Evening Star Newspaper, July 10, 1921, Page 51

*;guiany yedrs ago there was a hotel which . Part 4—8 Pages - . MAGAZINE SECTION Sunty Staf. WASHINGTON, D. O, SUNDAY MORNING, JULY 10, 1921 Wl Famous Bull Run Battlefield May Be Turned Into a Government Park 3 SR STONE HOUSE AT JUNOTION OF WARRENTON PIKE AND MANASSAS- SUDLEY ROAD. ULL RUN comes into the news again, but in a far happler ‘way than when it made its . first appearance on the print- ed page. That was sixty years ago. It is to be made a battlefleld park as & memorial to the soldiers who fought on that fleld. The Lee highway, be- ing developed as one of the great east and west automobile roads, passes through the flelds, that highway tak- ing unto itself as one of its sections the old Warrenton turnpike, which was one of the main civil war roads of Vir- ginia. Efforts have been made for twenty years to have the government take over the fighting ground of Bull Run | and care for it after the manner of | the flelds of Gettysburg and Antietam, or to buy the ground on which stand two simple little monuments that ! were set up on particularly tragio parts of the battlefields by Union troops in 1865. The proposal that the Bull Run battleflelds should be held By the nation as a battlefield park has been urged by organizations of Union and Confederate veterans and by many other patriotic associations, but there has always been sufficient in- difference or hostility on the part of Congress to thwart the plan. Though wery little, if anything, has been spoken against the proposal, there was for many years manifest indifference in Congress to making a battlefleld park of lands on which Union armies twice met defeat. Thera has been incorporated under the laws of Virginia *The Manassas Battlefleld Confederate Park,” lished there, and the other half to be used In laying out the battlefleld and in plaeing monuments and markers.” States will be given the opportunity, by subscriptions. secured through private sources or by legislative appropriation, to place upon the fleld special monu- ments and memorials to com: s that participated in the battles. The an- nouncement has been made that “The invited pligrims to drink the health- glving waters of Sudley. This junction of the Warrcnton turn- pike and the Manassas-Sudley road is one of the landmarks of history in our country. In the northeast angle of the roads, and close beside them, is an old stone house which in recent years has been porch. Union fifteen years ago. of the civil war that inated “the battlefleld houses are named owners, given a new roof and a front The o was put.on about GEN, MeDOWELL. commander. at first battle ‘of Bull Rua. In the red annals old house is denom- The other for their the atone house.” as the Van Pelt house, Robinsan house, the Matthews house, the Chinn house and the Henry house, but this little house is often mentioned v THE DOGAN HOUSE AT GROVETON. Snauguration of the plans for carryin out the details of this memorial i take place on the battlefied of Manas- sas on the anniversary of that battle, July 2" A mighty crowd, it is be- lieved, will gather on the battlefleld on that and a great many gpeopla from m&lon will be presen L s I’l‘ i® about twenty-five miles from ‘Washington by wagon road to the eastern edge of the bloody sone.of the Dattlefield of the first Bull Run, be “the fust battle of Manassas That is about the distance to the plcturesque ©id red stone bridge which spans the and which no doubt derives its name from the Bull Run mountains, an east- ern outpost of the Blue Ridge, in which the stream has its source. It i§ over Cthis ol Bull Run stone bridge that the Washington-to-Warrenton turnpike leads. Along the banks of the stream, and below and above it, the fighting on Sunday morning, 1861, which developed into a t was heard around the world, northern troops and his- torians called the “battle of Bull Ru which the southern . soldiers and historians generally called the “battle of Manassas.” Te e, after crossing the bridge, W"" with the land rising grad- to &’ridge on each side of it. s the land that-was wet with the bloodl of men and sprinkled with corpses. Two or three old houses, the names of whose owners stand out in civil war apnals, can be seen on those rising lopes. A mile of travel westward from “the bridge brings you to a 3t ia the junction of the Warrenton pike rnd a dirt road which leads from the ¥ fries to Leesburg and the mountains of the west. But it came to be known during the battle era of the republic, @nd is 80 known today, as the Managsas- Fi ‘battle and which th historla creek or “run” called Bull Run, 2 merefy as “the stone house.” It might have been without a tenant at the time of the battle, or being a stone house, and very conspicuous in the battle zone, the soldiers thought that “stgne house' ‘was the most fitting name to call it. On the other side of o the road and on a wide “level” beyond the crest of the slope—that i in the southeast of the roads—is a_ gray ‘frame house with few broken locust trees around it. is the He: Houss, which stands on %mnfln&h ‘The slope from