Posts

What is: General Grant’s cabin at the Eppes Plantation

What was: For nearly a year, General Grant occupied a tent and later a cabin here, while he commanded his army in the final months of the Civil War. Grant hosted several visiting dignitaries, including Secretary of State William Seward, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and President Lincoln visited the site during the siege in 1864-5.

Grant chose the Eppes family Appomattox Plantation at City Point (now Hopewell, VA) for his headquarters and supply depot because of its strategic location, situated on a bluff overlooking the James and Appomattox rivers. It had a port and railroad access.  There was a telegraph station constructed in the house.  The Appomattox Plantation became central for the offices of the Quartermaster.

Grants operation occupied most of the front lawn, 22 log structures, as a major supply center serving 100,000 men who were besieging Petersburg and Richmond.  His supply base at City Point was one of the world’s busiest seaports and combined with the use of the Military Railroad for communication and transportation. The successful capture of Petersburg and its network of railroads was the key to the fall of the Confederate capital city of Richmond, ending the war less than a week later.

By May 1865 Dr. Richard Eppes had taken the Amnesty Oath but found that due to his wealth he did not qualify to benefit from the Amnesty Proclamation. He had to raise money to obtain the title to his land and to settle up with the Federal government, including purchase the structures the Union army left behind on his land before he could touch them. By early 1866, after a favorable transaction with the government, the plantation was back in his hands and by March his family was together again at City Point.

A major limitation to our understanding of the enslaved community is due to limited surviving archaeological sites. The family’s financial situation in the early twentieth century led to the sale of the Hopewell and Bermuda Hundred Farms, destroying the archaeological record of the slave quarters there.

 

What is: Appomattox Manor at City Point, Virginia, the town is now known as Hopewell, VA. It is most well known as Grants headquarters, part of the Petersburg National Battlefield

What was: The area around the plantation was first settled in 1613. Captain Francis Eppes originally acquired a large tract of land in 1635, encompassing area known as City Point, along the James River. Today the town is known as Hopewell, VA. The property remained in the Eppes family until 1979.

In 1844, at the age of 20, Dr. Richard Eppes, who had had earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, inherited his ancestral home, Appomattox Manor at City Point, Virginia. When war broke out, Eppes enlisted in the 3rd Virginia cavalry and helped to equip the unit. Eppes then became a civilian contract surgeon for the Confederate army in Petersburg for the duration of the war.
Prior to the Civil War, Eppes owned nearly 130 slaves and 2,300 acres. The slaves performed the hard labor on this estate, as well as all the household functions. Eppes recorded truancy in labor, feigned illnesses, and theft of food. Most of the punishments for those people consisted of a reduction of rations or a whipping.

Just days after a Union raiding party landed at City Point, the Eppes’ family departed and all but 12 of the slaves cast their fortunes with the Union army. When General grant arrived at City Point he established his headquarters in a tent on the east lawn of Dr. Richard Eppes’ plantation. From tents on the east lawn, replaced in the winter with cabins, Grant and his officers coordinated the Union campaign. President Lincoln visited City Point twice during the siege to meet with his top military officers, and tour the Depot Field Hospital, the largest of the four military hospitals. Source: National Parks Service, Petersburg National Battlefield, Virginia

 

What is: George and Polly Gilmore’s farm, Montpelier, Virginia.

What was: This was George and Polly Gilmore’s farm in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Both George and Polly were born into slavery at James Madison’s Montpelier. The Gilmore family lived here until the 1930’s.  The cabin is representative of not just the Gilmore family’s early years of freedom, but countless other newly freed African Americans in the Piedmont region of Virginia during Reconstruction.

President Madison died in 1836. When Dolley Madison sold Montpelier in 1844, George Gilmore and his future wife Polly conveyed with the property. They were married in 1850 and were freed in 1865 when Federal troops occupied Orange County.  Excavation units in the yard allowed historians to uncover what appears to be the remains of a Confederate encampment.

Like millions of African Americans throughout the South, many emancipated slaves worked on the same plantations where they once labored. After emancipation, Gilmore stayed at Montpelier, and is listed in census records as having worked as a saddle maker and as a tenant farmer. In 1873 the Gilmores built this cabin, and in 1901 purchased the 16 acres of land from Dr. James A. Madison, the great-nephew of President Madison. Members of the family lived on the farm until the early 1930s.

What is: Fort Monroe, Hampton, Virginia

What was: Fort Monroe has an interesting place in American history.  In late August 1619, the first ship carrying “20 odd” enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia, where Fort Monroe is today.  The Fort was built between 1819 and 1834 and occupied a strategic coastal defensive position since the earliest days of the Virginia Colony. During the Civil War, the Fort remained in Union possession and became a place of refuge for freedom seekers, earning the nickname “Freedom’s Fortress.”

Just six weeks after the Civil War began, three slaves – Frank Baker, James Townsend and Shepard Mallory – escaped from behind Confederate lines and sought refuge at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. Commanding General Benjamin Butler refused to return the fugitives and declared the three men contraband of war. Soon, thousands of enslaved African Americans from all over the region descended on Fort Monroe in pursuit of freedom and sanctuary. This event fundamentally changed the meaning of the Civil War from states’ rights to the immorality of slavery, and marked the beginning of the end of slavery in the United States.  Fort Monroe became a refuge for those escaping enslavement, and was one of the first places enslaved people were granted freedom during the American Civil War.

While its location was the site of the first Africans who were traded as property, it’s also the place where — more than 240 years later — thousands of slaves found refuge and ultimately, their freedom, when Union forces did not return slaves to Confederate soldiers. Jefferson Davis was imprisoned here at the conclusion of the Civil War. Edgar Allen Poe and Harriet Tubman both spent time at Fort Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln stayed there during the assault on Norfolk, VA – the last time a sitting President was actively involved in a military campaign.

What is: The old steel mill wheel at the front of Tredegar iron works which is today the main visitor center for the Richmond National Battlefield Park and the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar.

What was: the iron works plant in Richmond opened in 1837 by a group of businessmen and industrialists who sought to capitalize on the Transportation Revolution. Tredegar operated on hydro power by harnessing the James River and the canal. The plant employed skilled domestic and foreign workers as well as slaves and free blacks. By 1860 it was the largest facility of its kind in the South – a contributing factor to the choice of Richmond as the capital of the confederacy.

It produced the steel for the first Confederate ironclad ship, as well as about half of the artillery production. It also manufactured steam locomotives, rail spikes and clamps. The iron works is one of the few Civil War era buildings that survived the burning of Richmond.

Tredegar began producing again by the end of 1865. By 1873 it employed 1,200 workers and was profitable business. The financial panic of 1873 hit the company hard and it did not make the transition to steel. The Tredegar company remained in business throughout the first half of the 20th century, and supplied requirements of the armed forces of the United States during World War I and World War II.

The company name Tredegar derives from the Welsh industrial town that supplied much of the company’s early workforce.