Vic Socotra

29 October 2009

The Battle on Fleetwood Hill

(The Graffiti House at Brandy Station)

I turned right at the light. I was stopped anyway at the red; the smooth pavement of Route 29 is hypnotic when you have the speed right, and hit all of them on the green. You can be in downtown DC in an hour and a half, if you catch the lights right.

I didn’t. It was a pleasant morning in the mid-fall, I had time to kill, and what the hell.

Alanthus Road is where the light is placed. It roughly follows the track of the old Carolina Road that leads south from this junction town. The four-lane road it crosses is cradled here by four long rising embankments that must have been intended to be part of a grander highway system, with overpasses that would permit traffic to fly unimpeded past the little town.

There must have been a battle about that, since real money and work was expended to through up these ridges of green grass covered dirt.

It is one of those things of mild note as you hurtle toward Culpeper, and there is no silver sign to inform you of what lies on the other side of the embankment. From the road there is only a flash of a red-painted house and the collapsing spire of a deconsecrated church with a faded sign hanging down by the stern reading “Fleetwood.”

I had always been meaning to stop, and the red light and being in the right lane made it possible. I swung the Bluesmobile smoothly through the aperture between the embankments and past Jimmy’s Auto and Trailer Repair to Brandy Road, which runs parallel to the railroad tracks as they pass through the little town.

The road swings awkwardly right after a couple blocks to cross the tracks and turn into State Route 669. The old roadbed continues straight on, into a dead end left by the construction of Route 29, and the disintegrating church and the red house are located just before the old road ends in a thicket.

The red house is on the right- the “Graffiti House,” as it has come to be known, though it has had many other names. It is a two-story frame structure, and the signs say that it was here in the day that this was the further point that the Federals controlled the railroad, and was the depot for Union operations in the County, and the lifeline for a hundred thousand troops who went into winter camp here in 1863.

I parked the car and walked up to the red house, topping to look at the interpretive sign on the lawn:

“Located on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, Brandy Station served as the Union Army of the Potomac's key supply and passenger depot during their 1863-1864 winter encampment in this area. Ingalls' Station, named for the army's Quartermaster General Rufus Ingalls, was 1.2 miles to the north. About 1 mile east-northeast, along the southern slopes of Fleetwood Hill, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, commander of the Union army, set up his headquarters.”

I looked up under the blue skies and tried to identify the hill. That Godawful new McMansion sits on a rise to the North, a house so huge that it startles you as you come around the bend on the highway, and makes you wonder who (or what) had possessed someone to build something so gaudy and out of scale and character with the rolling green grass.

I thought you might be able to see the battlefield from there, and considered driving up there on the way out of town. I read on:

“Here in Brandy Station, amid the hubbub of loading and unloading supplies and personnel, soldiers could have their pictures taken for $1.50 or spend their money on any number of other items. As one soldier remembered, "persons of almost any trade are...making money from the soldiers. There [in Brandy Station] you will see...Oysters, Fresh Fish, Condensed Milk, and numberless other signs which tempt the pocket book of the soldier...."

"It was a very busy place," another soldier wrote, "...from morning till night trains of army wagons were coming and going...waiting for their time to load."

With spring, roads dry out and temperatures rise, heralding a new season of battle. In early May 1864, the Army of the Potomac left its comfortable winter quarters and headed off to begin the bloody Overland Campaign.”

That really was enough to slake my curiosity, and it was such a nice day to be outside that I thought I might move along. They call it The Graffiti House for a reason, though, and on the general principle that you ought to do things when your are there, since life is short, walked up to the porch and plunged into another war.

The parlor- or what had been a parlor once upon a time- was filled with artifacts. In the middle of the run was a wooden structure that supported a crude flag, framed so that both sides were covered in glass, so that both sides could be viewed. I turned my attention to one of the storyboards on the wall, but then got bagged by the New Yorker.

Dave Barry has observed that there is a fine line between hobby and madness, and I was clearly now in the land between. There is nothing like the War Between the States to stir up emotion, particularly in those places where it actually happened, and where the wounds of the conflict are still sensitive to changes in the weather.

The New Yorker was a case in point. He wanted to talk about the flag, which was on loan from a small museum Up North someplace, and was of the species of home-made banners that the women sent to their sons and husbands in the field. It is believed that this flag was actually on the field at the time of the great Calvary battle, and hence it had been loaned for the touring season before going home again.

“What brought you here?” I asked, after he inquired as to the reason for my presence early on a Sunday morning. I never did get an answer, since he was summoned to the little gift shop, and I was turned over to Mike, a middle-aged man with a patchy beard who was articulate, well-spoken, and knew way too much about the house.

He could have been a re-enactor, one of those people who buys their own uniform and joins replica units to tramp around the fields in the campaigning season.

He walked me through the second story, explaining along the way that the house had almost been knocked down in the great struggle to build the international speedway here, an undertaking that would have covered hundreds of acres and periodically flooded the little town with more NASCAR fans than the whole Army of the Potomac.

“The house was built directly along the tracks of the O&A, we think in 1858, just three years before the war. Local tradition holds that the building was used as a hospital by both Union and Confederate forces, though of course that is true of every building that stood then.”

He directed my attention to the walls of the front bedroom where the plain brown paint had been scarped away to reveal inscriptions, drawings, messages, and signatures of the soldiers of both sides who had held the building in turn.

“This is what remains of the battle, and of the occupation,” he said gravely. I looked at the exposed inscriptions. Most of the wall is still covered in paint that the ten or eleven owners of the home since the war had thrown up to eliminate the memory.

“The building didn’t have a roof when it came into our hands, and nothing was left from the lower floor. These three rooms,” he said gesturing across the hall and to the back of the house, “Still have the original whitewall under the modern paint. Except for what was cut out and taken away when it looked like the house was going to be leveled.”

He showed me an exposed area of whitewash that had a name that looked very much like that of J.E.B. Stuart. “Can’t tell for sure, but it certainly looks like examples of the General’s signature that have survived. He certainly was here for the winter of 1862. Of course, it could be part of a tribute or something we have not uncovered yet.”

“So it survives because it was painted over to forget?”

“Precisely.”

“So what would it take to have the professionals take up the new stuff and expose it all?”

Mike paused and pursed his lips. “We think around $28,000 dollars. Seems like a lot or not much, depending on where you stand.”

I thought that might be government money well spent, as opposed to some of the other stuff it is so eager to throw money at, but I kept my opinion to myself.

“So, like where was the battle? It must have been right around here?” We were standing near the Northeast corner of the front (used to be back, when the house faced the railroad) bedroom at the top of the stairs. Mike pointed out the window at the McMansion.

“There it is. Fleetwood Hill.”

“You mean that house is on the battlefield?”

“No, that house IS the battlefield. The is very nearly at the center of where almost 20,000 men on horseback swirled back and forth for over six hours and 1,400 of them were wounded or killed. It is a Spite House.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Is it an American who built it?”

“Yep. American all right. Sicilian, though. He built it knowing how much the preservation society wanted to acquire the property.”

I am a strong supporter of property rights, but with all the vacant land in this great nation, I wondered who would deliberately buy a piece of land that was soaked in blood and put up a big-ass piece of 2009-era crap.

“No kidding,” I said. “What a jerk.”

I thanked Mike for the tour and gave the Foundation a $5 donation in the big glass jug on the table by the door on the way out. I promised I would come back.

I don’t know if I will, but I am going to go up to Fleetwood Hill and take a picture of the swimming pool one of these days real soon.

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