired up by the ideals of the enlightenment that he had absorbed in the salons of Paris, the Marquis crossed the ocean and presented himself to George Washington in order to offer his services in the cause of Liberty. He served loyally and courageously at the general’s side throughout the War for Independence and became a sort of adoptive son to the childless Washingtons.  If the French role writ large was critical in securing American independence – after all, Louis XVI did help bankroll the Continental Army and sent a French army and navy to help win the Battle of Yorktown – the Marquis de Lafayette himself came to embody that friendship; he also personally won overt he hearts not only of the American soldiers he served with, but of the nation in general.  The genuine affection that we held towards Lafayette was most evident in the reception he received when the outgoing President Monroe invited his old comrade-in-arms to visit in 1824, on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of Independence.  All along the route of his triumphal ‘farewell tour’ he was treated like a rock star, with crowds thronging to pay him tribute and scores of towns and dozens of counties adopting his name, not to mention countless newborn sons christened in his honor.  (Anyone from Fayetteville, Louisiana? Lafayette, New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania/Ohio/Etc?).     

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier,
le Marquis de Lafayette

This part of the story is commonly told, and may even still be taught by the odd History teacher here and there.  But what isn’t so well known – in fact, what I just learned the other day on my third tour of James Madison’s Montpelier – is what the now older and wiser Marquis had to say when he sat down in private with his old comrades Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.  The gentleman docent who took me and my fellow archaeology dig volunteers through the big house talked to us about how seriously Lafayette took his commitment to the cause of Liberty.  He actually went so far as to buy a plantation in the French West Indies with the intent of providing the enslaved workers with an education, their freedom and a portion of the land.  His plan was thwarted, alas, by events: namely the revolution that almost cost him his head.  Some forty years later, sitting down with three former presidents and fellow former revolutionaries, the Marquis de Lafayette told them a hard truth. What he said to his old friends, essentially, was this: You are virtuous men, founders of a great new nation that I love with all of my heart.  You are men who deserve a legacy of greatness in the annals of History, but that legacy will forever be tarnished if you do not do something about the slaves who cook your meals, make your beds, serve your guests, raise your children, toil in your fields, sweat in your workshops and live and bear children and die in chains on your plantations.

I can’t think of more in-your-face History than that.

_______________

*John Adams of Massachusetts, President number two, was the odd man out; his son, John Quincy Adams became the second non-Virginian and sixth President.  J.Q.A. also followed in his father’s footsteps in becoming only the second one-term president.

** Brother, it turns out.

The Valley Takes Charge

When last I left you, Fearless Readers, I had departed the town of Strasburg on Sunday morning, heading north to venture into the late 18^th Century Virginia Planters’ world.  My destination was a plantation manor built in 1797 by Isaac Hite (there are various other, more German spellings), whose grandfather, Jost Hite (ahh, there’s a good Deutscher name!), who was the first recorded European settler in the Shenandoah Valley.  In 1794 Isaac had married into another local, Anglo-aristocratic family, namely that of Nelly Conway Madison, of Montpelier – James Madison’s sister.  Clearly, the old man’s homestead was not going to do, so he sent his architect to consult with Thomas Jefferson as to how to build a proper, republican house.  The result was Belle Grove, right off of the Valley Turnpike (Route 11) about five miles up the road towards Winchester.

Such was my plan, anyway.  First house tour at 10:15.  After a brief detour to (finally) find a large-scale map of Virginia (my old one having been misplace somewhere), and another to buy some beef jerky, I arrived punctually at the mansion, only to find the door to the Gift Shop/Ticket Kiosk underneath the front portico shuttered (with an actual shutter).  I saw what I assumed were “historical interpreters’ setting up on the lawn and wandering around the grounds in 19^th Century costume.  Asking around and getting some puzzled responses I finally determined that for some reason, the first tour wouldn’t be until after 1:00. (see accompanying photo essay on the UpperShenandoah)

No biggie.  Your Intrepid Traveler is more than equal to such minor setbacks.  I decided to head further north, to the town of Winchester, where there is a Museum of the Shenandoah in which I thought I might profitably spend the intervening time.  I had barely turned left back onto the Pike, however, when I encountered a vast, Civil War reenactment encampment by the side of the road.  They were camped on the grounds of the Battle of Cedar Creek, a climactic battle in the 1864 Valley campaign.  For those in the know, this is the battle in October in which Jubal Early’s 14,000 Confederates surprised a much larger Union force of some 30,000 in a dawn assault, catching the bluecoats napping and causing an initial panicked rout.  This fight is best known for a dramatic ride that General Philip Sheridan made from Winchester (11 miles to the north), through his fleeing, demoralized troops, rallying them as he went, until he arrived at the scene to direct a counter-attack that drove Early back and turned a rout into a resounding victory.  This did Abraham Lincoln no harm in securing his reelection some two weeks later, thereby directly contributing to the ultimate Union victory.*

Curious about the reenactor camp, I stopped to take some pictures from the roadside (there was an entry fee to get on the field).  There is a little museum across the Pike and I asked what was going on.  As I began to hear the boom of cannon and the rattle of musketry (yes, musketry does rattle, just like the books say), the museum attendant informed me that they were re-playing the First Battle of Manassas, which I found odd, as that battle took place near D.C., quite a ways away.  Turns out that the big National Park battlefields don’t allow reenactments anymore.  Even play battles are hell on the terrain.

