'Peculiarly sad': Death in the Potomac of a 'patriotic man'

St. Clements Island, formerly known as Blackistone Island, near where Cunningham Johnston drowned
in the Potomac River when the Massachusetts collided with the Black Diamond
 on the night of April 23, 1865. (PHOTO: David Broad)

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Private Cunningham Johnston survived physically unscathed in all the 118th Pennsylvania's major battles, at Shepherdstown and Fredericksburg in 1862 and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville in 1863. He endured Burnside's "Mud March" in January 1864 and, following his capture during the Overland Campaign, survived nine months in Andersonville and other Confederate prisons.

But in the waning days of the Civil War, when all the fighting was largely over, the Irish-born bricklayer from Philadelphia couldn't elude death.

 1906 illustration of St. John's College General Hospital during
 the Civil War.  Private Cunningham Johnston, a former POW,
 was a patient here in late 1864 and early 1865.
(St. John's College Digital Archives)

On April 23, 1865, Johnston and about 300 former POWs and hospital convalescents boarded the privately owned steamer Massachusetts, anchored in the Potomac River at Alexandria, Va. Recently released from St. John's College Hospital in Annapolis, Md., the 37-year-old was to re-join his regiment to complete his term of service. The war was effectively over, but the country's turmoil was not: In Maryland and Virginia, Federal authorities frantically hunted for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

At about midnight, the Massachusetts neared Maryland's Blackistone Island, roughly 55 miles southeast of Washington. Lurking dangerously nearby was the Black Diamond, an iron hull steam propeller canal boat with men aboard aiding in the search for Booth. On the clear, moonless night, the vessel apparently had only one light on. Stunningly, the much larger Massachusetts collided with the Black Diamond, opening a yawning gap in the smaller ship's side. The vessel went under stern first in about three minutes. "Oh, the great dark hole in the water she made," recalled a soldier aboard the Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, panic ensued on the overcrowded Massachusetts, which, although still seaworthy, slipped lower into the water. In the inky blackness, frantic soldiers -- some of whom had been sleeping on deck -- leaped into the dark Potomac. In all, at least 50 men drowned; one report noted that nearly 90 perished. Among them was Cunningham Johnston, whose body, like many of those who died in this little-known accident, was never recovered.

“After all their suffering in the prisons pens, then to be drowned,” one of the survivors remembered. “It seemed bad.”

In a footnote in the 118th Pennsylvania regimental history, published decades after the war, Cunningham Johnston Jr. called his father's fate "peculiarly sad."

"He was a patriotic man," he wrote, "and patiently accepted the dangers and hardships of army life as a duty to his country."

          GOOGLE STREET VIEW: Site of orphans' home in Quakertown, Pa., where two 
                  Johnston family boys stayed after their father's death in April 1865.

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19th-century view of Yellow Springs (later known as Chester Springs), an orphans' home in Chester, Pa.
Cunningham Johnston Jr. and his brother, Michael, were placed here by their mother after their
   father's death "for the purpose of their education." (Chester County Library collection)

Cunningham's death threw the Johnston family into turmoil. His wife, Elizabeth, placed  her eldest sons, Cunningham, then 12, and 10-year-old Michael in the Soldiers Orphans' Home in Quakertown, Pa., "for the purpose of their education." Later, the boys were sent to another orphans' home, Yellow Springs, in Chester, Pa.

"I have not abandoned the support of any of said children, nor permitted any of them to be adopted by any person or persons ..." Elizabeth stated in an affidavit for a widow's pension. The Johnstons' other children, 14-year-old Sallie, 5-year-old Elizabeth and 4-year-old James, remained at home with their mother.

A widow's pension file offers us a glimpse into the family's tragedy: In an affidavit, Elizabeth wrote, "I have never heard from [Cunningham] him since" the collision on the Potomac. In another, a former 118th Pennsylvania officer wrote he believed he heard of Johnston's death from an official source but wasn't sure. A document noted names and birthdates of the Johnstons' children; another, the date Cunningham and Elizabeth were married in 1847.

"I feel as well as I ever did," wrote Cunningham Johnston in a letter
to his wife on April 13, 1865. It may have been the final letter
of his life. (fold3.com via National Archives)

The most poignant words in the file are in Cunningham Johnston's own handwriting.

