Beyond Fredericksburg's Stone Wall: Life on hallowed ground

A rebuilt section of the Stone Wall in Fredericksburg, Va.

       
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On a chilly Fredericksburg morning, the sun struggles through a leaden sky as life stirs near the infamous Stone Wall and Marye’s Heights.

On Mercer Street,
 a flag of shamrocks hangs
 in celebration of 
 St. Patrick's Day.

On Mercer Street, a flag of shamrocks hangs in belated celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. A train whistle toots in the distance, an ambulance siren rises and fades, and the low rumble of traffic gathers. A man wrestles an unruly English Springer Spaniel on a short leash while balancing a cup of coffee in his free hand.

A child’s sled waits on a porch. A toppled basketball hoop lies on its side in a driveway, forgotten. A wind chime rings softly, barely announcing itself.

Along Littlepage Street, a large Irish flag sways from a porch, and, two days after the holiday, a triangular banner of three shamrocks still clings lazily to a house nearby. In the tiny front yard of another home, a small multicolored sign declares: “Welcome. Life is Simply Amazing.”

At the corner of Littlepage and Charlotte, the muffled sound of a choir seeps through the stained-glass windows of Fairview Baptist Church, where the marquee out front proclaims: “The Key to Heaven Was Hung on a Nail.”

The brick sanctuary was built in 1925, long after the Battle of Fredericksburg rocked this quiet town — long after the plain before Marye’s Heights became a killing field. Now, in the lingering chill of an ordinary morning, the living world goes about its rhythm atop the memory of what once happened here.

Days after St. Patrick's Day, the national flag of Ireland sways from a house on Littlepage Street. 

Yards from the war-time Innis House near the Sunken Road, the present meets the past.

"I found the brick house packed with men," a Union officer recalled about the Stratton house.
  (CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

In 1862, a walker along the Sunken Road would have seen mostly open plain stretching beyond the old Telegraph Road — an expanse that offered little cover or mercy for Union soldiers. Just yards from the Sunken Road, Martha Stephens — a pipe-smoking woman with a notorious reputation — lived in a tiny clapboard house with her common-law husband. On what is now the corner of Littlepage and Mercer streets, 200 yards from Marye’s Heights, Allen Stratton lived in a two-story brick house, with his wheelwright shop nearby. A few scattered homes and outbuildings broke the emptiness.

On Dec. 13, 1862, wave after wave of U.S. Army soldiers surged across that open plain, leaving the pillaged town of Fredericksburg behind, driven into the teeth of a deadly, well-entrenched enemy on Marye’s Heights. The slaughter was inevitable. Eight thousand fell. Not a single Union soldier reached the Stone Wall. Among the dead and wounded were men of Thomas Meagher’s famed Irish Brigade, who charged forward with the battle cry “Faugh-a-Ballagh!”— “Clear the Way” — their courage swallowed by the merciless fire that awaited them.

A sign in a front yard on Mercer Street.

"The smoke lay so thick that we could not see the enemy, and I think they could not see us," a Union officer recalled, "but we were aware of the fact that somebody in our front was doing a great deal of shooting. I found the brick (Stratton) house packed with men; and behind it the dead and the living were as thick as they could be crowded together."

When night fell and the temperature plummeted, it was clear the Confederates had secured a victory.

"[N]early 1,500 dead soldiers lay upon an area of two acres in front of our lines," James R. Hagood of the 1st North Carolina recalled. "Three or four times as many wounded howled in the darkness, a dismal concert for assistance which could not be rendered, or perished in the cold from neglect. The pickets of the enemy's army which were posted that night on the skirts of the town erected breastworks of the dead bodies and thus secured themselves from the bullets of the Confederate Sharpshooters."

"It was a night of dreadful suffering," the Union officer recalled. "Many died of wounds and exposure, and as fast as men died, they stiffened in the wintry air."

During a temporary truce, Union soldiers buried their dead on the plain. Soldiers interred more than 600 in one trench, 130 in another.  After the war, many of those soldiers were re-buried in a terraced national cemetery on Marye's Heights, the very ground they aimed to conquer years earlier.

Beginning in the 1870s, development slowly transformed The Bloody Plain, and by the time the Fredericksburg battlefield became a national park in 1927, houses had begun to dot the area east of Marye's Heights. Today, it is a vibrant community — but one with a dark and violent past.

Here are snapshots of life on the killing field:

Josh Cameli is house manager at the Sunken Well Tavern, 175 yards from the Sunken Road. 

Dressed in his Sunday best, 81-year-old Wright Campbell slowly makes his way to Fairview Baptist Church. A lifelong Virginia resident, he is keenly aware of Civil War history in general and the Battle of Fredericksburg in particular.

Small talk quickly turns to the inevitable question: Is it eerie to live in the epicenter of death in this war-torn area?

“What acre does not have blood on it in Virginia?” he asks.

