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Civil War camp saved in Stafford; Developer, county team up
Union army regiments' 1862-63 winter camp near Falmouth will be preserved, and later opened to public, as part of Stafford developer’s subdivision
By CLINT SCHEMMER
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
November 16, 2006
Battlefields are the sexy sirens of Civil War preservation. Glamorous, with beautiful landscapes, they get all the attention.
Soldiers' camps are the Ugly Bettys--forgotten, ignored and often bulldozed.
And that's just not right.
"Most soldiers were in battle for eight hours in the course of a year. Marching, waiting, and being in camp comprised the bulk of the soldiers' experience," said John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
But it's going to get a little easier for the public to see, and appreciate, that part of the story.
Stafford County--working with a local developer and a preservation group--is going to preserve a historic site that will tell the largely untold tale of soldiers' daily lives in the months before and after the major and minor battles fought in the Fredericksburg area.
In partial trade for the rezoning of 47 acres near Falmouth, the builder, C.T. Park Inc. of Stafford, will deed easements to the county protecting the land where four Union regiments spent the winter of 1862-1863.
More than half of its Forbes Landing subdivision will be open space.
When handed over within three years, it will be the largest and the first complete winter camp preserved in Stafford--out of hundreds that sprawled for miles north and east from Falmouth to Aquia Landing during the war.
The rest are "fast vanishing or are, at least, forgotten," Hennessy said yesterday.
Which is astonishing, he said, given that 120,000 Union troops were living in Stafford for eight months in 1862 and 1863. Their log, mud and canvas homes amounted to the largest "city" in North America at the time. By contrast, Stafford's civilian population at the time was a mere 8,300 people--4,900 whites and 3,400 blacks, almost all enslaved. Today, Stafford has 116,000 residents.
The Union campsites have no profile now with the public although the soldiers' presence was the single most transformative event in Stafford's history, Hennessy said.
It took more than a century for the county to recover from the war's effects. By the time the Army of the Potomac pulled out, "as one soldier put it, 'Stafford looked like one big scab,'" Hennessy said.
The soldiers had felled the county's forests for firewood and building material, foraged for food, cut roads and dug winter quarters all over the place.
"It caused tremendous hardships for the local community. That story and these sites deserve to be preserved," Hennessy said.
A veteran of many preservation battles, the historian praised the partnership between the developer, county officials and preservationists that saved the 5th Corps camp. "The idea that [they] can work together is a very good thing," he said.
Executives with C.T. Park credited the Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites for its members' months-long efforts to identify and document the site, working closely with the company's archaeological consultants.
"That's something that doesn't normally happen," said Ray Freehling, C.T. Park's chief operating officer. "These guys really care about history."
The onsite work done by the Friends group and Fredericksburg's Dovetail Cultural Resource Group revealed several times as many hut sites--148 in all--as an initial archaeological survey had revealed, said Glenn Trimmer, director of the Friends group.
That persuaded the developer to give up two more lots and preserve a larger area, which includes the entire camp and 31 grave sites of Union soldiers, whose bodies were probably reinterred after the war. Far more men died of illness in the camps than on the battlefield.
The area, which the soldiers named Camp Humphreys after the 3rd Division's commander, is unusually well documented, Trimmer said. Letters and sketches by two of the soldiers who lived there are preserved in the archives of the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pa. The camp may have been home to the 2d Brigade of the 3rd Division of the 5th Corps, whose symbol was the Maltese cross.
Even to the layman's eye, the camp's orderly rows of hut and tent sites are still visible as depressions in the ground. Dovetail found dozens of cultural features in its study of the Forbes Landing tract, and concludes that the campsite is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Camp Humphreys "is significant at several different levels," Hennessy said. Its men, he noted, were recovering from the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 and the "Mud March," the army's ill-fated try in January 1863 at flanking Gen. Robert E. Lee in Fredericksburg.
After two costly defeats in six months, without the chance to rest and regenerate in the Stafford camps, the Union victory at Gettysburg in July of that year wouldn't have happened, Hennessy said.
D.P. Newton, the Friends group's historian and founder of the White Oak Museum, likened the winter camps to the American bison: "There were thousands of them. And now, they're almost all gone."
