Braehead: Breakfast Before Battle

Located off of Lee Drive and nestled within the boundary of the Fredericksburg Battlefield sits Braehead, the 1859 home of John Howison. The home was only three years old when the Civil War literally arrived on Mr. Howison's doorstep.

Braehead, 2013, courtesy of Braehead Manor website

On the morning of the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee tied his faithful warhorse Traveller to the tree in front of Braehead and came inside to have breakfast.

The tree where Lee tied Traveller still stands.



The home was damaged during the Civil War and bears many scars, including grafitti, bayonet marks, bullet holes, and carvings. Braehead had been in the Howison family for almost 150 years. Graham Stephens, the last member of the Howison family to live there, decided to sell the home. I contacted Mr. Stephens in February 2008 and arranged a tour of the house with him.

Damage next to the door from a projectile

 

Initials carved into a doorframe
 

Seeing the tree where Traveller was tied was very cool. However, what I really wanted to see was the room where Lee ate breakfast. I wanted to stand where Lee stood and see what he saw. Near the end of the tour, Mr. Stephens took me into "The Room" ... and this is what I saw:

The room where General Lee ate breakfast

I stood there, silent and stunned. Surely he had to be joking. This room had a fairly modern black-and-white linoleum floor and was being used to store Christmas decorations, among other things. That's when Mr. Stephens told me what had happened to "The Room." Years before, water damage wreaked havoc on part of the house, including this room. The original wooden floor was completely destroyed and had to be replaced. In an effort to save some cash, the floor was replaced with cheap linoleum.

Ugh. My heart sank. I couldn't believe it. My visions of standing where Lee stood and seeing what he saw had been dashed against the rocks.

At any rate, the whole home was very neat and I really enjoyed the tour. It contained all of the original furnishings and even had some odd quirks - like a bathroom in a hallway from an ill-fated stint as a bed and breakfast in the 1990s. Seriously. The bathroom WAS the hallway; you had to pass through it to get to the rooms on the other side of it.

When I left Braehead that day, I had mixed feelings. I was honored to have toured the home, but I was unsure of its future now that it was up for sale.


My fears were short lived because Braehead was purchased by the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust, and then sold to the first people to own the home outside of the Howison family, in 2011. They have turned the home into Braehead Manor, a very nice bed and breakfast. I have not stayed there yet, but the photos on the website show a home that, while very different in appearance from when I visited in 2008, looks wonderful. The restoration work was very well done and the home looks incredibly cozy and inviting.

So there you have it. My journey to see the room where Lee ate breakfast was crushed by linoleum, saved by a nonprofit, resurrected by a preservation-minded couple, and turned into a great B&B that will allow countless people to experience this gem of an antebellum home.

The Mystery Building Behind FedEx

During the government shutdown, I had some free time on my hands. OK, so I had a lot of free time on my hands. As luck would have it, I have a friend who likes to explore historic structures. She tipped me off about one on top of a hill, shrouded by trees, behind the local FedEx plant. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

We hopped in the car and off we went, north into Stafford County. As we came up on it, my friend pointed out the mystery building as we drove by, but I couldn't get a good look at it. We turned around and drove past it again. This time I got a better look, but I still wasn't satisfied.

Pulling off the road, it was time to embrace technology: Google Maps' satellite images.

Google Maps arial view
 

Sure enough, there it was. We weren't crazy. But we still had no idea what it was. For now, it was just some odd, tall structure hidden behind some trees on a hill near FedEx. Was is concrete? Maybe. Stone? More likely. Our time had run out for the day, so we headed home. I was dissatisfied, but still very intrigued.

Over the next few days, I got busy doing other things and put the mystery building out of my mind for awhile. Then we decided it was time to go back and explore some more.

Pulling off the side of the road at the base of the hill, I was almost beside myself with excitement. I was hoping it would reveal itself to be some really neat, old building that had long been forgotten. However, the very real possibility that it would turn out to be a boring, abandoned modern structure was still in the back of my mind.