In a letter to Elizabeth from St. John's College Hospital on April 10, 1865, he wrote of his disappointment at not receiving any recent letters from home and of the "glorious news" of Robert E. Lee's surrender the day before. "I feel purfickly sure," he said, "that I have seen my last battle although I am in poor halth as I ever was."

"Tell Cunningham," he added, referencing his son, "to ask Mr. Boles if he thinks the ware will be over before linkin is out of the Chair."

In perhaps the final letter of his life, Cunningham rejoiced: "I have just finnished reading the most walcom letter I have ever received from you or anyone else letting me know that my Lizay was better and the rest of my family well."

He said he expected to go to Washington soon to get transportation to return to his regiment, which was present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. "... I feel as well as I ever did," he wrote.

And, Cunningham closed in the letter, "I ... am your loving husband to death."

POSTSCRIPT: Elizabeth Cunningham secured a widow's pension at the standard rate of $8 a month. Beginning in July 1866, her five children also received pensions, at $2 a month. 

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-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

-- Cunningham Johnston widow's pension file, fold3.com via National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.
-- Smith, John L., History of the Corn Exchange Regiment, 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers, from their first engagement at Antietam to Appomattox, Philadelphia, Pa., J. L. Smith, 1888, Page 402.
-- 16th Connecticut veteran William Nott 1906 journal, copy in author's collection.

At Natchez Trace mile post 385.9, a Meriwether Lewis mystery

While cycling the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee, we stopped at explorer Meriwether Lewis' grave.

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Pedaling like demons on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee, we slowly made our way up another muscle- and lung-testing hill. To our right, a spectacular, green forest; to our left, more of the same; above us, a deep-blue sky. About halfway into a 50-mile bike ride with my brother-in-law, we were bit players and Mother Nature was the star.

On almost every stretch of the Trace, wildlife lurks. ("Look, there's a turkey." "Hey, was that a fox that just crossed the road?")

An early 19th-century portrait of explorer
Meriwether Lewis by Charles Willson Peale.
(Public domain)

And history lurks, too.

Miles earlier, we passed the site of "She Boss," where, in the early 1800s, a white woman operated a small inn in the sprawling wilderness with her second husband, a Native American. The man apparently spoke little English. According to legend, when travelers approached him with questions about accommodations at the inn, he would simply point to his wife and say, "She boss." Some of us truly understand this man of few (English) words.

At mile post 390.7, if you're adventrous enough, you'll find abandoned shafts from an old phosphate mine in the woods. And every so often, you'll see hints of the original trace, first blazed out of the wilderness by Indians  and eventually improved by the U.S. Army in the early 1800s. Early explorers used the Trace; so did bandits, who often terrorized those who traveled on it.

The only terror we faced on this Saturday afternon was the damn hill we needed to climb near a waterfall on our return trip. But before we did, I had to breathe in some history. And so at mile post 385.9, at the crest of another [expletive] hill, we stopped to visit the grave site/memorial for Meriwether Lewis.

You probably learned about Lewis, the great explorer, in grade school. Brief refresher: After the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson wanted to know what he got for the U.S. government's $15 million. And so Lewis and fellow explorer William Clark were sent west on a remarkable, two-year journey -- the first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific Coast by Americans. The intrepid adventurers documented their discoveries — flora and fauna, rivers, Indian tribes and much more — and returned with reams of information.

               PANORAMA: Meriwether Lewis gravesite on Natchez Trace in Tennessee.
                                    (Click on icon at right for full-screen experience.)

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In October 1809, en route to Washington from his home in St. Louis, Lewis stopped at an inn at Grinder's Stand on the Natchez Trace. One night, two shots rang out. A badly injured Lewis, who battled depression, was discovered in the inn with two gunshot wounds — one in the head, another in his stomach. By sunrise the next day, the 35-year-old explorer was dead. Was it a suicide? (Jefferson thought so.) Or was it murder? (Lewis' descendants believe so to this day.)

