By CLINT SCHEMMER
BONUS IMAGES: See what the camp looked like back then.
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.
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To learn more:
-- Friends of Stafford Civil War Sites: fscws.org
Email: info@fscws.org
Box 25, Brooke, Va. 22430
540/658-6324
-- Dovetail Cultural Resources Group: dovetailcrg.com
-- Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania
National Military Park: nps.gov/frsp
-- U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center: carlisle.army.mil/ahec
A soldier writes home from Camp Humphreys:
Excerpt from a letter written by Pvt. Robert W. Hemphill (Company C, 123rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, 5th Corps, Army of the Potomac), on March 9, 1863, from Camp Humphreys, near Falmouth, to his father back home in Allegheny County, Pa.:
“Well, I have the same old subject to write about and that is—nothing-at-all. We don’t know anything more about the war here than a man who is deaf. dumb and blind. I sometimes get the N.Y. Herald or the Philadelphia Inquirer but there is hardly ever much of importance in them. The weather has been good for a week or past, and there is talk of a move if it continues, but for my part I don’t see where we would move to. We can’t go over to Fredericksburg, that’s certain; for the Rebs like that place too well to give up their claim to us, and to try a flank movement on them might prove to be another ‘stick-in-the-mud.’ Or at least there would be some hard fighting to be done that this war may end soon. I don’t see what people will do after while the taxes will be so high, and then to think of so many poor fellows who are dying off every day in the hospitals from wounds and diseases. I believe I must come to a close, so goodbye for this time.”
Hemphill’s unit had recently weathered the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Union army’s infamous “Mud March,” Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s abortive attempt at a winter offensive. (President Lincoln replaced Burnside a week after the march ended).
Still in the dark about the plans of Burnside’s replacement, Gen. Joseph Hooker, Hemphill wrote the letter just a few weeks before his regiment marched off to the Battle of Chancellorsville. Hemphill survived that fight, returned to Camp Humphreys, and was mustered out of the army on May 13, 1863.
Snapshot of the Union Army's 5th Corps:
The Union’s 5th Corps was organized on May 18, 1862, while the Army of the Potomac was fighting the Peninsula campaign, and demobilized on June 28, 1865. The corps’ regiments included some of the most famous in the Union army, including the storied 20th Maine, and its troops saw heavy fighting at Fredericksburg, Second Manassas and on the Peninsula.
The 5th Corps took part in many battles including: Hanover Court
House; Gaines’ Mill; Glendale; Malvern Hill; Manassas; Antietam;
Shepherdstown Ford; Fredericksburg; Chancellorsville; Gettysburg;
Rappahannock Station; Mine Run; Wilderness; Spotsylvania; North
Anna; Cold Harbor; and Appomattox.
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