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The Fourth in History

The Fourth in History

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I know at least two re-enactors at Gettysburg this week, one fighting for the North and one for the South. And I remember the school trips each of the girls took to the battlefield in sixth grade, playing out roles in their own Picketts’ Charge.

There’s a battlefield site minutes from here where another battle was fought, the Battle of Ox Hill (or the Union name, the Battle of Chantilly) and I think I’ll go there today. It’s a place I’ve passed several hundred times and always meant to see. It’s tucked between malls, hidden in plain sight, a bit of history almost buried by modern life.

But it’s still there, not quite five acres. And visiting it seems like a good way to celebrate the day, here in the Old Dominion.

“If this is coffee…”

“If this is coffee…”

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In honor of our 16th president and his February 12 birthday, a quotation. Not from the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural. In fact, no one is sure exactly where it came from, or even completely confident that he said it. Though it has always been attributed to him, it is not an especially well sourced remark.

But still, it is funny and practical and about real life. A break from the ponderous union-preserving tasks with which he was shouldered. A witty aside the man might have tossed out into the world without expecting it to go very far.

“If this is coffee,” he said, “please bring me some tea. But if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”

So much for uniting the North and the South, those who sought to preserve the Union and those who clamored to divide it.

With one sentence this man could bring together  — with humor — those who love coffee and those who love tea.

Now that’s saying something…

The Lincoln Cottage in northwest D.C., the president’s summer home, where he undoubtedly had a cup of coffee … or maybe it was tea.

Up Close

Up Close

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There were fewer people then, but they huddled together. Eleven souls once lived in this tiny house, which consisted of one room downstairs (a bed, a hearth, a table) and a cramped stairway to the second floor. There, scads of islanders were born — including the mother of an old woman I met the day I visited this place, the oldest house in Chincoteague, Virginia (circa 1795).

Meanwhile, there are only three of us now in a once cramped center-hall colonial that is ever more roomy as the children move out. And we are one of the smallest houses around. Nearby neighborhoods are filled with McMansions, their two-story foyers and three-car garages of a different heft and scale than the houses here.

What sort of people does crowding create? And what sort of people emptiness? I re-charge in solitude and would probably have been driven crazy by the cheek-to-jowl existence of my ancestors. But still, there are times when I feel a deep-boned loneliness that’s not so much personal as evolutionary. Maybe it’s the crowded rooms of the past that I miss, the intensely shared life that never let us forget that we’re in this together.

History Lesson

History Lesson

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“Do you want to hold it?” asked Jim Lewis, our tour guide. “You might need both hands.”

And with that he passed me a 12-pound cannonball that, yes, was easier to hold with two hands than with one.

Lewis is a member of the Hunter Mill Defense League, which sounds like some sort of retro radical 60s organization but is actually a group of citizens formed to protect and defend the lovely, historic and oft-threatened (by development and widening) Hunter Mill Road.

Lewis and colleagues have bushwacked their way through the rolling hills of western Fairfax County, discovering old road beds, abandoned millraces and confederate earthworks, cannonballs and former camp sites. Now they’re sharing their knowledge through lectures, booklets and the occasional tour.

Yesterday’s four-hour jaunt delivered more information and ideas than I could possibly capture in a single post.  Like the cannonball, it was a lot to handle. It gave me a plethora of ways to see this land I live in. A place of history and of depth. 



(Jim Lewis and cannonball near the Confederate earthworks he found in the woods behind his backyard.)

150 Years Ago

150 Years Ago

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I went there once, a hurried pilgrim on my way home. Time to stop but not reflect. I vow to go there again, to walk the fields in silence, to meditate upon this number — 23,000 — the tally of soldiers killed or missing during the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862.

It was the single greatest one-day loss of American life. It happened less than two hours from here.

The landscape now is serene. It’s up to us to imagine the horror.


Burnside Bridge on September 1862 (photo by Alexander Gardner, courtesy Library of Congress) and in 2008.