In 1848, Lewis' body was exhumed, examined and eventually re-buried near where he died. A state commission's conclusion: He probably was murdered. (Oh, man, I refuse to go down this rabbit hole!) Later that year, the State of Tennessee erected a memorial atop Lewis' grave. In 1905, a magazine reporter found the granite monument abandoned — a "dim and ghostly" visage surrounded by woods and brush.

"But the monument itself, with the forest about it, silent, gloomy, deserted represents as nothing else could the love of solitude, the melancholia, the taciturnity of the youth whose dust lies beneath it," John Swain wrote for Everybody's Magazine. "Lewis' spirit indeed seems to pervade the spot, and it is little wonder that the hill people believe it's haunted."

Forest and brush surrounded the Meriwether Lewis memorial/grave when a magazine reporter
 found it in 1905. (PHOTO: Everybody's Magazine)

We weren't spooked by the place, thankfully long ago restored. But I was confused by the Latin phrase inscribed on the memorial: "Immaturus obi; sed tu felicior annos vive meos: Bona Republica! vive tuos." Translation: "I died before my time, but thou O great and good Republic, live out my years while you live out your own."

Perhaps someone should have carved another phrase on the monument, preferably in English: Keep your paws off all that ye find here. An iron fence originally surrounded Lewis' grave, but during the Civil War, soldiers under Confederate General John Bell Hood supposedly melted it down to make horseshoes. (But that story merits more investigation. I follow the old journalism maxim: "If your mother tells you she loves you, get another source.")

My brother-in-law and I had no such evil intentions. We took in the tranquil scene and read the large, cast-iron plaque near the explorer's grave. Lewis' "life of romantic endeavor and lasting achievement," it reads, in part, "came tragically and mysteriously to its close on the night of Oct. 11, 1809."

Our only mystery this afternoon: Are we really going to complete our 50-mile ride?

And so off we went, enriched by a brief experience at mile post 385.9.

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-- Have something to add, correct? E-mail me at jbankstx@comcast.net

SOURCES:

• Everybody's Magazine, Vol. 13, July-December 1905
• Killibrew, J.B. Resources of Tennessee, Nashville, Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1874

A mini-tour of Shy's Hill, a Battle of Nashville site

I biked to Shy's Hill recently, traveling over hallowed ground that long ago became residential neighborhoods. Before shooting this video, I met a young woman there who told me of finding a Minie ball in a brook nearby. Not surprising. There's Civil War lead and iron all over this vast battlefield. Shy's Hill -- called Compton's Hill in 1864 -- was the extreme left of the Confederate line on Dec. 16, 1864, the last day of the two-day battle.

Nashville's Fort Negley: A tale of 'paradise,' hobos and the KKK

A cropped enlargement of a war-time image of Fort Negley by George Barnard.
(Library of Congress)

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In the decades after the Civil War, Nashville's Fort Negley wasn't just a decaying relic of the past. The massive United States Army fortification on St. Cloud Hill also served as a playground for the city's youth, who would scour its trenches and breastworks for buttons from soldiers' uniforms, ordnance and whatever else the Federals left behind during their occupation of the city from 1862-67.

"A small boy's paradise," a Nashville Tennessean columnist called it.

Fort Negley is on St. Cloud Hill, a short
distance from downtown Nashville.

The place also has a sordid past: In the 19th century, a band of desperadoes, covered from view by rubble and undergrowth, occupied Fort Negley.  And beginning in the late 1860s, shortly after the U.S. Army left town, the fort became a favorite meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan, which spewed its hate-filled message there well into the 20th century.

"The thing that the struck terror to us children more than the Battle of Nashville," May Winston Caldwell recalled about the era immediately after the Civil War, "was the Ku Klux Klan that had its meetings in the then-abandoned Fort Negley. When twilight came, or in the misty moonlight, these figures of ill-omen would sally forth.

"The appearance of the Klan caused consternation; and after seeing one, it was days before we got back to normal."

Ruins on fort's south side. Peach Orchard Hill,
a key Battle of Nashville site,
 is in the middle distance.

In the 20th century, several organizations advocated for saving Fort Negley — there were even plans to turn it into a national park — but few Nashvillians were eager to memorialize a place so closely tied to the Federal occupation of the city and the disastrous Confederate defeat at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. And so the fort deteriorated until the Works Progress Adminstration restored most of it in 1937.