the pike, up around it was collision .between the Union lederate forces-in the first battle of Bull un, and it was also < Ri ‘Thet to ousé and the flat fleld t h the scene of the principal fighting ground in the second battle, something more than year later, death-blighted field of the second bat- tle being on the Dogan the bloodiest and wmost farm, about & mile to a mile and a half wes: by norty from the junction of the Manassas- and 7 the Warrenton pike dley road. Cxxx® ™M HE main line of the cunfedenlallpm, wh was on the Henry farm in the fight- | ing of 1861, and it was the farthest point ; of the Unlon advance in their march |feld where two great battles-ended, the westward: from the stone bridge and !nearest battlefield to the National Caj south from Sudley Springe. It was on: that fleld that the Union lines wavered, broke and began the retreat which soon ;like a stone wall’ in the first battle, and developed Into panic and a rout. yards behind the house. Close to their tombstones—one might almost say among them—stands a little brown-red stone monument built by soldiers and dedicated a few days after the grand re- view in Washington. | The soldlers set up on and around the monument shells and %nmm ‘balls which they picked yp on the'Nelds, for then a part of that country was still littered with the debris of battle and the country pitted with sunken graves, which had been very shallow in the making, and in many, places the skulls and skeletons of men, for the most part men who had been killed in the greater and heavier fighting of 1862, were strewn over the ground. Lieut. George Carr Round, deceased, & northern soldler, who settled at Ma- nassas many years ago, and was es- teemed one of the broad-minded, pro- gressive and public-spirited men of Prince Willlam county, gave something of the history of the Henry family in a letter which he wrote November 5. 1913, to_the Bull Run battlefield board of the War Department. That board, Col. H. O. B. Helstand, Col. C. B. Baker and Capt. R. R. Ralston, was appeinted by Lindley M. Garrison, Sec- retary of War, in connection with the provisions of an act of Congress, - proved March 3, 1913, entitled “An act to protect the monuments already erected on the battlefleld of Bull Run, Va., and other monuments that may be there erected. The board favored the purchase of the land. strongly favored the purchase of the sites of the but they thought that tha. price for the farm by .the Hellz-a irs; $20,000, ‘was excessive, -being at rate of $156 an acre. * % ® X AND this brings up the suggestion that it is fair to quots from this letter to the War Departmant in reply to the department's statemient that ft thought the price asked Yor the Henry farm was excessive. Lieut. Round wrote: “The ‘Henry heirs have given respect- ful consideration to the communication from your board regarding the ce at which the Henry farm is gffered to the Tnited States. It was the desire of their uncle, Hugh Fauntleroy Henry, from whom they inherited the property, that the estate should continue in the family, where it had remained since it come from the crown of Great Britain, though he preferred if it was ever alienated that it should pass into the control of the United States govern- ment, which he believed would pay proper respect to and take proper care of the family burial place, a subject that lay near his heart. ““The heirs, on coming into posses- sion of the property, found that it was not “capable.of sul - af and determined to: offes le. They appreciate, however, many reasons urged by the public, and especially by the veterans, why the place should pass into the hands of the general government, and are sincerely desirous to co-operate in-bringing this about. They do not desire to place an excessive or fictitious valgation on the rronarly. ‘The price fixed upon ($20,000) s $5,000 less than they understand their uncle was offered in 1876, and to their minds is a compromise between its valuation for farm and resf@ential pur- poses and such historical and sentimen- tal valuation as attaches to it in the public mind as well as in the minds of the present owners. ¢ ‘““The undersigned, -attorney for the helrs, desires to call your attefition re- spectfully to some considerations pecu- liar to this case. The views he will advance were held by him before he occupied any confidential relations to clients and were urged ;!p:n npmanmt‘x‘onz_' of “the e s and upon the Grapd Army Republic and Confedersts Veterans long y him before he accep consented thereto that means. He might ald in about a solution satisf: “He respectfully 2 “First, whatever price is-pajd case cannot be considered a for other cases; neither can price which ought to be pald be well inferrsd from prices at which other historle places have been offered or purchased. There 12 no other auch proparty tn the Tnited Stafes or in the world. It is the occurred the. first pitched battle of the greatest war in our his- tory. the greatest among all clvilized peoples in all history. It embraces the ital, both baitles being fought elped-l{; for the protection of the