After watching some blue soldiers and cavalry march and ride towards some grey soldiers and cavalry, to the sounds of cheering and booming and rattling, I got back in my car and resumed my northerly course.  I soon came across another site I had thought of visiting, that of the Pritchard Farm in Kernstown, just a couple of miles south of Winchester.  This was principally known as the site of two (yes, two), battles that take the little town’s name, along with a half dozen significant skirmishes throughout the war.  The first battle was the opening salvo of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign, on a cold March Sunday in 1862. ** Uncharacteristically caught out with bad local intelligence that assured him the local Federal garrison was heading out of the Valley to reinforce the defenses of Washington, Jackson’s then tiny force instead ran headlong into a comparative host of blue hidden behind a rise behind the Pritchard Farm, with cannon arrayed in front of the woods on the crest.  Long story short, while the Pritchard family cowered in the cellar with shells whizzing overhead and blue and grey soldiers charging back and forth across their fields, Jackson suffered his only defeat as a commanding officer.

In the aftermath, the Pritchard family emerged to the blood and gore of wounded and dying soldiers and horses strewn about their land.  Their house became a makeshift hospital and they began to deal with the inevitable destruction and detritus of war littering their farm. 

At this point I realized that, 18^th century intentions or not, the Valley was determined to draw me back into that damned war.  After driving down the little rock-wall lined lane leading to the house, I found the visitors’ center parking lot deserted.  No doubt everyone was off down the road enjoying the rattling and booming and cheering of the blue and grey.  The two ladies inside, Jeanette and Rebecca, seemed happy to see a non-reenacting face, and we chatted for quite some time about the farm’s history, the Pritchards and the battles.  When I asked if the house was open for tours, she regrettably informed me that it was open on alternate weekends, and this was an off week.  However, she immediately offered to show me around anyway.  First, however, Rebecca took me out back to show me the grounds and get me situated as to the battles.  Rebecca was an enthusiast and an excellent raconteur and I was grateful for her orientation tour from the back yard, gazing southward from which the Confederates came both times, and northwards, towards the hills that the Federals held.  She also confided in me, almost conspiratorially, that she had her own theories as to which part of the mansion was built first. Her uncle’s house in the Valley, it turns out, had similar characteristics, and she explained her reasoning.  I left her convinced that the now-demolished rear “addition” was, in fact, the original big house.

Jeanette, in her turn, was an excellent and gracious tour guide of the house.  I have had other, impromptu, often unsolicited special tours of historic homes that I have visited, mostly in the south.  I think that when the docents find out I am a Yankee teacher of History who actually knows his stuff, they are eager to get out the keys and show off their own piece of the past.  Jeanette fit this pattern.  (She did not, however, seem to think much of her colleague’s theories about the house.  This was her domain, and she politely – this is the South, after – all declined to take up the gauntlet Rebecca had thrown down when I mentioned it). 

The Pritchard House, with the stone wall in front
 of the lane behind which Col Mulligan and his
Chicago boys made their stand.

I shan’t burden you with the whole story of the house’s decline, the wanton arson of the original log cabin in a Halloween prank just after the property became officially part of a trust in about 2003, and so forth. (See the Kernstown Battlefield website for the details)  Suffice it to say that since the war, the homestead has had a run of bad luck.  Instead, I want to talk about James Mulligan and Helen Pritchard and the vagaries of the post-war years in the South. 

The property has been a working farm for over two-and-a-half centuries, starting with a 140,000 acre grant to Hans Yost Hite (there’s that name again) and another individual in 1731.  Part of the grant devolved to a William Hoge a few years later and in 1756 it was sold to Rees Pritchard; the Pritchards would farm the land for 120 years, until after the war in 1876.  Now, one doesn’t normally think of good Germans being slave owners and masters of plantations, but some were, of course.  Interestingly, my hostesses informed me, in 1850, just before the extant house was built, the family owned 15 slaves, but by 1860, the census lists none.   The theory that I like is that the son at the time, Samuel Rees Pritchard, had the house built to accommodate his new bride Helen, whom he married late in life (for both of them: he was in his 40’s and she was a 28 year-old spinster).  She was from a prominent New Jersey Quaker family and, as Quakers tend to frown on the enslavement of other creatures of God, I think Samuel got out of the bondage business to lure his inamorata down to Virginia.  At any rate, they started a family and no doubt would have lived a quiet, productive life in the Valley.  And then the War came. 

Helen Jonston Pritchard, a Quaker who married
Samuel Pritchard at the spinsterish age of 28

Towards the end of that war, in July of 1864, Jubal Early was striving to fill the rather large shoes of Stonewall Jackson in chasing the bluecoats around the Valley.  A reduced Union army – part of it having been, once again, sent back to protect D.C. – encountered Confederates at dawn on the 24^th south of Kernstown and the Pritchard farm.  Once again, the family huddled in the cellar as battle raged around them.  This time, the Federals were pushed back and outflanked and a good portion (including the command of one Col. Rutherford B. Hayes) was threatened with encirclement and capture.  At this point, a Chicago Irishman turned Colonel named James Mulligan made a stand at the stone wall beside the lane in front of the house.  He and his men, including his 19 year-old brother-in-law, managed to hold off the onslaught long enough to avert disaster.  In the process, the young brother-in-law, Lt. Nugent, was killed while carrying the regimental flag – a coveted position of honor that meant that every opposing soldier was gunning for you – while Mulligan was cut down, mortally wounded, by riflemen from a Confederate Sharpshooter Brigade.  His men tried to carry him from the field, but he told them to “Lay me down and save the flag.”  Or so the romance of war would have it. 

Col. James Mulligan, of Chicago, who died
with his head cradled in Helen's lap
(pre-war photo)

Mulligan was eventually carried into the Pritchard’s home, now once again a scratch hospital, where the Union-sympathizer Helen helped care for him and other wounded.  Mulligan’s wife had followed close behind him on campaign, and hearing of his wounding, rushed to the scene from Cumberland, Maryland.  Unfortunately, James died a few days after the battle, before Mrs. Mulligan (NAME?) could arrive.  She no doubt took comfort in the fact that he died peacefully, his head cradled in Helen Pritchard’s lap.  He even managed to pen a farewell on the back of a family photo he carried with him.  Such a death scene – one of peace, acceptance, and readiness to greet the almighty in heaven – was an ideal greatly valued in those days, and took away some of the sting of loss for the survivors.  The war was so traumatic for the nation in part because so many families – so many grieving mothers and widows – were bereft without any knowledge of how their son died, if their husband was surrounded by familiar and loving faces in his last moments, whether their brother had had time to prepare to meet his reward. 

