Vic Socotra

27 October 2009

Silver Signs

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers'
imperial dreams

(Matsuo Bash?, 1644 – November 28, 1694) Basho was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. His poems are reproduced on monuments and traditional sites.

It is a great time to be driving large motorcars around rural Virginia. The bright green of the grass has faded now, and the trees are brushed with color along the stretch of Route 29 that parallels the railroad tracks that lead down to Orange and points south and west. There are two stoplights on the four-lane on this stretch, and in the summertime the grass is a lush emerald.

The grass in this part of Culpeper County is the best in Virginia, some say, which would make it among the best in the whole of the old Confederacy. One of those who shared that opinion was Robert E. Lee, and another was J.E.B. Stuart, the flamboyant cavalier who commanded Lee’s cavalry division in the late unpleasantness between the states.

The Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers flow cold and clear and deep in Culpeper County. Surveyor George Washington called their confluence “The Great Fork.” This part of the Virginia piedmont slopes up gently westward, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Some of the highest of them tower just to the west.

Old Rag Mountain lies just beyond Culpeper’s western border in neighboring Madison County. The natural boundaries of rivers and mountains were of immense strategic value during the Civil War. General Lee used the county as a staging ground for his grand strategy that revolved around invading the North, with the dual objective of brining in Britain on the side of the South, and convincing Washington to leave the secessionists alone.

His annual raids into Pennsylvania and Maryland culminated in the great battles at Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863) and the last desperate attempt to seize Washington in 1864 that managed to bring Jubal Early’s snipers within range of President Lincoln, who came up to Fort Stevens to get a look.

The whole thing was extraordinary, the amount of carnage and blood that was spilled, and treasure and lives thrown away on so mad an enterprise. People came from all over he world to study what the Americans were up to. Brits, naturally, but military observers came from all over to attach themselves to the armies of both sides.

One of them was a German officer of Dragoons, Second Brandenburg, named Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke. They called him the Prussian Giant, standing nearly six feet four, and wielding a sword longer than most men’s arms. He ran the Yankee embargo to land in South Carolina, and secured a commission to ride with Stuart’s horse, and there he came to know a young West Pointer from Alabama named John Pelham.

The Confederate horses were worn out after the hard campaigning late 1862. When the rains came and the ground was too soggy for movement, General Lee directed Stuart to go into winter camp, and do his best to rest the men and get the horses fit.

Federal troops occupied Culpeper Court House during the winter of 1863-1864, a hundred thousand strong. They ate like tens locusts and burned the trees and fences and houses for warmth and cooking. The landscape was altered by their presence, shaving it right down to the short and curlies.

In all, more than 160 Civil War skirmishes and battles were fought in the county, and many of them have markers and stones. Virginia was among the earliest states to embark on an organized highway marker program, and began to place the silver rectangular signs at significant points as early as 1927.

There are more than two thousand of them in the state, some disappointing, some bewildering. All of them share one thing: they are all impossible to read at today’s highway speeds.

I have a book with the full inscriptions on each marker. Theoretically it is possible to read from the book as you flash by, but it is normally in the trunk and the spine is broken and stained from old coffee spills and a little beat up from all the cars in which it has travelled.

There is a cluster of silver signs on this part of the highway. The first of note is one that reads (I’m quoting form the book here):

“Battle of Brandy Station F-11 Here on 9 June 1863, the largest cavalry battle in North America occurred when 9,500 of Confederate Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart's troopers fought 8,000 cavalrymen under Union Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton. This daylong battle, the opening engagement of the Gettysburg campaign, erupted when the Federal attack surprised Stuart and his men. The Confederates prevented the Union cavalry from learning the intentions of Gen. Robert E. Lee, who had begun marching his infantry to the Shenandoah Valley to invade the North. For the first time in the Civil War, however, the Federal cavalry proved itself a match for its opponents.”

That is a lot to try to read at 65 miles an hour, and for about the 89th time I resolved to slow down and actually read the whole thing. Flashing by as fast as I was, I thought that maybe the next time I wasn’t in a hurry, I would do something about it.

On the other side of the road was another silver sign, something about Pelham, and one about Kelly’s Ford.

I made a bold decision as I approached the stoplight at the place where the old Carolina Road ran into the hamlet of Brandy Station.

I decided to get off the road. I’ll have to tell you what I found tomorrow.

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