But over the ensuing decades few visited Fort Negley, and the historic site once again fell into disrepair. "Winos and hobos" used it for a refuge, and the fort was closed to the public for safety reasons. "Fort Negley has grown into such a thicket," said a member of the Davidson County Civil War Centennial Committee in 1963, "that policemen don't like to go up there alone at night."

In 1964, locals considered using Fort Negley for a zoo, but that plan went nowhere. After decades of neglect, the city restored the fort — built mostly with African-American labor in 1862 — at a cost of $2 million and re-opened in 2004 as a city park. (A plan backed by the mayor to build a mixed-use development at the site thankfully got scrapped in 2018.)

Which brings us back to our "small boy's paradise." In 1929, Tennessean columnist Truman Hudson Alexander advocated for the creation of a Fort Negley national park. "Romance," he wrote, "clings around the old atrocity in South Nashville," where the newspaperman hunted with friends for Civil War artifacts as a boy.

Below is Alexander's column — a remarkable window into Nashville's past — as published in the Tennessean on Dec. 7, 1929:

            PANORAMA: View from a lower tier of the fort toward downtown Nashville.
                                   (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

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It has been only a few years ago that I, in company with other ragamuffins from Vine Street, used to play on old Fort Negley. Indeed, for 65 years the old fort in South Nashville has been a small boy's paradise.

In 1929, Nashville Tennessean columnist
Truman Alexander advocated for the creation
of a Fort Negley national park

And now, if I read the public prints aright, the sixty-sixth General Assembly is asked to make a national park of the old fort, immortalizing forever the spot near where [John Bell] Hood and [George] Thomas fought, where robbers used to hide in reconstruction days, where the original K. K. K. held ghostly conclaves by night and where goats and small boys have disported in late years.

I do not agree with a venerable contributor who wrote in to the paper the other day to say that he could not see why Fort Negley should be honored, because it was a pain in the neck to Nashville from 1861 to 1865. As well, he intimated, to erect a monument to a carbuncle or to the hives.

And I do not agree because old Fort Negley is to my not too ancient memory a place of pure delight. True, of late years it has been the rendezvous mainly of billygoats who thrive on tin cans. It has resembled nothing so much as one of Mayor Howse's celebrated city dump piles but may be distinguished from the garbage mountains by the fact that the piles of garbage are in active eruption, burning fiercely and giving forth an odor reminiscent ot a Chinese stink bomb.

I am for old Fort Negley and make haste to align myself with the proponents of its salvation through federal grace because as a lad we used to find Union buttons by the peck, play soldier on its slope, play robber in the remains of the old breastworks and charge rival gangs from its summit with fixed bayonets, which were sharp sticks and powerful weapons against little colored boys who ventured "too close."

An aerial view of Fort Negley in 1936. (Battle of Nashville Trust)

A late 1930s view of the fort, which was restored in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration.
(Battle of Nashville Trust)

In fact, romance clings around the old atrocity in South Nashville. It is not as ancient as the old Spanish fort in St. Augustine nor as picturesque as the old Cabildo in New Orleans, but list to its tale:

It served tor four years as a fort during the Civil war. It was a star shaped fort on the highest hill in Nashville, which like Rome of old is guarded by seven hills. It was one of a chain of forts around the city and on the nearby battlefield where the battle of Nashville was fought the gallant Federal general, Thomas, won one of the most decisive victories of the Civil War over Hood, the Confederate general, because that victory, by crushing the Confederacy in the west and protecting Sherman's flank in the Georgia campaign, made the surrender at Appomattox a certainty a few months later.

After the war it became the meeting place of robbers. I am told by Mrs. James E. Caldwell, who first suggested the preservation of Fort Negley 18 years ago, that her father, who was a physician, never ventured out on a call during reconstruction days unless accompanied by two men from the family he was to visit. The days were too lawless and most of the outlaws seemed to gather around the old fort.

Fort Negley today is a protected area,
but plans to make it a national park
never came to fruition

It is tradition that the robber gangs tunneled from Fort Negley to the old City cemetery to enable them to escape officers who raided the place periodically. The end of the tunnel was in the old McNairy vault in the musty City cemetery, as an excited negro reported upon seeing a man emerge from the handsome bronze doors of the vault.