After enduring four years of soaking up the blood of both sides and having its woods ravaged, its fences used as firewood, and its fields torn up, the Pritchard Farm’s run of bad luck continued.  In spite of Helen’s Union sympathies and the family’s unquestioned service to Federal wounded in the war, the family fortunes declined in the aftermath.  Extensive damage to the farm, combined with the economic chaos in the post-war period, led the Pritchards to the brink of financial ruin.  Samuel petitioned the Southern Claims Commission for restitution for damage caused by the Union army, but was rebuffed due to his supposed Confederate sympathies during the war.  Broke, the family had to sell out, thereby ending over a century of stewardship. Thankfully, the decline the house underwent in the 20^th century has been halted, and the mansion and house are stabilized, with plans, once money becomes available from somewhere, to restore the old girl.  (See my photo essay for some photographs of the mansion)

When I emerged from the tour, after I had spent some money in their bookstore and made a small donation to the house fund, it was after 2:00 and there was a line of clouds, dark blue underneath, coming up the Valley from the southwest.  I drove back south on the Valley Pike, into the rapidly cooling, moist air of the coming storm.  By the time I reached Belle Grove Plantation, some fat raindrops had already begun to fall. 

If you are in the area and have an hour to spare, this house is well worth the visit.  The house is grand in a modest way characteristic of what they call down here the Jeffersonian Style.  The original edifice is perfectly symmetrical and balanced, built of light-colored native limestone and, while Jefferson might have disapproved of the southern wing added on later, the overall effect is pure eye candy.  Hints of TJ’s aesthetic abound, including the cruciform floor plan and the careful sitting in the landscape with glorious views from the front portico of the Blue Ridge and from the rear the Alleghenies in the west.  I also noted that the building mimics the characteristic way in which he incorporates the service areas (kitchens, servants’ quarters, etc) in such a way so that they can accommodate and pamper the inhabitants of the main floor but are almost entirely hidden from casual view.  The entrance to the ground floor is hidden under the portico, while inside the house you would have to hunt a bit to find the stairway downstairs and to the attic, since it is a tiny spiral staircase tucked behind what looks like a closet door.  Jefferson took this ideal to the extreme at his own Monticello, where the enslaved servants downstairs put dinner courses in a dumbwaiter that opened on the dinning room; guests might eat a multi-course meal with old Tom and never see a black face. 

Having finally fulfilled my main goal of the day, I pointed my faithful Jetta wagon southeast towards my final destination, James Madison’s Montpelier, near the town of Orange, Virginia.  The drive, through intermittent thunderstorms followed by dazzling sunshine breaking through the clouds, was the most beautiful motoring thus far on my trip.  I skirted the northern tip of the Blue Ridge and on down the eastern flanks, through rolling hills and horse country, whizzing by any number of hysterical markers commemorating this or that Civil War cavalry skirmish, such and such old settlers’ homesteads, and the founding of various old towns.  I think the Shenandoah, the Blue Ridge and the Virginia Piedmont comprise some of the most glorious country in this great country, and I drank up the landscape like a fine vintage wine.  I was coming to the end of my week-long road odyssey and looking forward to spending two weeks digging in James Madison’s plantation.  And that, dear Fearless Readers, is what I have been doing since, and about which I shall soon post photo essays and travelblogue reports.***

____________

* This was the campaign during which Sheridan spent the summer months ranging up and down the valley in a scorched earth campaign.  The idea was that if the Union couldn’t keep the Confederates out of the Valley, Sheridan would make it untenable as a resource for the CSA by turning it into a wasteland.  Hence Sheridan’s famous comment that he would make it so that a crow overflying the Valley would have to bring its own provender….  In the larger picture, as Sheridan was laying waste to the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman was making his infamous March to the Sea, during which great swathes of Georgia and the Carolinas were similarly made victims of marauding bluecoats.  Sherman’s comment, possibly apocryphal, was his famously terse “War is Hell.”

** The very fact that the battle was fought on a Sunday is testament to Jackson’s getting caught with his pants down.  A devout, church-going man, General Jackson never sought battle on the Lord’s Day. 

*** You might be interested to view my photo essay from last season’s dig, in the Domestic Servants’ Quarters of Montpelier.

Dead Horses, Dead Confederates, Dead Confederate Horses...

A caveat for my Fearless Readers -- Beware: naked History ahead.  Due to capricious connectivity where I am at present, this and subsequent posts are being composed on the fly, as it were, without the fact-checking I would normally perform.  Therefore, please excuse, and please correct any errors of fact I may have committed.  I also welcome comments, alternate interpretations, rants, etc.  Also, for geographical reference, you can use the map accompanying my Strasburg photo essay.

This is my third visit to the famed Shenandoah Valley, and the first time visiting the lower reaches (confusingly, the northern extreme, since the Shenandoah River runs from south to north).  The first time I ventured to these parts, some seven years ago along with my wife Éva, we entered towards the southern end near Lexington, Virginia, home of two famed educational institutions dating to before the Civil War: Washington College (soon to append R.E. Lee to the name), and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). 

