Jehu Williams

Jehu Williams

     In about 1720 young David Shion Williams, born in Wales in 1699, boarded one of the many sailing ships plying the Atlantic in those years and sailed west to the New World. He would establish himself in New Castle County, Delaware where he raised his family and lived out his years until his death in 1786. One of David's sons, Jesse, was born there in 1750. [Please note that all images in my blog may be clicked on for enlarged viewing]
     By the 1770s Jesse Williams was living in Baltimore, Maryland, where he married Rachel Gott on November 24, 1774. Less than two years later Jesse would be mustered into service to fight soldiers from his father's native country sent to suppress the rebellion that spread throughout all thirteen colonies. During the American Revolution Jesse Williams would serve in several regiments, as he would be called on to re-enlist after his original term of service expired.
     In 1780 Jesse and Rachel Williams and the first two of their eight children moved to Culpeper County, Virginia. The following year Jesse was again called upon to serve the cause of the Revolution and he enlisted one more time.
     The Williams family remained in Culpeper until about 1791; at least four of Jesse's and Rachel's children were born there, One of these, Jehu Williams, arrived on October 11, 1788.
     From Culpeper the Williams family moved to Orange County and from there to Stafford. It was while living in the latter place, in 1799,  that eleven year old Jehu met the family of six year old John Victor (1793-1845). It was this auspicious meeting that transformed the lives of both boys.
     Young John Victor was the son of John Victor, Sr. and Sarah Tankersley, who married in Caroline County sometime between 1777 and 1780. Like Jesse Williams, the senior John Victor also served during the Revolution, first as a lieutenant with Baylor's Regiment of Horse and afterwards as an adjutant. It was in this latter capacity that John Victor, Sr. recruited and trained new soldiers in Fredericksburg.
     In 1789 John and Sarah Victor moved from Port Royal to Fredericksburg. Here the former cavalryman gave expression to an entirely different set of talents. Victor, by now an accomplished musician, gave lessons in harpsichord, pianoforte, spinet and guitar. He was also a tuner and repairer of these instruments. He was particularly popular for the concerts he performed in Fredericksburg in the early 1800s. John Victor, Sr. died in 1817.
     Jehu Williams and John Victor developed talents of their own, and by 1813 had established themselves in business in Lynchburg. It would be here that Williams & Victor would over the following thirty years achieve a reputation as two of Virginia's most gifted jewelers, silversmiths and clock makers.  An advertisement for their business, seen below, was published in "Image of an Age," The Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, 1963.

   
     Just four months after the appearance of this notice in the Lynchburg newspaper, Jehu Williams married Hettie Row of Orange County on Christmas Day, 1814. Hettie was the youngest daughter of Thomas Row, my third great grandfather. Although her name is spelled variously as either Hetty or Hettie, her parents opted for the second spelling, which appears in the record of her birth in her mother's (Rachel Keeling Row) Book of Common Prayer, shown below. (Incidentally, Jehu's younger brother David married married Hettie's older sister Elizabeth in Orange County in 1817).

Birth record of Hettie Row

     By this time Jesse Williams and the rest of his family had moved from the Fredericksburg area to Kentucky, ultimately settling in Rockcastle County, which had been founded in 1810. Here the old Revolutionary War veteran would spend the rest of his life. On September 29, 1835, at the age of 84, Jesse Williams died after being kicked by a horse he had been trying to shoe. (Many thanks to Dee Blakeley for this detail of his death. Dee is a direct descendant of Jesse Williams and hosts her own family history blog, which is quite good.)
     Jehu's first two children, twins Mary Ann and Sarah Jane, were born on March 3, 1816. Mary Ann lived but three months. Sarah Jane and the other ten children of Jehu Williams would all live to adulthood.
     Over the next seven years Hettie gave birth to three more daughters, the last arriving on February 7, 1823. Hettie died just three weeks later on March 3, the birth date of her twins. Her last daughter, whose photo is seen here, was named Hettie Row Williams in her honor.

Hettie Row Williams (1823-1905)

     Young Hettie's mother, whom she would never know, is buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in Lynchburg (photo by Darrell Landrum):

Hettie Row Williams

     After a decent interval of six months, Jehu Williams married Susannah Sanford Tompkins on September 11, 1823. Susannah was the daughter of Reverend James Tompkins, Lynchburg's first Presbyterian minister, and Mary Hurt. Jehu and Susannah were married by Reverend John Early, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Susannah bore Jehu five more daughters and, at last, two sons. The oldest of these was James Tompkins Williams (1829-1900), named for his grandfather.

