Confederate graves at Manassas.

Robert Gray

Sergeant Major
Joined
Jul 24, 2012
On March 9, 1862, the Confederates evacuated their winter camps in Centreville and Manassas in anticipation of fighting closer to Richmond. Photographers George N. Barnard and James F. Gibson recorded this solemn tribute to the men who were left behind.
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(Library of Congress)
 
Prince William County VA has established the Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park. Included in the park grounds is Camp Jones, the site of a Confederate encampment in the autumn of 1861. Nearby are two cemeteries containing graves of over 200 Alabama and Mississippi troops who died in that time period. The park flier (see link) indicates that locations of cemeteries from other states have not been located. Camp Jones and the Confederate cemeteries can be accessed by the Tragedy in Camp and The Battle of Kettle Run Self-Guided Trail.
http://www.pwcgov.org/government/dept/publicworks/hp/pages/bristoe-station-battlefield.aspx
 
Yeah PW County did a nice job preserving some of that land at least. If you view the satellite image of the little park you can see it's surrounded by upscale high dollar townhouses on one side. Too bad it came too late. So much more land could have incorporated into the Park by PW County. But like any other county, they're more interested today (and always have been) in tax revenue generated by single family homes, businesses and golf courses. I remember back in like the year 2000, that big golf course on the other side of Bristow Rd. was being excavated/landscaped. A girlfriend of mine at the time that was a member of the architectural staff that designed the golf course. She called me up on the phone one day and said the guys running all the dozers and excavating equipment were uncovering all kinds of neat stuff like artillery shell fragments etc. etc. etc. She said I can give you written permission for 2 or 3 days to go out and metal detect the property if I wanted to after the guys running the equipment were done for the day(s). Unfortunately for me at the time I wasn't into metal detecting (actually I never have been) and didn't have access to a detecting unit and was still gainfully employed prior to my retirement in 2006. So sad I lost out on that.....
 
Cannot imagine winter inside these camps. That's a wide open field and you can see spaces between logs, in constructing those cabins. Even if there isn't a lot of snow it's cold, no windows, a cemetery for a front yard and a battlefield for your township.


Anything useful would have been stripped before the confederates left. One trick was to use canvas and logs.
Winter camp google search
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Cannot imagine winter inside these camps. That's a wide open field and you can see spaces between logs, in constructing those cabins. Even if there isn't a lot of snow it's cold, no windows, a cemetery for a front yard and a battlefield for your township.

Yeah, they don't look like soldiers quarters (no chimneys!).

I wonder if the huts are stables or storage sheds?
 
I dug a little deeper into the images captured by Barnard and Gibson during March 1862. The OP posted a LOC photo which I'm thinking may be related to this image.
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If you look at the LOC photo shown by the OP, you will see buildings similar to these off in the background. I'm thinking the first photo shown attributed to Barnard and Gibson may have been taken a few hundred yards away from this image, with the gravesites and rudimentary sheds far away from the actual troops' living quarters.

Here's another image by Barnard and Gibson during the same time period of the town of Manassas
Virginia,_Manassas_Junction_-_NARA_-_533283.jpg
 
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