It is a cloudless and brilliant Piedmont morning. There is a sparkle of life renewing out over the pastures. There had been a note on the production schedule to do a little history on the current fight about replacing a nice equestrian property south Virginia’s Route 3 with a sprawling data-center complex to serve the interests of the Amazon consortium. We actually composed the slides incorporating several views of the area from the F150 Farm Truck on a journey around the farmland.

There is another slide incorporating the route of advance of Union forces (3rd Corps) who roade and marched up the little County Road in front of The Farm. DeMille had outlined a short historical account of what happened on the 9th of June, 1863. That was the year Lee’s Confederates camped in these hills, preparing to head north to Pennsylvania. The next year it was Grant’s men on their way to Richmond. Our County was a busy crossroads then.

We have shortened it a bit to this: just north of here there was an afternoon in which 20,000 mostly-mounted troops waged a savage day-long conflict that left nearly 1,500 of them killed in action.

We will do that sometime. This morning dawned cloudless again, and the temperatures are predicted to hover in the low ’60s. It might be another day to venture out and see what remains of the landscape those men saw in the course of that day’s work.

The conjecture of the day was whether we would have been happier as a group if the home shown above had been for sale on another lovely day thirteen years ago. It would have been a money pit. But seeing it yesterday, still standing tall in Victorian splendor, made us sit up straight in the pick-up.

It reminded us of the vehicle that preceded the truck, the former Police Car the Chairman allowed the Writer’s Section and HR to use to get to the Pharmacy and Distillery. Behind the handsome, if toxically masculine, lines of the car is the famed Spite House erected atop Fleetwood Hill, the center point of the battle 150 years ago. The house shares something in lineage with the one off the old Carolina Road. It was built to ensure a personal alteration of the historic landscape would stand. We contributed to the fund to purchase that home and rip it down. It is gone now as if it never existed.

Blues at Fleetwood.jpg

History is a funny thing, isn’t it?

We prefer this landscape:
Blues assault.jpg

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