Vic Socotra

30 October 2009

Where Pelham Fell

(Virginia Historical Marker F-10)

I left the Graffiti House puzzled again by history. The whole thing is baffling, layer on layer of it laid down like shale, crushing what is below it.

That damn house up on the hill was symbolic of it. I bear no ill-will to the angry man who built the place. It is his property, after all, insofar as anyone really owns anything in this short and brutal life. If anyone else cared about it, something should have been done before he had the right to do what he wished with it.

I was on the Amalfi coast of Italy one time, visiting the Judge during a brief time when the carrier was in Naples harbor. He took me to a hillside where a scavi had uncovered a remarkably well-preserved Roman bath. It was curious, I thought, walking into the side of the hill and through the changing room, the tepidarium and the hot room, the caldarium. There was a cold pool, too, the frigidarium, which is where I would have started, if I were a sweaty Roman.

They didn’t do it that way, apparently. The oil they used in place of soap was scraped off in the hot room with a dull blade-like device, and then the cold pool closed up the pours to the skin. You do what you must, I suppose, in the context of your times.

We emerged and I casually said that it was sort of strange the Romans had built such an elaborate facility out there in the country.

The Judge laughed and gestured at the hillside. “It is still here, my friend, all the Villas. A house here would have cost what a Province did in Gaul or Britannica.”

I looked at the terrain around us, the terraces softened by the brick walls that had collapsed from the weight of years, and realized the Judge was right, as he usually is. It was all there still, all the might of Rome collapsed into the rich volcanic soil.

Cimbing into the Bluesmobile, I tried to get it straight. What was left on the walls of the red house were the inscriptions, for the most part, of the Yankee winter encampment of 1863-64. A hundred thousand troops, right here in this little junction town, for nearly five months. Accessible by the O & A rail line to the North, the lady’s came to meet the officers, and there was a weird conjugal interlude in an increasingly savage war.

The battle on the hill had been the spring before, and that had made all the difference in what was to come.

The winter season of 1862-63 was still one of hope for the Rebels. They had fought hard to invade the North and secure their independence from the interfering Federals. They got as far as Sharpsburg, which is what they called the big fight in September of that year. The Federals had the field when it was all done, after the single bloodiest day in American history to that point, with 23,000 casualties. They called it “Antietam,” and that generally is what those awful two days are known by now.

Winter quarters in Culpeper for J.E.B. Stuart and his remarkable cavalry were used to fatten up the horses and rest the troopers for the next assault on the invaders. Dashing John Singleton Mosby was in the area to the north, raiding the raiders, and the jolly Prussian giant Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke. They would both survive the coming carnage, but the other legends of the South who were in camp that winter would not.

J.E.B. Stuart, the Virginia Cavalier; implacable Stonewall Jackson; Major John Pelham were among those soon to die as the inexorable power of the industrial North generated troops and materiel.

But that winter, they were all alive, particularly John Pelham, the rock-star mounted artilleryman who dazzled both sides with his reckless courage, and made the ladies swoon.

I fired up the car, the V-8 thundering into life. I pulled slowly out of the lot, looking up the hill at the sprawling house that sat smack in the middle of the field where the cavalry had swirled. Just up the road is a silver sign marked “10-F.”

The text is simple, almost short enough to read at highway speed.

“Where Pelham Fell
Four miles southeast, at Kelly's Ford, Major John Pelham, commanding Stuart's horse artillery, was mortally wounded, March 17, 1863.”

The sign is at the edge of the parking lot of the Elkwood Country store, facing the big road. There is no light there, and hence no particular reason to even slow down.

But what the hell. The roads to Washington were mostly unopposed on this early fall afternoon, and I thought I would ride the way John Pelham did, coming from Culpeper Court House where he had taken advantage of the winter break in campaigning to call on Becky Shackleford, the Judge’s pretty daughter, while attending to the business of a martial court.

Then waved farewell to Becky, and rode toward the sound of distant guns with Rooney Lee’s 9th Virginians.

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