same. This was the fleld where Jackson It was | Sykes, Reno and Reynolds in the sec- he lines of battle being. reversed in % ond, on that fleld that the sobriquet “Stoe- | the two enzasements and the result, so wall” was first applied to Gen.. Jackson, | far as this fleld and there the Confederate general, Be: who gave him that sobriquet, was and today & that “Gen. on this Jof the first battle of- Very railway hamlet of | bed. Springs,. Junction and Sud! avllhco where there are lp::n strong sulphur and iron, where there is a mill and a meeting-house, and where N killed, farm t most_of the Kkilling Manassas took early after the fight and sigple little marker tells B‘tfil killed here.” It was: August was_concerned, being reversed.also, the Confederates having held the Henvy hill at sundown July 21, 1861, and the Union foroes at sun 18/ 3 3 n: this same fleld, exmotly half century later, the blue and the gray lined up, the one on the north ents Put Up by Soldiers. OVEMENT on Foot to Take Over Historic Ground, Where Two Big Battles of the Civil War Took Place—A Battlefield Park asa Memorial to the Soldiers Who Fought There—Efforts for Twenty Years to Have Government Purchase Land and Care for It in Manner of the Fields of Gettysburg and Antietam—Where the Heaviest Fighting Took Place—Famous Houses Where Generals Had Their Headquarters—Markers and Monum of consideration as the most interesting spot in that ‘far-flung battle line,’ the fact of its deliberate selection in the spring of 1865 and. the most impressive ceremonial and formal dedlaation Su day. June 11, 1865, leave no manner of doubt as to what the soldiers themselves thought of the question we are dis- cussing." The ~household around ~which - the northern and southern armies circled so suddenly in the first battle of Bull Run was a family made up one-half of northern and one-half of southern blood. Judith Henry was born Judith Carter, and she was a direct descendant of that celebrated Virginia character known in the early colonial period as “King" Carter. Her husband, Dr. Isaac Henry, ‘who died in 1831, was a native of Phil. adelphia, and descended on his mother's side from the Morris family. He was commissioned surgeon in the Navy by President John Adams, and served In the short war with France on the Con- tellation, under. Commodore Truxton. Thelr youngest son, Landon Henry, served as a sergeant throughout the Seminole war and died In the service of yellow fever at Kéy West. None of the descendants of Judith and Isaac Henry served in the Confederate army. Hugh and John, sons, were school teachers by profession and followed _thelr calling throughout the war 8o far as it was possible for them to-do so. * & 5% N the crisis of the first battle Im- boden’'s battery and the Washington artillery of New Orleans were In line to_ the right and left of the Henry house. At that time the house was surrounded by a grove of locust treés and many of these were shot away and their stumps were standing at the time the photographs accompanying this story were made, which was In 1900. A little heap of stones picked up In the fleld marked where Gen. Bee was killed. An- other little heap marked where Gen. Bartow was killed, and a stake in the und marked the spot where Col commanding the 75th New York regiment, was killed: A rail fence, along which a line of cedar trees had grown up, marked the position of Jackson's col “stood like a stone wall” was wavering and uncertainty in some of the Confederate line. - A gran- laced in position in fronting - northwest towsrd Groveton and half a mile west of the Sudiey road and the Henry fleld, to mark the spot where Col Filetcher ‘Webster, son of Danfel Webster, and colonel of the 12th Massachusetts Vol- unteers, was killed in the second bat- tle, ug&t 30, 18 A rude little marker been set up to indicate the ed by Rickett's U. battery in the first battle and where that command was shot to pleces. In & plece of woodland mot far from the Henry house bits of board nailed to trees were inscribed telling how Gen. ‘Wilcox and Gen. Kirby Smith had been shot there. ©On the Warrenton pike, one mile west Henry farm, is Groveton. Four houses and " a - blacksmith shop were there in 1861 and 1362. ‘The houses were destroyed in the second battle and three of them were rebullt after the war. One of these was the Dogan house, and on the Dogan farm much of {dedication of these monuments was the Killing of the battle was done. Groveton was Jackson's right and the Confederate center when Longstreet joined him. The man who is Writing this knew Mrs. Lucinda Dogan, her daughter Mollie, and several of the grandchildren. An old colored man liv- ing there in 1900, whose name was Redmond, helped in the work of bury- ing the dead in 1862 Mrs. Lucinda Dogan was eighty-scven years old in 1900, and she died ten or fifteen years ago. She often told The Star man that she was ordered from her house by one of Jackson's officers on the morning of August 29, 1862, and before she had been gone ‘ten minutes artillery opened and heavy infantry fighting soon fol- lowed. Befors the war a raflroad, called