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.

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

**See above

***See above, above