Why Alleghany County Was the Virginia Locality Most Affected by the Civil War

Belle Montgomery

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Hamilton Lombard isn’t a Civil War buff, but like many people, he’s heard the story of Wilmer McLean, who just couldn’t escape the war.

In 1861, McLean’s farm near Manassas was involved in the First Battle of Bull Run.

Looking to flee the fighting, McLean and his family moved to Appomattox – and wound up being right in the heart of it once again. In 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant – in McLean’s house.

It was with McLean’s plight in the back of his mind that Lombard, a state demographer at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, thought it would be interesting to measure the demographic impact of the Civil War in Virginia.

“What I wanted to know was, on a county level in Virginia, which areas were more impacted?” Lombard said. “Can we actually identify specific counties, specific regions that had more deaths or dislocation than others?

“A lot people would say that most of the military action was between D.C. and Richmond. So I thought, ‘Let’s check that. Are those the areas that were also the most impacted?’”

Using digitized historic census age data and a methodology similar to the one the Cooper Center uses to project future Virginia populations, Lombard made several notable discoveries,...
REST OF ARTICLE:https://news.virginia.edu/content/why-alleghany-county-was-virginia-locality-most-affected-civil-war
 
I'm in Alleghany from time to time. I've done several projects in Alleghany County recently. It's a BEAUTIFUL area. It's very rural, & I'm confident a large portion of the county looks much the same, as it did during the war. It's one of the things that has me in love with where I live. I'm confident that a 100yrs after I'm gone, the area I live in will look much the same. There may be a few more homes here & there but, overall will remain rural, & easy on the eyes...
 
He uses the returning level of the population as indicating how much the county was affected by the war. Wonder if he looked at Stafford County at all.
Kristopher White, in a talk on Changing Military Strategy in 1864 said that Stafford County(where 4 major battles had taken place during the war) , in 1862 had 25 square miles of completely deforestation. One soldier said they could not find food and a bird known as a chicken could not be found. Kristopher also said that Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania did not return to its war time population until the 1950's because of the devastation in the area. Just wondering!
 
He uses the returning level of the population as indicating how much the county was affected by the war. Wonder if he looked at Stafford County at all.
Kristopher White, in a talk on Changing Military Strategy in 1864 said that Stafford County(where 4 major battles had taken place during the war) , in 1862 had 25 square miles of completely deforestation. One soldier said they could not find food and a bird known as a chicken could not be found. Kristopher also said that Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania did not return to its war time population until the 1950's because of the devastation in the area. Just wondering!
An interesting fact I heard once about Stafford County is that the Gross Domestic Product for the county in 1861 was never reached again until 1941. It took 80 years and a world war for the county to recover from the utter destruction the area suffered between 1861-65. The area was not only ravaged by battles but also by the armies camping there for extended periods of time. The union soldiers would dig a rectangular hole in the ground and build a hut/log cabin type building for their winter shelters. There were tens of thousands of these buildings built all over the area in farm fields which made the fields no longer good for farming as they had these buildings left behind. Then if the building was torn down and removed the holes pot marked the landscape and had to be dealt with. When the union army camped there in the winter it was close to 100,000 men and there was a huge demand for firewood so every fence was taken down as well as every tree cut down for miles. After the war, I can only imagine that it looked like a Cat 5 hurricane made a direct hit on that place. Just think about 100,000 men camping and how much garbage would be created each day. I have been to NASCAR races where 40,000 camped for three days and it looked like a bomb went off after they were gone. Think about what it must have looked like after 100,000 had camped for 4-5 months in the same area.
 
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