After this the old fort became the meeting place of the Ku Klux Klan, which held weird conclaves on the forbidding brow of the hill. The flickering pine torches revealed sometimes thousands of klansmen in white robes, about to set out to curb lawlessness or to drink buckets of water which went into a rubber sack over their stomachs. announcing simultaneously to the superstitions ' host that the white rider hadn't had a drink since he was killed at the Battle of Nashville on Dec. 16, 1864!

And still later the old fort became a paradise for goats and small boys. No Nashville boy has really tasted the joys of boyhood unless he has visited Fort Negley. True, he will return with the smell of billy goats on his clothing and perhaps muddy and dirty besides, but he will have lived.

Personally, my boyish legs bore me thence often and I collected a lard bucket or two of buttons from the coats of soldiers. Indeed, I am able to see why the Civil war cost so much because the daily pleasure ot the Yankee soldiers must have been in ripping off the buttons from their coats, and in scattering cannon balls around for the small boys of another generation to collect.

      PANORAMA: A view of the remains of the stockade, the fort's last area of defense.

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The profusion of Union buttons, however, may be explained by an ancient wheese hereabouts which is that a prominent merchant and Confederate sympathiser on the public square shortly after the Civil war wrote North to order a hundred pounds of onion buttons. Being a poor speller it appears that it was thought he was ordering Union buttons and instead of a hundred pounds of small onion sets he received quite a large box of brass buttons with eagles on them and the letters U. S. A. These he promptly threw away and I am constrained to believe that perhaps he threw them on Fort Negley.

That's my story, anyway, and I stick to it.

That this proposal to save Fort Negley from the knawing tooth of time came from Mrs. Caldwell is, it seems to me, peculiarly fitting. Her eldest brother, Arthur Winston, was with General Hood's Confederate army when the battle of Nashville was fought nearby. As a small child she heard the distant rumble of artillery in the battle, and it is to Mrs. Caldwell that Nashville owes much of the credit for the handsome monument to the battle of Nashville which must attract and charm visitors from the south as they approach the city over the floor-like smoothness of the Franklin pike.

If Mrs. Caldwell's ideas are carried out Nashville will have another enterprise to which we may point with pride. as entrance from Eighth avenue as well as from the Franklin pike could be arranged rather easily. There should be an imposing entrance and the dedication to Grant and Lee ought to please almost everybody -- except the G. A. R. and the U. C. V.!

Of late years, I am against almost everything I find. Much of what we call progress isn't progress at all, but I am for Fort Negley's restoration and sending the bill to Washington.

A cropped enlargement of George Barnard's war-time image of the interior of Fort Negley.
(Library of Congress)

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-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

• Nashville Banner, Aug. 15, 1963
• Nashville Tennessean, Dec. 6, 1964

'Utter desolation': A visit to Lee-Grant 'Surrender House' in 1915

Early 20th-century postcards of the ruins of Wilmer McLean's house, where Lee surrendered to Grant
 on April 9, 1865. (National Park Service) | CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

(National Park Service)

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Fifty years after the Civil War, the once-impressive, two-story brick house in Appomattox Court House Va., where Lee surrendered to Grant lay in ruins. "No one familiar with Civil War history," the Washington Times wrote in 1915 about the site of Wilmer McLean's home, "can view this scene of abject and utter desolation ... without an involuntary sigh."

Headlines in the Washington Times
on Sept. 26, 1915.

In its glory days, the "Surrender House" featured seven wide steps leading to a spacious porch supported by five white pillars. McLean's property included a large, well-kept front lawn, a flower garden, ice houses, a weaving house and quarters for slaves. The commodious residence, where Wilmer lived with his wife Virginia, was described as one of the finest in the state at the time — a "typical country residence of a Virginia gentleman of wealth and culture."

Unable to keep up with mortgage payments, McLean defaulted on a bank loan after the war, and the house was sold at public auction in 1869. After a succession of owners, it was purchased in 1891 for $10,000 by former Union officer Myron Dunlap, who originally planned to hold Grand Army of the Republic gatherings at the site. Later, Dunlap and other investors aimed to dismantle the structure and display it at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. That was followed by another scheme to haul most of it off to Washington, re-build it as a Civil War museum and charge visitors admission. The "Surrender House" was dismantled in 1893 for a move, but both plans were scotched for lack of money and legal issues.