That trip was, like most of my road trips, a whirlwind of hysterical tourism as well as communing with nature.  Ultimately, our wanderings would encompass hours of touring in the ever truly beautiful Valley along with camping in the spectacular Shenandoah National Park astride the Blue Ridge; we also made a quick two-day visit to D.C. and ended up by swinging northwards to camp in the mountains of western Maryland and tour the battlefields of Antietam and nearby Gettysburg.  Oh, and somewhere in there we spent a day in and around Charlottesville, soaking in the Jefferson aesthetic at his estate, Monticello, and at the University of Virginia, the college he founded and designed (see my photo essays on the UVa, and also Poplar Forest, the retirement estate he designed and built while he was serving as our third President).  It was a glorious road trip, but it makes me tired just to think about it.

Gen’l Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, 

whose left arm is buried 150 miles from 

where the rest of him is.

In Lexington, our first stop, we visited the home of Thomas J. Jackson, who, before the war (one wants to say “befowa the woawa”) was a well respected, even beloved instructor at VMI.  From the opening battle of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run (known to southerners as the First Battle of Manassas), he was universally known as Stonewall Jackson, for the inspiring stand he took against the attacking Federals, thereby turning a probable Confederate defeat into a panicked Union rout.  The nice southern lady docent on that visit fairly swooned as she led us around the house, bubbling over with such breathless enthusiasm about ‘The General’ that I was pretty near certain she would have acted downright indecorously had Jackson suddenly come to life and returned home.  I also suspect that Éva came away with a bit of a crush on the old reb.  We also walked the campus of Washington and Lee University, so re-named because the school invited the Confederate icon General Robert E. Lee to spend his years of semi-retirement as President of the school.  It was intended as a sinecure, but he took the job seriously, made reforms, pissed a few people off and gained renewed respect. He is buried in the crypt of the campus chapel that he commissioned, underneath a beautiful glowing white marble sarcophagus, which he almost certainly did not commission.  Curiously, his beloved horse, Traveler, who faithfully carried Lee throughout the war and similarly entered into retirement at W&L U., is buried right outside the door.  When we exited the cool refuge of the crypt, I stopped to pay homage to the noble steed; some romantic soul had left an apple on his gravestone.  Oddly enough, when we visited the little museum at VMI right next door, we suddenly found ourselves face to face with Stonewall Jackson’s horse, Little Sorrel, who also enjoyed a long and peaceful retirement.  The former battle horse spent his twilight years happily munching clover on the parade ground, beloved as a sort of campus mascot at VMI.  When he finally passed on, he was stuffed and mounted (oh, the terrible unintended pun) by admiring students to preserve his memory.  Somehow I feel Traveler got the better deal….

General Lee in Repose

(Fast forward to just yesterday late afternoon, on a tour one of the staff archaeologists at Montpelier was giving us dig volunteers of the grounds.  We ended up in the northwest corner of the formal grounds, sitting around Madison’s ‘Temple’, and Mark, aka ‘Mark the Brit’, asked if we had any questions.  I had spied, a bit further off under a spreading evergreen tree, three large gravestone looking objects, and asked what they were.  Turns out they were, in fact, large gravestones.  The last owners of Montpelier, the duPonts, were horse people and had buried three of their thoroughbreds on the grounds – including Annapolis and Battleship,* the latter of which, Mark ruefully informed us former colonials, was the first American horse to win the prestigious British Grand National Steeple-Chase.  I am reliably informed that the horse-burying thing is not a Southern thing.  Just a horse people thing.  Then again, I know where all the cats I have owned are buried, so there is that.  The stuffing and mounting thing is simply nutty.

Little Sorrel, not so reposed

To Éva, born and raised in Hungary, this was her first taste of how terribly current the war still is in the South.  The past is the present is the past in these parts in a way many northerners find hard to understand.  For one thing, the war and defeat devastated the South physically and psychologically and forever altered its economy, and its very way of life, and left it with few resources with which to reconstruct itself.  On the other hand, the North, if anything, emerged economically stronger, certainly more industrialized, with a robust infrastructure and confidence in itself and a future full of promise and progress.  Also, the impact of the war is present and tangible in the landscape of Virginia, especially.  Every major battle save one (Gettysburg) was fought on southern soil – most of them occurred in northern and western Virginia – and it tells.  For four years mighty armies ranged back and forth between Washington and Richmond, only 100 miles apart, and up and down the Shenandoah Valley, a mere 90 miles long.  This is why there are so many ‘firsts’ and ‘seconds,’ as in ‘First/Second Battle of Manassas,’ ‘First/Second Battle of the Wilderness,’ First/Second/Third Battle of Winchester.’  With both sides’ armies maneuvering in such a relatively constrained geographic area for four long years, they were bound to contest the same strategic spots more than once.

And the Shenandoah Valley, I was soon to fully appreciate (as opposed to simply read about), was a critically strategic piece of real estate for the South.  Before the war (befowa…), the South, though an overwhelmingly agricultural region, was a net importer of grain for its tables.  The economy being based on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton, which were hell on the soil not to mention on the enslaved people who planted, tended, harvested and processed them, there was little incentive to grow wheat and barley and corn in sufficiency to feed its population.  With the coming of the war and the increasingly effective Northern naval blockade of Southern ports, suddenly the South needed all the homegrown foodstuffs it could produce.  The Shenandoah was the most fertile land in the region, what with the rest of Virginia having ruined its already poor soil with intensive tobacco production.  Additionally, having been settled in the main by Germans, many of them Mennonites, the agriculture of the valley was characterized by modest, sustainably managed farms producing copious amounts of grain needed to feed the Southern armies and population.  This made the valley intensely contested; as a result, you can hardly spit around here without hitting some battlefield, skirmish site, fort, encampment, general’s headquarters, or something to do with that war.