Eric
Union army regiments' 1862-63 winter camp near Falmouth will be preserved, and later opened to public, as part of Stafford developer’s subdivision
By CLINT SCHEMMER
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
November 16, 2006
Battlefields are the sexy sirens of Civil War preservation. Glamorous, with beautiful landscapes, they get all the attention.
Soldiers' camps are the Ugly Bettys--forgotten, ignored and often bulldozed.
And that's just not right.
"Most soldiers were in battle for eight hours in the course of a year. Marching, waiting, and being in camp comprised the bulk of the soldiers' experience," said John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
But it's going to get a little easier for the public to see, and appreciate, that part of the story.
Stafford County--working with a local developer and a preservation group--is going to preserve a historic site that will tell the largely untold tale of soldiers' daily lives in the months before and after the major and minor battles fought in the Fredericksburg area.
In partial trade for the rezoning of 47 acres near Falmouth, the builder, C.T. Park Inc. of Stafford, will deed easements to the county protecting the land where four Union regiments spent the winter of 1862-1863.
More than half of its Forbes Landing subdivision will be open space.
When handed over within three years, it will be the largest and the first complete winter camp preserved in Stafford--out of hundreds that sprawled for miles north and east from Falmouth to Aquia Landing during the war.
The rest are "fast vanishing or are, at least, forgotten," Hennessy said yesterday.
Which is astonishing, he said, given that 120,000 Union troops were living in Stafford for eight months in 1862 and 1863. Their log, mud and canvas homes amounted to the largest "city" in North America at the time. By contrast, Stafford's civilian population at the time was a mere 8,300 people--4,900 whites and 3,400 blacks, almost all enslaved. Today, Stafford has 116,000 residents.
The Union campsites have no profile now with the public although the soldiers' presence was the single most transformative event in Stafford's history, Hennessy said.
It took more than a century for the county to recover from the war's effects. By the time the Army of the Potomac pulled out, "as one soldier put it, 'Stafford looked like one big scab,'" Hennessy said.
The soldiers had felled the county's forests for firewood and building material, foraged for food, cut roads and dug winter quarters all over the place.
"It caused tremendous hardships for the local community. That story and these sites deserve to be preserved," Hennessy said.
A veteran of many preservation battles, the historian praised the partnership between the developer, county officials and preservationists that saved the 5th Corps camp. "The idea that [they] can work together is a very good thing," he said.
Executives with C.T. Park credited the Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites for its members' months-long efforts to identify and document the site, working closely with the company's archaeological consultants.
"That's something that doesn't normally happen," said Ray Freehling, C.T. Park's chief operating officer. "These guys really care about history."
The onsite work done by the Friends group and Fredericksburg's Dovetail Cultural Resource Group revealed several times as many hut sites--148 in all--as an initial archaeological survey had revealed, said Glenn Trimmer, director of the Friends group.
That persuaded the developer to give up two more lots and preserve a larger area, which includes the entire camp and 31 grave sites of Union soldiers, whose bodies were probably reinterred after the war. Far more men died of illness in the camps than on the battlefield.
The area, which the soldiers named Camp Humphreys after the 3rd Division's commander, is unusually well documented, Trimmer said. Letters and sketches by two of the soldiers who lived there are preserved in the archives of the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pa. The camp may have been home to the 2d Brigade of the 3rd Division of the 5th Corps, whose symbol was the Maltese cross.
Even to the layman's eye, the camp's orderly rows of hut and tent sites are still visible as depressions in the ground. Dovetail found dozens of cultural features in its study of the Forbes Landing tract, and concludes that the campsite is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Camp Humphreys "is significant at several different levels," Hennessy said. Its men, he noted, were recovering from the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 and the "Mud March," the army's ill-fated try in January 1863 at flanking Gen. Robert E. Lee in Fredericksburg.
After two costly defeats in six months, without the chance to rest and regenerate in the Stafford camps, the Union victory at Gettysburg in July of that year wouldn't have happened, Hennessy said.
D.P. Newton, the Friends group's historian and founder of the White Oak Museum, likened the winter camps to the American bison: "There were thousands of them. And now, they're almost all gone."
Eric
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