I hopped out of the car and began my ascent up the hill. Right off the bat, it was tougher than I thought it was going to be. The hill was incredibly steep and everything was covered in thorny vines. Nonetheless, I made my way up the hill.

The further I climbed, the closer I got and the more of the building I could see. By the time I reached the top, I knew we had stumbled onto something very cool. This is what I saw:

Overall view of the building

Needless to say, I was very intrigued by what I was beginning to see. This was obviously no modern building. It was also obviously no small structure. This old, stone building was very cool! I was totally excited by it and began snapping pictures to take back with me for research.

 

After I made my way back down the hill, I explained what I had seen to my friend. We spent some time looking at the photos and then left the site, hoping to know more soon.

 

The next day, I did some very simple online sleuthing that led me to some very solid info about the building.  It turned out that the mystery structure was:

 

Chestnut Hill

 

As it turned out, discovering the name of the structure was going to be the easiest (and most straightforward) part about this.

 

Could I track down a solid construction date? Nope. Local lore says part of it may date back to 1660-1677 as a fort ... but that's highly unlikely. The year 1850 (or 1856) is supposedly carved into one of the chimneys. That's a more likely date. Still, an exact date is unknown.

 

When documented by Julia Heflin in 1937 for the WPA, she had little to report on the home. "There is no history attached to this place," she wrote. While her research skills are incredibly poor, she did manage to take a photo of the old place. It's not a great photo, but her photography skills are certainly better than her research skills.

 

Chestnut Hill in 1937

 

Despite being a mystery-filled, three-story, stone oddity, Chestnut Hill can lay claim to being the first home in Stafford County to have an indoor bathtub with running water ... gravity fed, of course. A pipe ran from a local spring into the stone tub and could be filled with just the turn of a handle. It must have been neat to see, but I wouldn't want to bathe in such cold water!

 

Chestnut Hill was occupied well into the 20th century. It was sold in 1964 and then, like many historic homes in this area, burned under mysterious circumstances in 1967. It was obviously never rebuilt.

 

At any rate, the home (or what's left of it) is very neat and I was happy to learn 1) that it even exists and 2) that it has such a neat history.

 

More about Chestnut Hill can be found in a great new book, Land of Hogs and Wildcats: People and Places of Lower Stafford County, Virginia, by my good friend and local historian Jerrilynn Eby. You can get the book by clicking here. Jerrilynn is a wealth of information and all of her books about Stafford are great!

 

Well, thanks for joining me for this installment of The Ambling Historian!

 



Stolen Statue Recovered with Aid from President Lincoln

During the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, the town was occupied by Union soldiers. There are many accounts of the rowdy behavior by the soldiers while they were here. Some of their activities included excessive drinking which led to men parading around in dresses, dragging very nice furniture out into the streets, playing pianos that had been removed from homes, and quite a lot of looting.

Looting is the theme of today's post.

Douglas Gordon House

Built sometime before 1801, the Douglas Gordon House, located at 1210 Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg, was the scene of an odd case of looting and Presidential-aided recovery during the Civil War.

 

Douglas, his wife Anne, and their three children were among the residents of town who left their homes and took refuge elsewhere during the battle. As a result, their home was "up for grabs," as it were, by the occupying Union soldiers.

 



Daguerreotype of Douglas' wife Anne


 

When the Gordon family returned to their home on Princess Anne Street, they found it to be a casualty of war; the home was riddled with holes from bullets and other projectiles. In addition to this, their furniture and works of art had been smashed and destroyed.

 

One of the more ambitious looters even made off with a heavy bronze equestrian statue of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy. The piece had been purchased by the Gordons while on their honeymoon in Italy. No small piece, it is likely that it took more than one person to get it out of the house.

 

This is the actual statue that was stolen and recovered.

The looter (or looters) are lost to history; their names are not recorded. That said, it is known who the statue was sold to: Colonel Joshua Owen of Pennsylvania.