We got a feel for just how critical the Shenandoah was in the Civil war by driving from the upper (southern) valley to about the middle on that road trip seven years ago.  The farthest north we ranged was also the most wrenching of the sites we visited or passed by, the Battle of New Market.  Thankfully there was only one of these.  There we toured the museum and extensive grounds dedicated to the battle, in which a scratch force of Confederates, including young cadets rushed up from the now-dead Stonewall Jackson’s old school VMI, tried to hold off the Yankees one more time in May of 1864.  They succeeded, but at terrible cost; there is an area of the battleground called the “field of shoes” where the youngsters made a valiant and unspeakably heart-wrenching stand against a make-or-break Union charge, during which many lost their shoes to the mud.*

Virginia Mourning her Dead, 

sculpted in 1903 by Moses Ezekiel, 

VMI Class of 1866, stands in front

 of the parade ground at the college.  

Ezekiel, who was a veteran of 

New Market, was the first 

Jewish cadet at VMI.

Then last year, on my next visit to the Valley, I stayed in the middle part, including a day following in the footsteps of old Stonewall himself as he deftly parried and thrust at one of the superior Federal forces after him in a series of battles around the town of Port Republic, southeast of Harrisonburg and hard up against the western slope of the Blue Ridge.  This was another chapter in the storied 1862 Valley Campaign I mentioned in my last post.  As I traveled by car from battle site to battle site I marveled, as rest of the world did at the time and has ever since, at the rapidity with which Jackson’s vaunted ‘foot cavalry’ covered ground to always be one step ahead of the bluecoats.  All the while I was struck by the perverse contrast in what I was doing.  I was, on the one hand, taking in some of the most varied and beautiful countryside I know of, all the while contemplating some of the most blood-soaked soil in the bloodiest war this country has yet fought, a tragic, existential crisis in our nation that touched virtually every town and family, north and south, with death and maiming and grief. 

Finally, on this last trip, this time to the lowest extremity of the Shenandoah, I was on the most contested ground in this contested valley.  The town of Winchester, some 15 miles to the north of where I was staying in Strasburg (see post and album), is like a cork in the northern bottleneck of the Shenandoah Valley.  Whoever controls this town and its environs controls the lower valley.  Hence the First and Second and Third Winchesters.  The town, in fact, fairly boasts that it changed hands by some counts as many as 70 times during the war.  One can imagine that at first this untoward popularity must’ve been the cause of no small anxiety and panic for the local citizenry – frantic, unpredictable upheavals during which one had to be constantly on one’s toes, ready to run for the cellar (or for the hills) at a moment’s notice.  There were several occasions when the soldiers of one side or the other – frankly, mostly the blue side – were skedaddling at speed through the streets of their town with the cavalry (or foot cavalry) of the opposing side following in hot pursuit.  But 70 times?  I mean, eventually it must’ve become a matter of, “Oh crap, gotta switch out the flags again....”

On Sunday morning early, I left the Hotel Strasburg and turned north towards Belle Grove, a plantation house built in 1797 in which Thomas Jefferson himself had a hand in designing.  I had no intention of doing any Civil War tourism at all.  I had planned a day strictly devoted to history from befo…prior to that particular conflict.  However, the Valley had other plans for me, as it often seems to do.  Hence the disquisition above which I hadn’t planned to write.  As well as the next installment in these pages, which, fearless readers, will have to wait until tomorrow.

________________________

*Both sired by Man-o-War

**At the cost of 10 dead and about 50 wounded out of 250 cadets.  The were ordered in to fill a gap caused by the panicked retreat of other units; forced to order them out of reserve, General Breckenridge – last pre-Civil War Vice President and southern Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1860 – was heard to lament “And God forgive me for the order.”

The Wrong Way on the Map

The last time I posted, I had stopped for a time (if you can call a hysterical touring visit from your Intrepid Traveler stopping) with old friends in Middletown, Pennsylvania.  From there, after a morning spent visiting ancestral homes in the environs of Lebanon, Pennsylvania*, I headed southeastwards to the burg of Columbia, Maryland, southwest of Baltimore.  There I spent another excellent evening and day with friends (namely, Eric, an old high school chum and college roommate), enjoyed another fine meal (in this case, grilled salmon and succotash), meeting and getting to know young folk I haven’t met before (the lively and lovely sisters Greta, 11 and Maia, seven), and doing a little exploring in Baltimore.**  I cannot honestly think of any other combination of activities that could be more pleasurable and good for the soul than those three days with old friends.

My hosts and I mugging for the iPhone in front of the USS Constellation, in Baltimore harbor.  Her keel was laid in 1853, and she was the last sail-only ship the US navy commissioned.  Amongst other duties, she spent the last few years prior to the Civil War in the Africa Squadron (I didn’t know we had one back then).  As part of her duties in those climes, she on three occasions engaged and captured slavers, sending hundreds of kidnapped Africans back home or to Liberia.  The crew was enforcing both US and international law in doing so, but one wonders what white southerners of the time felt about ‘our boys’ participating in freeing people who looked exactly like the enslaved workers in their midst.  

From Columbia*** I headed southwest to the little town of Strasburg, formally chartered 1761, in the northernmost reaches of the lower Shenandoah Valley.  This was a region I had not previously visited, having mostly traveled the upper and middle sections of the valley.  Like much of the Shenandoah, Strasburg was founded by Germans.  (I was about to write ‘duh,’ but then remembered that the Strasbourg in Europe is in the eastern part of Alsace, for long a region disputed between Germany and France.  It is currently part of the latter, bordering close on the former.  But I digress…).  When the first intrepid Deutschers, many of them Mennonites, arrived in the area of the town in the 1740’s, it was on the absolute western frontier of white settlement in North America.  The first buildings built were stout, stone structures with loopholes for defense against the odd Indian raid.  To this day, as you drive down the streets of this little town, you run across log houses and buildings that have their log structure partially visible, attesting to its frontier roots.  The town became fairly prosperous – they were Germans, after all – as they settled down to farm and be industrious.  In Strasburg’s case, that meant, early on, taking advantage of the excellent clay deposits in the area to become known regionally as Pot Town.