the Independent railroad, was projected to run from the Manassas Gap railroad at Gainesville (where the railroad crosses the Warrenton pike west of Groveton) to Leesburg. The road was graded, hills were cut through and fills made over low ground and stane culverts bullt over the runs and larger crecks. No tics or rails had been laid, and when the war came on all work stopped. It was along this graded way that Jackson formed his line for the second fight. The line of the unfinished rallroad is preserved today, though the ‘“cuts” are.grown up in woods and the “fills” are generally overs grown with pines and cedars. A par- ticular cut where troops, their ammu- nition expended, fought with bayonets, clubbed muskets, and even stones, about a thousand yards north of the|labo Dogan_house. Pointing over the wide fields between Rer house and the woods through which the “cut” runs, Mrs. Dogan told T Star man that’ when she came ho after fighting had ceased and armies moved on to fight at Chantilly, “dead men lay so thick over that fiel that you couldn't walk without stepping on them. They had not been buried. Men had gone about shoveling dirt over them where they lay. and the night be- fore 1 came back with my children to where the house stood. it had rained and the dirt that had been thrown these men had been washed off.” * % % % TR! old lady was & witness at the congressional inquiry which reversed the findings of the court-martial in the cage of Gen. Fitz-John Porter. Bhe testified that Longstreet and officers of his staff ate breakfast in her house early in the morning of August 28 (or was it August 297) and that his troops ‘were coming down the pike from the’ direction of Gainesville. Her testimony helped to prove that Longstreet had Joined Jackson on the morning of that day and that therefore Longstreet's corps was in front of Porter's corps, which lay behind Dawkin’s branch, two miles south of Groveton, while Jackson was standing offe and finally driving back the troops of Pope with great slaughter. 3 One of thoss “soldler monuments” stands on the Dogan farm by the side of the railroad cut. Though erected on two battleflelds and set up as memo- rials of battles that occurred something more than thirteen months apart, these tv& monuments should be discussed to- gether. One of the officers present at the over Niay 23, 1865, THE STONE BRIDGE OVER BULL RUN. the | taken out of a culvert of the unfinished. rallroad. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, quarter- master general of the Army. There i in the War Department library a photo graph taken on the day of the cere- monies. Gen. Meigs is in the picture. So, tos, 18 Gen. William Gamhle, then commanding the division in which the battleflelds were, and Gen. Augur is also in the picture. The Army of the Potomac passed In grand review on Pennsylvania avenue The veterans were en- campéd in Virginia and their camps ex- tended far west of Arlington and Alex- sndria, and there were camps around Fairfax Court House. The story goes that after the review, and before being discharged, there arose a desire to erect monuments on the Bull Run fields. The movement was startea by women, who visited the Fairfax camps at the close of the review and were shown over the Bull Run fields, where they bad lost kinsmen. An impromptu meeting was held at Fairfax and a program mapped out. Maj. Wickersham, one of the sur- vivors of the desperate charge of the $th Pennsylvania Cavalry at Chan- cellorsville, and then a brigade chief of staff, drew the necessary orders, which were indorsed by Gen. Willlam Gamble and forwarded to department headquarters for approval. Capt. H. C. Lawrence, a brigade quartermaster, had general control of the enterprise’ and provided the necessary materials. Lieut McCallum of the 16th Massachusetts Battery was made superintendent and builder. A hundred mechanics and ers were detailed from Col lup's 5th Pennsylvania Heavy lery. The stone for the monument on Henry hill was taken out of a fiel nearby and the stone for the monument at’the railroad cut near Groveton was ‘The emervice of the gonsecration of these monuments on_Sunday, June 11, 1865, was rendered with great solemnity by Chaplain McCurdy of Kentucky, as- sisted in responses by Chaplain Wil- llam A. Spencer of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry and by Signal Officer Albert N. Belp. Gen. Augur, commander of the Department of Washington, was present with his staff, one of whom, Col. J. H. Taylor, was the author of the I scription on each monument, “In mem- ory of the Patriots Who Fell” Gen. Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomae, sent his headquarters band. A government railroad train brought guests from Washington to Fairfax sta. tion, and sixty army wagons and am- bulances carried them to Henry Hill and Groveton. At the close of the dedi- cation services there was a e of all branches of the service and Scot Bixteenth Massachusetts battery fired a salute from the spot where one section of Rickett's battery, slaughter, was capt: Sunday, July 21, 1865, * % % % HE addresses at the ceremonies ‘were representative of all the de- partments of the government. Gen. Farnsworth of Illinois spoke for Congress, of which he was a member. Gen. Heintzleman and Gen. Wilcox spoke on behalf of the soldiers who had fought on that fleld. The Rev. John Pier- pont, then in his eightieth year, wrote the dedicatory poem, which breathes the THE FOUR-CHIMNEY HOUSE, QUARTERS, BEFORE same spirit as that which he prepared forty vears before, when the cornersione of the Bunker Hill monument was laid. Judge A. D. Olin of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia made an eloguent address. The Star sent a reporter to the dedi- cation of these monuments. Many of the facts just related are taken from that old account, and the following. which was part of the same article, iy introduced because of the great in terest which must now attach to it: “From Alexandria to the battlefield is one wide area of desolation. Fences are utterly swept away. Here and there a dilapidated house shelters a few squalid inmates, and occasionally a small patch of corn or wheat is passed. but the whole face of the country is OF THE FIGHTING OF CENTERVILLE, McDOWELL’S HEAD- THE FIRST BATTLE. or fifteen years ago it was as bad, if not worse, than any other rogd in Vir- | ginia, but it has been much improvec and as part of the Lec highway, will be {made into ome of the fine automobil |roads of the United States. The roal | to Fairfax Court House is an excellent | river pike. | from Alexandria to the west by way Fairfax and the gap at Aldie. west of Fairfax Court House there is fork and the lef ginning of the Warrenton pike. Fairfax to Centerville, around and which McDowell's army lay before L. - | ginning the attack on the Confederates | west of Bull Run, is seven miles from Fairfax. There you see the Bull Run mountains. It is about five miles to 'ARM ON WHICH MUCH OF BULL RUN TOOK changed. Scrub oak and pine are 8) ging up everywhere. tew decrepit houses and Yeaning chimneys are all that remaln of the once pleasant valley of Fairfax Court Hou The old-fashioned courthouse itself is - | GEN. BEAUREGARD, Confederste commander, at first battle of Bull Run. half ruined, its roof going to decay and its walls plerced for rifiemen, threaten- ing at no distant day to fall in the gen- eral ruin. The hotels are but hovels. Broken brick and mortar, half hidden by weeds, alone mark the site of the churches. A dozen, perhaps, of its former male population remaln. Their homes ruined, their families beggared and themselves humbled, one cannot avold expression of sympathy in, their m! ne. “Centerville is even more of a desert. Once a village of rare beauty, perched upon & gentle slope of a high ridge and commanding & view of f le valleys for many. miles war-swept, it and its Tuins Bul ped clear by relic hunters except e matter of horse bones. The bat- the stone bridge, then about a’ mile to the Sudley road and Henry farm, and about a mile or a mile and a half on to Groveton. In some places you will have to leave vour car if you would visit the lines occupied by troops. With the battleflelds made a park, the road to them improved and road: built through to the various positions a: at Gettysburg and Antietam, it will become one of the shrines at which millions of Americans may visit and strengthen their love for America and its race of men. The Rock of Gibraltar. HE Rock of Gibraltar, taking into consideration the far-carrying guns of today, is of even greater im- portance, because of its commanding Pposition at the mouth of the Mediter- ranean, where that sea is little more than twenty miles wide—about as ‘wide as from Calais to Dover—than it ‘was in the old days. Gibraltar was captured by the Brit- ish on July 24, 1704, and from that day has never been out of B hands. At first little importance attached to this stronghold. For the succeed- ing nine years the Spaniards made Tepeated attempts to recapture . it, however, and on one occasion they al- most succeeded. A French and =& Spanish force having been collected on the isthmus that jolns the rock to- the mainland, a goatherd offered to show them a path .up the sloping sides of the rock, which he had rea- son to believe was unknown to the British. This offer was accepted. Five hundred troops ascended quietly one night and took shelter in a hollow « called by the Spaniards “the little chair.” At daybreak next morning they ascended higher, took the signal station, killed the guard and anxious- ly looked for expected reinforcements ‘The armed garrison sallied forth and drove the Invaders down the rock. The * “little chair” was fillled up and th. place made stronger than ever. All. subsequent. attempts to capture the rock failed. One of them was a siege by Spain and France, beginning in 1779, and not terminating until Sep- tember, 1783, The Gift of the Nile.' Amch *is especially dependent upon irrigation, and It has been pointed out that modern engineers have i mot devised any essentially new method |of supplying thirsty lands with water. | Referetice may be made to the statement ot Herodotus that Egypt is the gift of