 

Less than a year later, Anne Gordon's sister-in-law, Anne Thomas, overheard a soldier in her Baltimore home bragging about an equestrian statue he had stolen from a home in Fredericksburg. Mrs. Thomas was convinced it was the Gordon family piece.

 

Anne Thomas was friends with President Lincoln's physician, so she called on him to enlist Lincoln's help in recovering the statue. The plan worked.

 

On November 7, 1863, General Order No. 360 was issued to order the statue, which was "private property of Mr. Douglas Gordon" had been "unlawfully taken from a private residence in Fredericksburg" and was to be "restored to Mrs. Annie C. Thomas, the sister of Mr. Gordon, who has made application therefor." 

 

General Order No. 360

 

The Gordon statue went on an odd journey with an interesting cast of characters. It eventually found it's way into the Virginia Historical Society's museum collection and is currently part of a travelling panel exhibition entitled, An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia. The exhibition is currently on display at the Fredericksburg Area Museum & Cultural Center, which is how I was able to see and photograph it.

 

Arguably, the statue should have not been removed from the house in the first place. That said, it's a good thing the thief had a big mouth and decided to brag about it. It's really quite remarkable that he happened to be bragging about it in front of  Mr. Gordon's sister in her own home. Of all the people and homes in Baltimore, he just happened to be in that one at that moment!

 

Coincidence? I think not.

Idlewild: Lee's Chancellorsville HQ

When someone says "Idlewild," most people in the Fredericksburg area think of the new subdivision full of cookie cutter houses set so close together that you could almost touch two at once if you stood between them with your arms outstretched.

Most people don't think about the house that appears on the three entrance pillars to the Idlewild neighborhood. That house isn't just some random image chosen because it looked nice. No, that house actually exists.

Built by William Yates Downman in 1859, Idlewild is a beautiful example of American Gothic Revival architecture. The home was just four years old when Robert E. Lee used it as his headquarters on May 4-5, 1863, during the Chancellorsville campaign. Perched high up on a hill, the home had a commanding view of the surrounding landscape when Lee was there. Today, the area is secluded by trees; you can see a Home Depot building and a Central Park shopping center sign in a couple of the clearings.

From the opposite perspective, if you know just where to look, you can see one Idlewild's chimneys peeking through the trees from the edge of the Home Depot parking lot.

Remarkably, Idlewild remained in the same family until the 1940s. Subsequent owners lived there until vacating the property in 1989. No one has lived there since then.



Idlewild, circa 1989

The home sat relatively undisturbed until arsonists set the home ablaze in 2003. A smaller fire and continued vandalism have plagued the site ever since. Now in the possession of the city, the sad remains have been shored up with steel beams and a "protective" fence has been erected around the main house and some of the outbuildings.

Idlewild, October 2013

The city has hoped that someone will come along with a plan that will allow Idlewild to be restored to its former glory. A few companies and people have presented various ideas, but the city has turned all of the offers down.

Idlewild is one of only two homes in the Fredericksburg area that was used by Robert E. Lee. The other home, Braehead, was recently redone and turned into a B&B.

I would love to see Idlewild restored, but without some quick action and, frankly, some deep pockets, it isn't going to happen. I remain hopeful, though, because it would be an absolute shame to let a home with so much history fall victim to the elements any more than it already has.

Idlewild's sad interior

Fredericksburg is often billed as "America's Most Historic City," but every time we lose a piece of our history, whether it is to development or the elements, we become a little less historic.

Little Building, Big History: Union Church Historic Site

As I mentioned in the introductory post, I'm President of the Union Church Preservation Project and Head Trustee of the Union Church Historic Site. (Be sure to "Like" us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.)

Since the majority of the church was destroyed during a storm in September 1950, the current structure is just the narthex and is only about 10 feet deep. But like the title of this post implies, there's big history in this little building.

Photo taken in 1927 by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

Built in 1819, it was the third iteration of a church in Falmouth and was the only church there at the time. The name "Union" comes from the fact that it was shared by Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Therefore, it was a union of the four denominations.