A log building at the main intersection in Strasburg.

My home for the next two nights was the Hotel Strasburg, a lovely Victorian former hospital turned boarding house turned hotel on Queen Street, a block south of the main King Street (named, no doubt, after King George III and his Consort).  The furnishings are decidedly of the era, and my third floor room was small but comfortably appointed with a comfortable double bed, a scallop-backed armchair and, a small fold-down desk so I could write and read and recuperate from most of a week’s worth of fairly constant movement.  After a late dinner in the dining room I found myself nodding off over the archaeology reports on Montpelier that I was reviewing and slept soundly and late.  From the architecture to the furnishings to the friendly and personable service, this is my idea of what a hotel should be.  Then again, the last commercial establishment I stayed in was a Days Inn on the outskirts of Pittsburgh on Monday night, so there is that....

Dr. Bruin’s hospital in Strasburg in 1910, around the time he

absconded with a nursing student.

The hotel began its existence, as already mentioned, as a hospital, although there had been an inn (called an Ordinary, since it also had a pub) on the corner of Queen and Holliday as early as 1782.  In 1895 a Dr. Mackall Bruin opened a small hospital/clinic on the site and a few years later, in 1902, built a substantial, four-storey addition.  He also began a nursing school in the facility.  This last proved his undoing as a medical entrepreneur, since the good doctor soon fell for one of his comely young nursing students and ran off with her, leaving his wife with the now doctor-less hospital.  By 1912 the place was being operated as a boarding house on its way to becoming the charming, comfortable hotel it is today.  (For photos of the hotel then and now, as well as of Dr. Bruin and his nurses, see my Strasburg photo essay).

By the time I ventured out on Saturday, it was already fairly hot and heating up.  I thought, nonetheless, that I would attempt the hysterical walking tour of Strasburg that a brochure I picked up at the hotel mapped out.  So I headed off for the local history museum where the walk starts.  And was pleasantly surprised by how well laid out and organized the museum is.  The museum is housed in what had originally been a steam pottery factory (steam-fired pottery, who would’ve thunk?), then a railroad depot.  In the cavernous main hall there are tons of objects and furnishings and tools and such arrayed on the main floor and on a mezzanine that goes around three sides.  They are organized into coherent themes (economic, education, domestic, etc) and eras that make sense out of what often in such institutions becomes a confused and random sampling.  The Strasburg Museum does not attempt an exhaustive history of the region, but there is something of interest for just about anybody, from their world-famous pottery, to colonial settlement, to a very good display of Victorian life-ways arranged by rooms of the house – bedroom, parlor, kitchen, etc.

There is, of course, a good-sized area devoted to the Civil War.  As we shall see in subsequent editions of this blog, this part of the country is steeped in the history – past and present – of the War Between the States; understandable, since this part of the country was steeped in most of the blood that was spilt in those terrible, tragic, and magnificent years in our history.  However, I didn’t stop long in this area except to take note of a map of the immediate area drawn by an Aide de Camp of Union General Nathanial P. Banks, who had ordered a fort built on the hill adjacent to the town in the overall effort to keep the Confederates bottled up in the valley.  (It didn’t work).  This map caught my eye because a) I like a good map, and b) something about it was odd.  Then I noticed that it was oriented almost directly opposite the maps I had been looking at: north and south were switched.  It was, in fact, oriented southwards, in the direction of the Stonewall Jackson’s famous grey ‘Foot Cavalry’ that the bluecoats were bottling up in the valley.  The map was finished and dated Sunday, May 21, 1862, the day Jackson burst out of a side valley behind the unfinished fort and attacked Winchester, to the North, the wrong way on the map. 

This was but one episode in the extraordinary, brilliant and dashing Valley Campaign of 1862 in which for several months in spring and early summer a tiny force of Confederate infantry ran circles around a two separate but lumbering Union armies, each vastly superior in force to his own.  In the end, both Union armies, baffled and battered, limped out of the Shenandoah at either end, leaving the breadbasket of the Confederacy firmly in southern control.  This enabled another, much larger Confederate army to similarly deal with a third Union army and send it cowering back to D.C.  The summer of 1862 was something of a low point for the Union cause.

There is, I later discovered, no remnant of the Bank’s Fort remaining on the hill, save for the fact that as it was partially developed the lines of trenches became roads.

After taking in the museum and chatting with the docent (and a friend who stopped in), I headed out into the hot afternoon, fortified with my camera, a bottle of water, and – oh look!  A huge Antiques Emorium!

A good two hours later, somewhat poorer in cash but richer in goodies, I repaired in the late afternoon heat back to the hotel, where I had a decent burger in the pub (making the Hotel Strasburg, thereby, an Ordinary), and a quiet few hours reading in my room, before heading out to complete most of the historic walking tour.  Photographs of which can be seen my above-mentioned Strasburg album.

The plan the following day, Sunday, was to drive to Belle Grove plantation a few miles north of town, and from there on to my dig at James Madison’s Montpelier.  But that, fearless readers, is fodder for a missive yet to come.

_______________________

*Naturally, another entry-in-train for these pages

**See above

***See above, above

Exploding Planetary Cores, Hershey’s Kisses, and Eating Shit

I am writing the parts of my summer travelblogue out of order, it seems, but so what?  I’m a Time Traveler.  I can take in the French and Indian War and dead 18^th century generals AND revolutionary 20^th century architecture in the same morning, no problem.  Yesterday, for instance, just tooling around the Middletown/Harrisburg/Hershey area, I yo-yo-ed back and forth over the centuries willy-nilly, from strolling the mid-19^th century waterfront of Pennsylvania’s current capital, Harrisburg*, on the Susquehanna River, then exploring a turn-of-the-century company town (Hershey), on to a quick gander at Three Mile Island, site of the 1979 nuclear power plant disaster, and, finally, trying to decipher the epitaphs on the tombstones of people who lived most of their lives in the 18^th century.  So I can certainly write out of sequence if I damn-well please.  Besides, I can always go back and rearrange them later…

Incidentally, much like the site of GW’s early debacles that I happened upon the other day, the whole Three Mile Island thing came as a bit of serendipity.  I had forgotten where this incident had taken place and so it hadn’t figured in my (albeit vague) plans for visiting this area until my hosts reminded me of its proximity.  Anyone who was in the US at the time and at all cognizant will instantly recognize the distinctive shapes of those four squat towers with their plumes of white steam wafting up from their maws, like toxic industrial volcanoes rising menacingly from the middle of the broad Susquehanna. 

