JPK Huson 1863
Brev. Brig. Gen'l
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2012
- Location
- Central Pennsylvania
Chatham Manor, Falmouth, Virginia, LoC photograph obviously taken during occupation by Federal soldiers
A Lacy ancestor, setting out in grandiose style from Chatham Manor, to view with pleasure a forthcoming battle at a place called Bull Run took with him men servants, picnic baskets, cooks and a waved an airy hand " My dear " he said, stepping into a carriage filled with like minded gentlemen of Fredericksburg , " Next week I will be making a speech from the steps of the capitol in Washington.."
History's sequence;
.At the time the house was owned by James Horace Lacy {1823-1906}, a former schoolteacher who had married Churchill Jones’s niece. As a planter, Lacy sympathized with the South, and at the age of 37 he left Chatham to serve the Confederacy as a staff officer. His wife and children remained at the house until the spring of 1862, when the arrival of Union troops forced them to abandon the building and move in with relatives across the river in the beleaguered city of Fredericksburg. For much of the next thirteen months, Chatham would be occupied by the Union army; they referred to it as the “Lacy House” in their orders and reports, as well as diaries and letters.
https://virginiaplantation.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/chatham-manor-the-civil-war-years/
LoC- more from Federal occupation. There would have been wounded at Chatham through most of the war.
Clara Barton famously ( thankfully ) nursed 100's of wounded stuffed, literally into the Lacy House during Fredericksburg in 1862 and nearly as famously Walt Whitman memorialized ghastly scenes of what it meant to be wounded during the war- he came to Chatham searching for brother George. ( 51st New York ) Surgeons tossing amputated limbs from windows before moving on to the next patient shocked him beyond words, as we know he found them- but also steeled Whitman's resolve. He became a nurse.
Five men shared four shelves in a closet, ' lucky ', a soldier stated, was under a table, not on a sodden blanket, in the freezing yard waiting for death to create room inside. Sumner's HQ was shared with scenes of chaos and gore so extreme "Here and there a poor fellow coiled upon the floor, too full of pain and weariness to bear his own weight " http://www.brotherswar.com/Fredericksburg-5.htm
Another LoC image, ' Chatham ' was referred to as ' Lacy House ' by the Union Army
Post war, the Lacy family claims to have found " 19 Union graves " in the yard. There seems to be no reconciling this number with an unknown but certainly ??? that number. ( Most were removed to the National Cemetery but, like all our battlefields, who on earth knows where our fallen lie? ) " At least three soldiers, each unidentified, remain buried at Chatham. "http://friendsofchatham.org/
It is fatefully easy to view Chatham today and perhaps be carried away by antebellum nostalgia. Beyond remembering perhaps these bricks themselves, each one, would have been created, stacked then used to build this lovely old home by enslaved hands, the walls themselves are indeed permeated with the cries of wounded. And have seen probably hundreds of deaths. Clara Barton refused to be escorted out of harm's way from that door and must have to-d and fro-d hundreds of times over the doorstep, the windows? How many saw limbs tossed through them as described by Whitman? Which closets held wounded, 5 to 4 shelves? Where in the yard did sodden and sick soldiers die?
We are hugely lucky. Aiding in all these questions and in keeping the memory of even nameless wounded alive is an organization which seems to certainly cherish Chatham Manor for all the reasons History insists we cherish. Until walls can talk......
http://friendsofchatham.org/