Appomattox Court House

In 24 hours on Wednesday, we had 6.3" of rain fall. That's the new record for a single day for us.

Thursday was gloomy and wet, but Dad headed out for several hours to count living chestnut trees. When a cloudburst struck in midafternoon, he came back to the house. Perhaps 2/3 of the trees were living, but those trees were tricky to find. Many of the chestnuts had a few leaves of regrowth sprouted from the bottom, but a few leaves of green in a sea of three-foot weeds can be difficult to spot. Happily, the six foot spacing gave a good estimate of where to look, but finding trees, living and dead, was a challenge.

We didn't have trouble spotting another peach tree that the chickens had girdled. It was oozing sap, like a gelatinous doughnut. Beautiful and deadly. (In the future: all chickens in the orchard will be in pens.)

Friday dawned gloomy again, but I had suggested that we head to Appomattox Court House, the site where Lee agreed to terms of surrender from Grant, so we packed up waterproofs and headed out.

Only about an hour away, the trip took a bit longer than expected when we ended up behind a grader for the first mile down our road, slowly leveling the gravel, filling in the washed out sections. I tried not to be too impatient, but I struggled with car claustrophobia: I could walk faster than this grader! Ack!

By the time we reached Appomattox, the weather had turned sunny, and all the boys were ready to run.

In the four hours or so that we were there, we watched both slideshows, took an excellent guided walking tour of the full city, filled out the Junior Ranger books with Jadon and Isaiah, and entered just about every building on display.

It was a full visit, and felt very satisfying to me. Phil, having studied the war at length, was a bit more melancholy.

Some of my favorite tidbits: the little town's name is Appomattox Court House. The visitor center is in the courthouse, the building that was the county seat of Appomattox County, and the courthouse has no historical significance whatsoever. (The tour guide says he often sees tourists come, take a photo of the courthouse, then leave, not realizing their mistake.)

The historically significant building is the reconstructed McLean House. The McLean's had witnessed the Battle of Bull Run, the first battle of the war, in their front yard. In order to avoid the war, they moved to the middle of nowhere, only to find, four years later, the war end in their parlor.

The smallness of that parlor surprised me. To have Lee and Grant meet to discuss terms of surrender in an ordinary living room, along with six or eight staffers: the living room seemed like it should have been larger, to contain the forceful persons in it. But, no: just a normal living room.

The day after the generals agreed to the terms, the two met on horseback just a few hundred feet down the road. The Southern soldiers were given parole slips, which showed, first, that they weren't deserters (in the days before high speed communication, news of the surrender didn't reach all combatants immediately. There were holdouts in Texas that went on another seven months!); the paroles also granted food and transportation as needed.

This site was also the place of the formal stacking of arms, when the Southern soldiers marched between the two lines of Union troops and stacked bayonets and bullets, and then began their long walk home.

The thought of that walk home—hungry and defeated men, without their weapons or, often, suitable clothing, going home to often devastated, destroyed land, to communities stripped of their young men. One company had 96 men who had signed up from a community. When called forward at the stacking of the arms, only one man stepped forward. (The guide pointed out that the other 95 didn't, necessarily, die: some were probably wounded, and some may have deserted.) How could a community go forward? What a terrible, depressing time.

Some of the stories of the people involved amazed me. You can see, in the shadow, some artillery, placed right about where it was during the last battle there between North and South. The resident of that house came out to sit on his porch while he watched that battle. It made me wonder about his sanity!

One of the boys of Appomattox volunteered, but died of typhoid fever before ever shooting at the enemy. Apparently, 2/3 of the casualties of the war were caused by sickness, not battle.

Another of the boys signed up at the war's start, was injured, was healed, and returned to fight. Four years later, during the last battle of the war, he actually fought across his front yard. A couple days later, after he laid down his bayonet, he walked home: about a quarter of a mile.

I love those little personal stories of history. What a treat!

And on the way home: it's not every day that we get to buy gas at Duck's Crossing. You never know what you'll find in rural Virginia.