James Tompkins Williams

     In 1850 James T. Williams married Martha Jane Row of Spotsylvania, who was a niece of his father's first wife Hettie. While Martha was no blood relation of James, I always thought it curious that, given his matinee idol good looks and mercantile success, he did not cast a wider net in his quest for a wife.

     Jehu Williams and John Victor were both artisans of the first rank and generous contributors of their talents to the Lynchburg community. Williams & Victor silver tableware was much in demand during the first half of the nineteenth century and is still highly collectible today. One of their clocks stands in the reconstructed Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. The mechanisms for their case clocks were imported from England; Jehu and John built the cases. Below are photographs of their handiwork taken by me at the Lynchburg Museum in 2010. The clock has since been relocated to nearby Point of Honor in Lynchburg. The clock I photographed contains the highly accurate Regulator clockworks. This particular clock is believed to have been the shop clock of Williams & Victor and would have been used to set all the other clocks.

Williams & Victor clock, Lynchburg

Williams & Victor silver, Lynchburg Museum

     During his tenure as the mayor of Lynchburg in the 1820s, John Victor engaged the services of Albert Stein, who had built America's first gravity-fed municipal water system in Philadelphia, to design a similar system for Lynchburg. Although the townspeople were shocked by the $50,000 price tag, the system worked as promised when it was completed in 1829.
     During his forty six years in Lynchburg, Jehu Williams also contributed a great deal to the civic life there. He was an ardent Methodist and a member of Court Street Methodist Church. He was president of Lynchburg Savings and helped organize the Lynchburg Hose Company ("Lynchburg and it People," William Asbury Christian, 1900). Jehu was a supporter of the Lynchburg Music Society. And both he and John Victor were members of the Lynchburg Colonization Society in the 1830s. This organization, which had branches throughout the South, proposed sending freed slaves to Liberia as a humane alternative to the unlikelihood of them ever being successfully integrated into white society. This plan, futile though it proved to be, was looked on approvingly by many in the years before the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln.
     Inevitably, the colonization plan proved futile for Jehu Williams personally. In 1850 he owned six slaves, presumably most of whom were servants at his fine brick house at 616 Church Street. The Williams family were accustomed to having household servants and employed them through the generations. After the Civil War Jehu's son James normally had at least four at his home at 822 Federal Street, including Ellen Upshur, an eleven year old girl whom James purchased from his mother in law Nancy Estes Row in 1857 and who remained with the Williams family for many years after Emancipation.
     Jehu Williams continued to ply his trade after the death of his friend and business partner John Victor in 1845. He would one day change the name of his business (located at 8th and Main Streets) to J. Williams & Son when his youngest son, Jehu, Jr. (1834-1906) became old enough to assume some responsibility. With the exception of the time he spent in the Confederate army during the Civil War, the never married younger Jehu Williams worked all his life as a merchant in various enterprises in Lynchburg, and lived for a time at his father's old house on Church Street.

Jehu Williams, Jr. 

     Jehu Williams's second wife Susannah died at the age of forty one on October 7, 1843 "after an illness of only a few hours." Though he would father no more children, the ever vigorous Jehu -at age 59 - married his third wife, Elizabeth J. Robinson, on August 2, 1847.
     Vigorous he may have been, but Jehu Williams was not immortal. His obituary, kept in his family Bible, tells us that: "For a large portion of his life he was permitted to enjoy almost uninterrupted health, but for the last two or three years his naturally strong constitution had been gradually yielding to the hand of disease and for the last six months he had been the subject of the most intense suffering, which he bore with calmest Christian fortitude and resignation.
     "The most untiring and devoted attention of his children and the skill of his attentive physicians could not for a moment arrest the progress of his disease, which continued to invade his system until Thursday evening the 31st day of March [1859] at a quarter past eleven o'clock, death came and terminated his earthly suffering."
     Jehu Williams lies in Spring Hill Cemetery near Hettie. (Photo by Darrell Landrum)

Jehu Williams

    
    

The Taking of Jacob Lyman Greene

Jacob Lyman Greene

     Two years ago I wrote a detailed analysis of the letter written by Maria Dobyns of Oakley plantation in Spotsylvania. Written on June 17, 1864 to my great grand aunt Nannie Row, Maria's letter describes the fighting, suffering and chaos that occurred at Oakley during the battle of the Wilderness. She also mentioned the fact that Nannie's brother, George Washington Estes Row of the 6th Virginia Cavalry, had given her the pocket watch and pen knife of Custer's adjutant.
    