No state suffered more than Virginia during the Civil War. Campbell notes that residents of this neighborhood don’t dwell much on its deadly past.

Two women walking to the Baptist church nod in agreement. “It’s just a nice place to live,” says one, whose ex-husband’s ancestors fought for the Confederacy.

At the Sunken Well Tavern, on the corner of Littlepage and Hanover streets, 45-year-old manager Josh Cameli hustles from table to table. Business is brisk for breakfast. “Fly” by Sugar Ray hums in the background, modern art decorates the walls, and a stuffed lynx and fox face each other on a window shelf.

Well aware of the town’s bloody history, Cameli lives in a 19th-century building in Fredericksburg that used to be a carriage house, he says—making it unlikely that anything significant occurred there.

“Every year when reenactors come through,” he says, nodding toward the Sunken Road just 200 yards away, “I tell them there’s trouble up ahead.”

Occasionally, a descendant of a soldier who fought at Fredericksburg stops by for a meal and a conversation.

“One older gentleman came in and told me that when he walks here, he walks on the bones of his ancestor,” Cameli recalls. He appreciates the town’s history but doesn’t dwell on the battlefield.

Jacqueline Damm, shown near the Richard Kirkland monument near the Sunken Road,  
had a ghostly encounter while she lived on Williams Street in Fredericksburg.

The view up Mercer Street. The Sunken Road is in the far distance. No Union soldier reached
the Stone Wall during the Battle of Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

Crossing the street near the Stratton house, where scores of dead and wounded lay in December 1862, a 60-year-old man makes his way home during a morning stroll.

"I used to go up to the national cemetery on Marye's Heights when I was a kid and watch the sun rise," says the lifelong Fredericksburg resident. "Nobody bothered you but the ghosts." The notion of the neighborhood as a killing ground, he says, seems odd now. To him, it's just home.

A young woman walking her dog nearby concurs. She has lived in the neighborhood four years, just blocks from the Stone Wall. Although she found a Civil War-era bottle and a Union button while digging in her back yard, the former journalist rarely thinks about the neighborhood's deadly past.

Thirty-year-old Jacqueline Damm, who has lived near the Stone Wall for several years, appreciates the town's history, especially during walks with her dog and frequent runs through the neighborhood. But she did have a disturbing encounter while she lived in a building on William Street in Fredericksburg. Several times, she insists, an apparition of a woman appeared. "The air felt different," she says, "it felt electric."

Sixty-seven-year-old James Freeman, a longtime neighborhood resident, knows the feeling. While emptying his truck in the driveway of the Stratton House, he recounts stories from his childhood. When he was 5, he swears he saw under his bed the ghost of  Richard Kirkland, the South Carolina soldier who famously aided wounded Yankees near the Stone Wall. The look in his eyes suggests he isn't kidding.

      Google Earth view of  neighborhood east of  Marye's Heights and the Sunken Road.

Several houses down Mercer Street from the Stratton House, 45-year-old James Tompkins sits on his small front porch, taking a drag on a cig.  He's peppered with questions about the city's past.

 "That's about as far as they got," Tompkins says of the U.S., pointing to the house next door. His small house is within sight of the Stone Wall, about 150 yards away.

Tompkins has a close association with the Civil War: An ancestor served in the Richmond Light Infantry Blues while another may have been the only commissioned female officer in the Confederate army, he says. "Captain" Sally Louisa Tompkins, promoted by Jefferson Davis for her service as a nurse, was a wealthy philanthropist who lived in Richmond.

A longtime relic hunter, Tompkins has even hunted in his "postage-stamp-sized" back yard, but has never found anything besides bits of glass. "I'd love to look under this foundation" for Civil War relics, he says of the post-war house he has lived in for four years. "Bet there is something there."

Over on the western side of Marye's Heights, Tompkins says he found 10- and 20-pound Parrott shells "just hanging in the roots of trees," possibly overshots from Union artillery on the other side of the Rapphannock River.

"Years ago, old-timers would find relics by just eyeballing them in the woods," he says. "But those guys wouldn't look for relics on the battlefields. That was hallowed ground. People kind of lost their sense of history now."

Not one to believe in ghosts, Tompkins has lived in the area his entire life. He appreciates the neighborhood and its history — and thinks many of his neighbors do, too.

"It's real quiet here," he says. "There not a lot of drunk college kids around. It's a good place to live.

"And it sure is more quiet than it was in December 1862."

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SOURCES

• The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. 32, Page 635, 1886
• Hagood, James R., Memoirs of the First South Carolina Regiment of Volunteer Infantry in the Confederate War for Independence from April 12, 1861 to April 10, 1865, manuscript, University of South Carolina Libraries Digital Collection
• Hat Tip: Mysteries and Conundrums: Exploring the Civil War-era landscape in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania region.
• Hat Tip: Clint Schemmer, Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star.