I was 14 at the time and have a distinct memory of television footage of Jimmy Carter touring the site in order to reassure the nation that folks with the know-how knew how to fix this, the world’s first major nuclear oops.  After all, this was a guy who had helped run a nuclear powered submarine…  Of course, the fact that he was wearing plastic booties even in the power plant control room belied his attempt to soothe a jittery populace.  It also didn’t help that a mere three months earlier the hit disaster movie of the season, the China Syndrome, had been released, in which Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas did their level best to scare the bejeezus out of us with a nuclear-meltdown-explodes-the-earth’s-core scenario.  And I imagine, though I have no special recollection of this, that President Carter’s awful suit must’ve jangled a few already strained nerves:

Booties and Bad Suit

But, just as with so much of what I seem to be doing and seeing on this trip, I hadn’t planned on writing about Three Mile Island in this post.  I had intended, instead, to finally plunge into writing about the first stop in my peregrinations, on Marblehead Peninsula in Lake Erie opposite Sandusky, Ohio.  However, I am getting pretty good at simply allowing things to happen on this trip, at accepting and embracing diversions and detours.  The key is to have an overall plan but not to plan too much, and to allow plenty of time to get lost.  Oh yes, and to strap in and avoid whiplash as you jump from century to century; time travel can be jolting on occasion. 

So, rather than writing about my visit to the archaeological dig at the POW camp on Johnson Island, I shall shelve that for the time being and instead take a moment to reflect on Hershey’s Kisses. 

Anybody who is conversant with late 19^th century robber baron capitalism will be familiar with the (to us) bizarre and cautionary tale of Pullman Town south of Chicago.  Pullman was a company town on steroids – George Pullman didn’t just own the factory making his eponymous railroad sleeper cars.  He owned the houses his workers lived in, the stores they shopped in, the churches they worshipped in (as well as the ministers); he even owned the human waste that came out of his workers.  When you took a dump in a Pullman house, you ended up fertilizing the Pullman gardens from which much of your vegetables came from. 

There is something to be said for this sort of paternalistic capitalism.  Job security, decent housing, trolleys that run on time and so forth.  Good vegetables….  However, Pullman’s edifice came crashing down during the economic panic of the early 1890s.  With industry sucking wind – including the production of luxury sleeping cars – Pullman slashed wages in 1894.  Bad enough, but when he simultaneously raised rents on his workers, they naturally went on strike, inaugurating one of the most violent and contentious labor struggles of that strife-prone era.  It turned into a national general strike (does anyone even know what that means anymore?) crippling the nation’s rail system.  Pullman, over the head of Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld (my favorite Illinois Governor), got President Cleveland to send in Federal troops to quash the strike, but that was the effective end of paternalistic capitalism in America.

Or was it?  I learned this week that the company town has been alive and kicking all this time in Hershey, Pennsylvania.  My hosts, driving me around this thoroughly surreal town, informed me that even if you own your own house in Hershey, the company still owns the land underneath it.  Your children go to Hershey-subsidized public schools, and check out books from the Hershey Library.  You can to this day still go to the Hershey Theater for cultural events, and for fun go to Hershey Park and ride roller-coasters and tilt-a-whirls and eat…cotton candy?  Nah, no doubt you treat your kids to (yet more) Hershey Bars in Hershey Park.  There is an extravagant Italianate pile of a Hotel Hershey overlooking the town where the old man in his dotage would sit on the veranda and gaze upon his factories.  The family established a rambling boarding school for underprivileged youth called, needless to say, the Hershey School (my hostess taught there for upwards of a decade).  The lampposts are in the shape of – what else? – Hershey’s Kisses!  The main drag is, of course Chocolate Avenue, and one winces to contemplate the potential scatological jokes had the Hershey’s gone so far as to recycle their workers’ effluence as Pullman once did.

Again, however, when you factor in good wages from now-unionized jobs, a stable school system, a decent public transit system (subsidized by the Hershey’s, of course), there is some good to be said for this seemingly quaint throw-back to the 19^th century.  And it survived – indeed, seemingly thrived – until very recently.

The Hotel Hershey.  Or, rather, one wing of the Hotel Hershey.

Then about ten years ago, according to my hosts, the Hershey company belatedly discovered out-sourcing.  Chocolate began to be made in Mexico and shipped to Hershey to be boxed and shipped.  The management of the Reese’s plant was split off and a Texas-based management company got the bid, so folks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, make Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces under the baleful, and entirely union-antagonistic, supervision of Texans flown in for the purpose.  My hosts’ 24-year-old son, just back from earning his MA in Comparative European Politics in Denmark, is working a summer job there for $10 an hour, a job that until recently would’ve been a union job with benefits and a real salary.  (David, the son, is also volunteering for the Obama-Biden campaign and working for an up-and-coming Democratic candidate for the statehouse.  David's man, Osman Kamara, is a refugee from the civil wars in Sierra Leone back in the early '90's who has a story to tell that could remind Americans of the reasons this country even exists in the first place.  His big issue is public education.)