  

George Washington Estes Row, right

    Jacob Lyman Greene, who was also a personal friend of Custer,  was captured at Trevilian Station in Louisa County on June 11, 1864. He was stripped of all his personal belongings, including his flute and spurs (as well as the items taken by Private Row).  Greene was taken to Libby Prison first, and from there spent time as a guest of the Confederacy at several prisons until he was paroled in December 1864.
     After the Civil War Greene served with Custer in Texas. In 1878 he became president of the Connecticut Mutual Insurance Company.
     An excellent biography of Jacob Lyman Greene by Charles Raymond Howard can be read at Uncle Jacob's Civil War.

    

Wilcox & Kinsey

Wilcox & Kinsey, 1870s

     Sometimes something as simple as a business card piques my interest and spurs me to dig a little deeper to see what, if anything, I can learn about persons who are otherwise unknown to me. Among the papers of George Washington Estes Row was today's featured item. [Please note that all images in my blog may be clicked on for enlarged viewing]
     GWE Row operated a large saw mill in Spotsylvania near Todd's Tavern until his untimely death in 1883. It is possible that Row may have supplied lumber to Wilcox & Kinsey, although their names do not appear within his ledgers or among his cancelled checks. Still, he kept this card so I do not rule out a possible business connection.
     Albert Gallatin Wilcox and his family came to Spotsylvania from New York about 1870. He was a "manufacturer of spokes," according to the 1870 census. That same census shows that his neighbor was a fellow New Yorker, Allen Hakes, also a manufacturer of spokes. In 1873 Wilcox was appointed postmaster at Spotsylvania Court House. The Wilcox family did not settle permanently in Spotsylvania, and by the 1880s were living in Hillsborough, Florida, where Albert Wilcox died in 1894.
     Wilcox's partner in this enterprise was Edward Wood Kinsey, born in Chester, Pennsylvania in 1842. Kinsey served in Company A of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War. Like Albert Wilcox, Kinsey moved to Spotsylvania by 1870 and worked for a number of years in Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg as a merchant and grocer. His first wife died in 1883 and he married Henrietta Hall in 1885. That same year he ran afoul of the law by espousing his political views in public without proper clearance from the town fathers. From the Free Lance, dated 15 September 1885:

     Mr. Kinsey divorced wife number two at some point and married Agnes Jennett Morrison Eastburn in Washington, D.C. in 1902. There he made his home for much of the rest of his life. The index to the historical Fredericksburg newspapers shows that in 1924 his grandson Edward Walter Kinsey was selling used cars there.  From selling wagon spokes to automobiles, the business life of the Kinseys seemed to have come full circle.
     Edward Wood Kinsey is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
     Kinsey's son, Fredericksburg auctioneer Nathaniel Bacon Kinsey, was a witness to the will of GWE Row's son, Horace Row (my grandfather) in 1927.

Ancestors at the Museum

Photo courtesy of John Cummings

     Recently Terry Dougherty, director of the Spotsylvania Museum, and museum specialist Liz M. Clayton produced a multi-panel display commemorating the 150th anniversary of the battle of the Wilderness. Included in their presentation is one panel devoted to my ancestors [please click on this image for enhanced viewing].
     Long time readers of Spotsylvania Memory know that I have been an earnest advocate for telling the story of my ancestors, who arrived in Virginia from England in 1621, and describing their place in state and local history. My family is no more or less special than that of anyone else. But because their experience is so well documented, their lives can in many respects be viewed as emblematic of their time and place.
    

"I would charge hell itself"

General John Gregg

     One of the most emotionally charged moments of the Civil War occurred on Widow Tapp's farm on Orange Plank Road during the battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864. Unwisely waiting for the expected arrival of Longstreet's troops, A.P. Hill's soldiers were poorly prepared for the onslaught of the Union forces. The Rebels were thrown into confusion and at just the most crucial moment the Texas Brigade of Longstreet's corps, commanded by former Texas district judge John Gregg, arrived on the scene.
     What occurred next was recorded by Private Robert Campbell of the 5th Texas Infantry:

..."Attention Texas Brigade" was rung upon the morning air, by Gen. Gregg, "the eyes of General Lee are upon you, forward, march." Scarce had we moved a step, when Gen. Lee, in front of the whole command, raised himself in his stirrups, uncovered his grey hairs, and with an earnest, yet anxious voice, exclaimed above the din and confusion of the hour, "Texans always move them."
...never before in my lifetime or since, did I ever witness such a scene as was enacted when Lee pronounced these words, with the appealing look that he gave. A yell rent the air that must have been heard for miles around, and but few eyes in that old brigade of veterans and heroes of many a bloody field was undimmed by honest, heart-felt tears. Leonard Gee, a courier to Gen. Gregg, and riding  by my side, with tears coursing down his cheeks and yells issuing from his throat exclaimed, "I would charge hell itself for that old man." 