And so the remains of the historic house just sat there.

In the years afterward, nature, thieves and souvenir hunters targeted the mishmash of bricks and rotting wood. "The McLean house site," the Times wrote, "is a foreboding looking, dank dark spot in the woods, overgrown with tall, foul-smelling weeds, saplings and underbrush."

To get there, the Times reporter maneuvered through a cornfield that once served as McLean's spacious front yard. The only mention of the site's historical importance was an iron tablet near the ruins that noted: "Gen. Robert E. Lee, C.S.A., met and agreed upon terms of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on the afternoon of April 9, 1865." Near the plaque, the reporter discovered a ramshackle ice house and a small weaving house; in a thicket lay three large piles — all that remained of the historic home.

An image of the iron historical tablet
at the McLean House site appeared
in the Washington Times
on Sept. 26, 1915.

"The wood is water-logged, moss-covered, and so soft and decomposed that a finger will make an impression in it," the Times reported. "The steps are intact and lie upon one of the piles. The lumber from which the porch was constructed lies rotting on another pile, with weeds, vines and underbrush almost obscuring it from view." A "greenish accumulation" coated piles of crumbling brick. To keep intruders from the ruins, a makeshift wire gate stood near the original entrance to the house.

R.H. Browning, who lived across the road, served as unofficial tour guide and watchman of the rubble. He complained to the Times reporter about thieves swiping McLean house woodwork to use as firewood. Browning, who claimed to have witnessed Lee's surrender as a boy, used "shotgun methods" to chase off those miscreants. It apparently was a losing battle.

April 1865 photo of McLean house by Timothy O'Sullivan. (Library of Congress)

Schoolchildren examine bricks at the McLean house ruins. (National Park Service)

An early 20th-century postcard of visitors at the ruins of the McLean ice house. (National Park Service)

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Several other historic buildings in the rural village suffered from neglect, the Times reported. A reporter found the old Raine tavern in "dilapidated and tumbled-down condition." Weeds and underbrush hid the charred ruins of the war-time courthouse, which burned in 1892. The city jail nearby was an eyesore, with a "badly dilapidated" roof and "decomposing and disintegrating" bricks. A hotel, used as a headquarters by both armies, sat in a "sad state of disrepair."

"The raging winds and waters have done their worst," the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote about Appomattox Courthouse in the summer of 1915, "and what they have left is crumbling from human neglect."

Added the newspaper: "Why isn't Appomattox to-day a literal shrine, as well as a historical shrine?"

Plans to restore the McLean house stalled early in the 20th century. As late as the 1920s, Civil War veterans occasionally stopped at the site with their families. Tourists often sought souvenirs, so enterprising local boys sold them bricks for candy money. After the improvement of roads at remote Appomattox Courthouse, even more souvenir-seekers arrived. "The old house," the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote in 1936, "is scattered from Maine to California."

A front-page photo in the Richmond Times-Dispatch 
on April 17, 1950, of the huge crowd at the
 official dedication ceremony for
the reconstructed Wilmer McLean
 "Surrender House."

In 1940, after Appomattox Courthouse became a national historical monument, momentum finally built to reconstruct the McLean house. The feds conducted archaeological studies and collected data, but the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, stopped the effort. Finally, in 1949, a reconstructed McLean house — using many of the old bricks — opened to the public.

The next April, a crowd estimated at 10,000 attended the official dedication ceremony. Direct descendants of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant were honored guests. Bands played Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy. Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman spoke for 45 minutes. He said he planned to will his tattered, bullet-riddled 61st Virginia flag to the McLean house. Photographers swarmed around U.S. Grant III and Robert E. Lee IV as they stood on the porch for the official ribbon cutting. And a national magazine writer asked other reporters, "Have you seen any nice old ladies crying?"

1915 was a distant, ugly memory.

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-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

-- National Park Service, Appomattox Court House site, accessed April 4, 2020
-- Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 29, 1915, March 24, 1936, April 17, 1950
-- The Washington Times, Sept. 26, 1915