“Look on my Works”

“Look on my Works”

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Gray clouds part as I drive across the river, which is smooth and still. The familiar monuments rise in the foreground. It’s early morning and already cars are jockeying for the center lane on Constitution, the only lane I trust to take me where I want to go.

Entering the city above ground I’m suddenly aware of its heft, its stone edifices, the Corinthian columns of the National Archives Building. The trees that grow beside it, the rich old magnolias and oaks — they seem a construct too. And the words carved on its pediment, Archives of the United States of America, look ancient and proud.

For some reason (the hour? the light? the mood?), these words of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” come to mind:

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Photo: Wikipedia

Decoration Day

Decoration Day

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We have no flagpole holder, no siding on our house to hold one, and the front of our house is obscured by large trucks. Still, I walked to the mailbox a minute ago to stick a small flag in its arm.  It’s Decoration Day, Memorial Day’s first name, what it was called when it was established in 1868 for the purpose of decorating the graves of fallen soldiers.

No longer May 30, Memorial Day is the last Monday of the month — a day for cookouts, pool openings and ushering in the summer. But long ago (and in some places still) it was a day for a solemn parade and a trip to the cemetery.

Here is a Decoration Day parade from Brownsville, Texas, in 1916, photographed by Robert Runyon and downloaded from the Library of Congress’ American Memory project.

(Photo: The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, [image number, e.g.,
00199], courtesy of
The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.)

Water and the Bridge

Water and the Bridge

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As I learn more about the land around me, I find myself gawking out car windows, craning my neck as I cross bridges, counting houses after I pass a hidden lane.

Is that where the old road veers off into the woods? Is this where, as late as 1970, cars forged the creek?

I’m testing the waters here, seeing if history can stand in for that bone-deep knowledge of a place that comes from growing up there. My hunch is that it won’t; my hope is that it will.

For doesn’t this, like so many conundrums (conundra?) depend upon whether you listen to head or heart? You can make a list of pros and cons, but in the end your rational self is taking orders from that fast-moving water down below.

Our thoughts are the bridge; our feelings are the water.

I put my money on the water.

A Palpable Past

A Palpable Past

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In thinking about place, and what binds people to it, I ponder the beauty of the landscape, the scale of roads and buildings, and the people, of course, always the people.

And then there is history. Not one’s own family history, but a learned body of knowledge, something you can pick up from books and conversations, from paying close attention to the woods you walk through.

On Saturday I met two men who have mapped the forgotten roads of our area. They started with two places, an old house in Vienna and the site of a mill a few miles away, and they charted the road that ran between the two. This is only one of their projects. They have also helped to move an old school, protect an old road and add historical markers to our neighborhood.

For them, the past is palpable. And because of them, it is more real for all of us.

Family Stories

Family Stories

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Betty Leet Bell is my Dad’s first cousin, which makes her my second cousin, or my first cousin once removed. One thing she is without question is a genealogist. She has spent years researching the births, deaths, marriages and deeds of those who can no longer tell their own stories.

Yesterday we went to visit Betty and she told us about a cousin who danced in the dream sequence of the movie “Carousel,” a great-grandmother (above) who died of the measles after giving birth to her tenth child, and another relative whose pet was a talking crow.

One of Betty’s stories concerned two store-front lots in Lexington. When she was researching the ancestors on her mother’s side, she learned that in the 1790s her great-great grandfather bought these two parcels of land for a hatter’s shop.

A couple years later, when Betty was researching her father’s side of the family, she learned that these were the exact same lots that her dad purchased in the 1930s when he was looking for a place to build his furniture store. One hundred and forty years (and several intervening owners) separated these purchases. It was one of those historical coincidences that Betty says is not that uncommon when she’s digging into the past.

Maybe it was just the commercial potential of these lots that spoke — generations apart — to these two very different men. Or maybe there was something about that spot, the way it looked in the morning light, or smelled after a good, hard rain; maybe there was something about that place that spoke to each of them.