     Seeing that General Lee earnestly intended to lead the attack himself, the Texans cried out "Lee to the rear" and "Go back, General Lee, go back." A sergeant took hold of Traveller's bridle and Lee then thought better of his ill-advised intent and rode through the Texans back to the Tapp house. One of the men present that day later wrote: "I thought him at that moment the greatest specimen of manhood I ever beheld. He looked as though he ought to have been, and was, the monarch of the world."

     This drawing of that event was done by artist and former Confederate William Ludwell Sheppard and was published in 1866. It is part of the collection of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

Corporal William White and the Wrong Man

,

Western Spotsylvania County, 1863

     Today's tale comes from the superb Civil War diary of artillerist William S. White, which is included in Contributions to a History of the Third Richmond Howitzer Battalion, published by Carlton McCarthy & Co. in 1883. I heartily recommend to the history enthusiasts out there that they read his diary in its entirety. White fought in twenty one battles, from Bethel Church to Appomattox. His detailed descriptions of those engagements, his depiction of camp life and the articulate manner in which he shares his views make this journal a compelling read. It can be found online here; White's diary begins on page 84. [Please note that all images in my blog may be clicked on for enlarged viewing]
     We will be looking at a three month period of White's experience, which occurred December 1862 to February 1863. Corporal White was assigned by the provost marshal to take charge of the case of fellow soldier John Edwards of Spotsylvania, who had been convicted of desertion in the face of the enemy and was sentenced to be "shot to death by musketry."

Verdict and sentencing of John Edwards

     Corporal White's efforts on Edwards' behalf obliged him to travel on horseback in deep snow through western Spotsylvania, among other places. In the course of his travels he had occasion to spend two nights at Greenfield, the plantation of my great great grandmother, Nancy Estes Row, the only person he knew in Spotsylvania. In the group portrait below, Nancy Row is seated at left next to her daughter Martha Row Williams. Standing behind them are Nancy's daughters Bettie Row Rawlings and Nannie Row.

Nancy Estes Row and her daughters, c. 1870

     William S. White was born in Richmond in 1840, a son of Phillip Barrett White, a merchant in that city. The senior White was raised in Hanover County and was buried at his family's ancestral home there after his death in August 1851. Eleven year old William was then sent to Lexington, Virginia to live with his uncle, Reverend William Spottswood White, pastor of Lexington Presbyterian Church. (After the Civil War Reverend White retired from the ministry and became principal of the Ann Smith Academy, a school for girls attended by my great grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Houston).  Young William White's Sunday school teacher was future Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill, in whose division White served during the Civil War. Hill was an instructor at Washington College 1849-1854.
     In January 1854 White was one of the witnesses to the fatal stabbing of VMI cadet Thomas Blackburn by Washington College law student Charles Burks Christian. The slaying took place across the street from Reverend White's church. This sensational event and the trial that followed are the subjects of the excellent book by my friend Dan Morrow, Murder in Lexington, available from History Press. In October 1862, as fate would have it, Corporal White and his company camped in Clarke County, Virginia on the farm of Dr. Richard Scott Blackburn, the father of the slain cadet.
     Although stricken with illness several times during the war, White was fortunate to avoid being wounded or captured. In 1862, during the battle of Ellerson's mill, White found himself at his family's estate in Hanover County and fought for three hours within a few yards of his father's grave.
     John Edwards, for whose survival Corporal White worked so hard, was a laborer in Spotsylvania as shown on the 1860 census. He was by no means young - he was in his mid fifties - and was described by the provost marshal (to aid in his capture, no doubt) as five feet five inches with a dark complexion, blue eyes and sandy hair. In the map detail presented above, Edwards (whose name does not appear on the map) would have lived north of Todd's Tavern between Catharpin Road and the unfinished railroad.
     Some of the other individuals who appear in White's narrative are:

     -"Mrs. Rowe," my great great grandmother Nancy Estes Row. White knew her thanks to his friendship with Nancy's daughter Martha and her husband James Tompkins Williams, who lived in Richmond 1851-1867. James T. Williams was a partner in the firm of Tardy & Williams, auctioneers and wholesale grocers. Nancy's home, Greenfield, is seen in the lower center of the map as "Mrs. Rowe."