Two very important people with the abolition movement worshiped in Union Church. One was Anthony Burns, a Stafford county slave whose escape, capture, and trial in 1854 under the Fugitive Slave Law made headlines across the nation. The other was Moncure Conway, a Falmouth native born into a slave-holding family who went on to become one of the most outspoken Southern abolitionists.

Anthony Burns

Burns and Conway, born just two years apart but in totally different worlds, crossed paths during one of the United States' most contentious times. This little building with big history is one of the places their lives intersected.

Moncure Conway

Once the Civil War broke out, Union Church was used in a variety of ways for the war effort. First and foremost, the brass bell was removed and melted down, likely turned into a cannon tube. Next, the church saw a ton of Union soldiers. It was used as a barracks and a hospital on a variety of occasions between 1862 and 1864.



After the Civil War, the church was pretty badly damaged. All of the pews had been used for firewood or makeshift hospital tables. It wasn't until 1868 that the church was up and running again with new pews and a new steel bell.

Union Church thrived for the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1930s, however, things were changing. There were now other denomination-specific churches in Falmouth and Union Church was no longer the only option for worship. The doors were closed for good in 1935.

Sitting vacant for years, a 100-year-old structure cannot survive without general maintenance. A new roof was needed, but the funds never came through. In September 1950, a large storm ripped through Falmouth and caused the roof to collapse, taking the majority of the building with it.

Union Church sat, mostly destroyed and open to the elements, for four years. In 1954, a contractor was hired to take down the rest of the walls and brick up the narthex.

In the decades that followed, a number of efforts were begun by a variety of people to preserve and restore the old building, but none came to fruition.

It wasn't until 2009 that the Trustees of the Union Church Historic Site, a 501c3 organization, was formed to bring the building back to life. In 2010, a fundraising arm called Union Church Preservation Project was formed.

In the four years since being created, we've come a long way. Thanks to a grant from Stafford County, the church finally got a new roof. A number of volunteers have helped clean and maintain the church and make it more presentable. We've removed the bell and put it on display as well as have the church painted. Our first major fundraising event was a huge hit back in May and we're gearing up for year two soon. Students created a digital reconstruction of the church using AutoCAD. We even donated a pew to the Smithsonian! New whiskey barrel planters were put out in front and Union Church once again looks lively and cared for.

Most recently, the University of Mary Washington's Historic Preservation department (where I got my degree) was partnered with us to use the church as a case study for their Building Forensics class. The students will gain valuable, hands-on experience and we will get wood, brick, and mortar analyses that will help us move forward with the proper preservation of the structure.

As we move into Stafford County's 350th anniversary in 2014 and we get closer to Union Church's 200th anniversary in 2019, things are definitely looking up.

Like I said in the title, Falmouth Union Church is a little building with big history.

Freshly painted in January 2013.

Here we go!

Hi everyone!

Thanks for stopping by my corner of the Internet. Let me tell you a little about me so that you know what to expect from The Ambling Historian.

In my professional life, I have a degree in Historic Preservation and have done work at both of the "Ivory Towers" of the history field - the National Park Service (previously) and the Smithsonian Institution (currently).

In my personal life, I run a nonprofit for the Falmouth Union Church Historic Site and have an intense passion for American history, mainly Civil War and earlier. I love visiting battlefields, historic house museums, and various other historic structures.

I love seeing places that are off the beaten path - like, waaaaay off the beaten path. This often means that the sites may have little if any information on site. That appeals to the researcher in me because I then get to dive into historic records, maps, etc and find out about the site.

My goal for The Ambling Historian is to present a variety of posts. Sometimes we will explore the story behind a place. Other times it will be about the people in a certain place. There will also be posts about places I can't find any info about and I just want to share in he hopes that someone else will have some info. There may even be posts that are short - a photo and a few words - because I find the place and its accompanying story moves me beyond words.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy this blog and you have a good time ambling through history with me!