I wonder how long it will take for the workers of Hershey to rediscover the power of the labor strike.  Alas, probably never.  Unlike Pullman Town, which went out quite literally with a bang (well, lots of bangs from Federal troops), Hershey will probably go quietly into that dark night of “right to work” capitalism, where the only moral responsibility of management is to make the biggest quick buck in the cheapest way possible.  And if you have to raise the workers’ rent while taking away their union wages and benefits and sending their jobs to Mexico or Taiwan or Singapore or Malaysia to be performed by near-slave labor, that is called progress.

At least they aren’t forced to eat their own shit.

______________

*Philadelphia gave way to Lancaster in 1799, which in turn gave way to Harrisburg in 1812

George Washington Lost Here

I have been on my semi-annual summer Hysterical Road Trip, in which I drive madly across the country ferreting out odd historical sites.  I left Chicago Sunday, stopping at an archaeological dig on an island in Lake Erie (more on that later), ending up on the northeastern outskirts of Pittsburg Monday night.  Not quite where I had intended to wind up on, but it’s where I came to roost.  I had decided that afternoon that I would see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Waters Tuesday morning before heading further east to some friends' place near Harrisburg.  I determined to get an early enough start to be able to drive part of the way on the National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road).  So I headed towards Uniontown in order to get on Route 40 towards the Ohiopyle Forest.  It was a lovely day and a lovely drive through wooded, hilly countryside.

The National Road was the first major connection between the developed Eastern Seaboard, and the trans-Appalachian frontier.  None other than George Washington, as a young British Army officer of 22 years, helped carve the road out of the wilderness.  Washington had been west before, in 1753, all the way to the northwestern tip of state to deliver an ultimatum to the French near what is now Erie, Pennsylvania.  The future First President returned to the west a year later as a Lieutenant Colonel of the new Virginia Regiment when he was dispatched from Alexandria Virginia with a small force to deter French incursions into the area of what is now Pittsburg.   He and his small force hacked a narrow road across the mountains, using an old Indian trail.  This was the main positive result of the expedition, which was an otherwise inauspicious start to GW’s military career.  His little army, after a small victory in a skirmish with another tiny combined French and Indian force, was subsequently surrounded at Fort Necessity east of present-day Uniontown and forced to surrender ignominiously and trudge back the way he came. However, in preserving his force intact, he set a pattern for his future military career: that of losing battles, but preserving his army from annihilation by one means or another. 

I say this not to denigrate the Father-of-our-Country, I hasten to add.  GW’s ability to pull off this trick – of getting shellacked in battle, but managing to save his army – was the true key to the American military victory over the Brits back in the War for Independence.  He repeatedly had his, and the Continental Army’s, collective asses whooped by the Redcoats, only to pull of a miraculous retreat in good enough order to save enough of his rag-tag army to regroup, refit, and stay in the game until the French came to save their rear-ends.  It is a little known fact that General George Washington lost almost every single battle he fought in. 

At any rate, in 1754, young Colonel Washington managed to lose his first battle, and in the process to help initiate the first World War in human history:  the Seven Years’ War, known locally as the French and Indian War (and, although surely unintentionally, thereby setting the stage for the confused misery of countless generations of tortured grade school students in Social Studies class).  This war was fought in Europe, India, and the Americas; Britain’s victory, and participation of the Colonists, set the stage for the struggle over Independence. 

The following year, 1755, Washington extended what was to become his nearly unbroken record of military defeat by tagging along as Aide-de-camp to a British heavy hitter, General Braddock, sent along to set things aright on the frontier.  This force of some 2,500 regulars and colonials followed the same road GW had trail-blazed, widening it as they went along to 12’ in order to accommodate the supply train and artillery.  They managed to make an average of about three miles a day, hacking their way through the rugged, densely wooded hills (really, small mountains) of south-western Pennsylvania, on their way to confront the pesky French and their even more pesky Indian allies.  Who, no doubt, had plenty of warning of the British-American force laboring in their direction.  And who, consequently, managed to set up an ambush that nearly wiped out Braddock’s force, resulting in appalling casualties – fully one-third of his force was dead, another third wounded, including Gen’l Braddock himself, and the final third high-tailing it from the scene in complete rout. 

And here is George Washington, on the spot to stem the rout and turn it into a bedraggled but organized retreat back to near the ruins of Fort Necessity, scene of his first defeat.  There the much diminished and bloodied force managed to regroup the following day.  Braddock died of his wounds, which left GW in charge, since most of the other officers had been killed or wounded.  After presiding over what must have been a hasty and improvised funeral service, they buried the general in the middle of his road, and GW marched the army over the grave on their way back to Virginia, thereby eradicating any evidence of the burial to tempt the local savages.  There he lay, forgotten, until 50 years later when the crew constructing the actual National Road rediscovered him and reinterred him to one side of the road, where he remains to this day.

General Braddock's current resting place on left, to one side of the National Road.  Originally, he was buried in the middle of the road he had just enlarged, down a ways at the right.

You would think that these twin debacles would have been more than enough to cure Washington of western wanderlust.  But no.  In 1794, as pesky western settlers chafing at paying an onerous tax on their livelihood – that of turning grain into whisky – were tarring and feathering tax collectors and raising liberty poles, President Washington couldn’t resist the temptation to act literally as Commander-in-Chief.  In order to teach these upstart frontiersmen a lesson, the President rode at the head of his army and once again set out down the road he cut through the primeval forest almost 40 years earlier.  In the end, by the time his force reached the epicenter of the revolt around Pittsburg, most of the miscreants had melted away, so he was denied a chance at a near-certain military victory.  Though not technically defeated, for after all the rebellion did end, he nonetheless must have felt pretty disgusted at having to trudge back east empty handed once again through those damned woods over those infernal hills of western Pennsylvania.

N.B.  If you are interested you can peruse my photo album of this drive, including some quite gorgeous pictures of Falling Water