     -William A. Stephens and Joseph Trigg, neighbors of Nancy Estes Row. Their farms are shown on the map north of the Row place, adjacent to the unfinished railroad.

     -Leroy Wonderful Dobyns (yes, that was his real name) was the owner of Oakley, the farm immediately south of Greenfield. His home was the scene of chaos and violence during the battle of the Wilderness, as described in a well known letter by his daughter Maria.
 
     -Robert C. Dabney, Spotsylvania clerk of court. During the war he buried the county's records, thereby saving them from being destroyed by rampaging Federal troops.

     -William Stone Barton was an attorney and ardent secessionist in Fredericksburg before the war. He served as a major in the 30th Virginia Infantry before becoming judge advocate of the Confederate army. After the war Barton was judge of the 10th Circuit (where he heard a number of cases relating to my family) and Assistant Court of Appeals.

     I cannot improve upon the quality of William S. White's prose, so I will allow him to tell his tale in his own words:

                                             Jan 31

                                                                    

     The John Edwards that Major Barton knew was John B. Edwards, a musician in Company A, 30th Virginia Infantry. This John Edwards did indeed serve in the Mexican War.

Greenfield and the Battle of the Wilderness

Nancy Estes Row and her daughters. Lynchburg, about 1870.

     Although my ancestors would have likely disagreed with me, the Rows of Greenfield plantation may have been among the most fortunate of western Spotsylvania's inhabitants during the spring of 1864. During the battle of the Wilderness and the Overland Campaign that followed, many of their neighbors suffered from hunger, terror, privation, imprisonment and a permanent diminution of their financial security. By a happy confluence of circumstance and geography, the Rows managed to avoid the most serious of these consequences of the Civil War on the civilian population. 
     A daughter of Richard Estes and Catherine Carlton, Nancy Estes Row lived at Greenfield virtually her entire life. In the photograph above she is shown wearing a mob cap and sitting next to her oldest daughter Martha Row Williams. During the war Martha lived in Richmond with her husband James Tompkins Williams, a partner in the wholesale grocery and auction house of Tardy & Williams. Standing behind Nancy and Martha are Bettie Row Rawlings and Nan Row (known affectionately to the family as Nannie, she remained unmarried all her life).
   

Western Spotsylvania, 1863

     Greenfield, a sprawling 889 acre farm, extended northwest from Brock Road towards Orange Plank Road. In the detail of the wartime map shown above, Greenfield can be seen in the middle of the image where "Mrs. Rowe" is indicated. That portion of Greenfield which included the family home, the slave cabins and other dependencies (site of the present day subdivision of Fawn Lake) was situated far enough from Orange Plank Road and Brock Road so that it was not the focus of the most intense fighting which occurred during the battles of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness.

Sketch of Greenfield by Roger Mansfield

Map of Greenfield area by Roger Mansfield

     On May 2, 1863 Stonewall Jackson led his Second Corps on a circuitous march which culminated in the successful ambush of the Union Army's exposed right flank near Wilderness Church. A portion of this march was made on a narrow farm road that began on Brock Road near Todd's Tavern and meandered to the north until it came out on Brock Road once again near its intersection near Orange Plank Road. A section of this farm road, known today as Jackson Trail West, traversed the Row farm. In 1936 my grandfather donated to the National Park Service the section of that road that had once been part of old Greenfield.

Bettie Row Rawlings

     Bettie, the youngest daughter of Nancy Estes Row, married neighbor Zachary Herndon Rawlings in a ceremony at Greenfield in November 1860 conducted by Zachary's uncle Reverend Herndon Frazer. Zachary was one of five children born to Ann Cason and James Boswell Rawlings  of Green Hill near Shady Grove Church, seen at the lower center of the Spotsylvania map above and indicated as "Rawlings." James B. Rawlings, a large powerful man, was a farmer, slave owner, justice of the peace, miller, gold miner and a gambler whose intemperate habits caused occasional difficulties with the law.

Benjamin Cason Rawlings

     After the election of Abraham Lincoln, talk of secession and war dominated the news and the thoughts of millions of Americans. This historic tumult made a special impression upon young Benjamin Rawlings, the second son of James B. Rawlings. During Christmas 1860 Ben, still two weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, secretly absconded from his parents' home and made his way by rail and on foot to Charleston in order to be at the center of the southern rebellion. There he joined Maxcy Gregg's regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, thereby becoming the first Virginian to join the Confederate Army.
     Soon after Virginia's secession, Maxcy Gregg's regiment came to Virginia to aid in the defense of Richmond, the Confederacy's new capital. At the urging of his father, Ben transferred to a unit nearer home, Company D of the Thirtieth Virginia Infantry. Ben's brother Zachary enlisted in Company A of the same regiment.
     The following year Ben and Zachary fought at the battle of Antietam where Zachary was wounded, thus ending his career as a soldier. After his convalescence Zachary Rawlings helped both his parents and Nancy and Nan Row and he also provided livestock and fodder to the Confederate Army. In the meantime, most of the slaves belonging to Nancy Estes Row escaped to freedom, leaving only a small handful of servants who faithfully remained behind.

Letter of Ben Rawlings, 1 March 1864

     In late November 1863 eighteen year old Benjamin Rawlings, now captain of Company D, was captured by Union forces which had surrounded his parents' house. So began Ben's dreary eleven month incarceration in a series of Federal prisons. By late winter of 1864 Captain Rawlings was confined at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he wrote a letter to his mother on March 1. He asked her to send greenbacks and chewing tobacco, both of which could be exchanged for better food. He concluded his letter by issuing this stark warning to her and his father:

     You should be careful not to allow yourselves to become in contact with the yankee army on its next advance. Save what you can. Fall back with the negroes.

     By the time Ann Rawlings received this letter, Generals Grant and Meade had already assembled a huge army just north of the Rapidan River. This blue host was poised to strike into northwestern Spotsylvania County in early spring 1864, as soon as the roads became passable. The Rawlingses of Green Hill and the Rows of Greenfield took heed of Ben's advice and laid plans to escape the inevitable onslaught.
     At some time before the Union juggernaut surged south in May 1864 the Row and Rawlings families prepared to leave and head south to the relative safety of southern Goochland County:

     Family valuables were buried, and the horses were hidden in the woods. The plantation mules were fastened in the corral. Federal troops attempted to capture these, but they became frightened and escaped. It was weeks before they were all rounded up and returned. The plantation was looted, but the residence was spared. (From Roger Mansfield's history of Greenfield)

Southern Goochland County

     By now the owners of Greenfield and Green Hill had fled to the tiny crossroads hamlet of Hadensville in Goochland (at the center of the image above), located on the Three Chopt Road, which ran from Richmond to the Shenandoah Valley (the road was so named for the distinctive notches cut into the trees when the trail was blazed in colonial times). Nancy and Nan Row, Bettie and Zachary Rawlings and their young daughter Estelle, James Boswell and Ann Rawlings and their youngest son James (future merchant and postmaster in Fredericksburg), together with a small retinue of slaves, had loaded onto wagons and carts those possessions which they could take with them and trundled south to Hadensville. Here they would live as refugees for most of the remaining months of the Civil War.
     Meanwhile, fighting raged near Greenfield as Confederate and Union troops fought for the intersection of Orange Plank and Brock Roads. Elements of Stuart's Horse Artillery fought at Greenfield:

Friday [May] 6
     Reveille early this A.M. Heard heavy firing on our left, indicating that a great struggle had commenced between Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. We were ordered up to the front. Filing left, took the Catharpin Road. Crossed the River Po. Filed to the left through the farm of Leroy Dobbins, then filed right again crossing the Po and through to Mrs. Rowe's farm. Here met with many of our wounded cavalry fighting against as great odds as yesterday.
     Our battery was soon in position and commenced firing on the enemy, their artillery returning the fire. We were too much annoyed by sharpshooters. Heavy firing on both sides was kept up till near midnight. Our ammunition giving out, we fell back to replenish which was quickly done. We, however, did not renew the fight. The enemy making no advance we parked for the night on the farm of Mrs. Rowe.
     Our casualties today were very severe. Killed, Parson W. Crouch. Wounded, Corporals John Cary and George W. McDonell. Privates James A. Musgrove, Samuel T. Preston, George Stump and Joseph H. Torrence. Also James A. Cobbs and Robert W. Irving, but so slightly they did not leave the field. 
     We also had many horses killed and wounded and among them my own, which was wounded in the face as I sat on him. A few inches to the right or left and I might have been severely wounded in the leg. I had rather a a singular experience in today's fight. While First or Orderly Sergeant I was always at the head of the battery and was foremost, generally, in all fights, but after receiving the appointment of Lieut. had charge of the caissons of ammunition which in battle were kept in the rear. Today was my first experience in the rear and having always been in front, had much curiosity to know how I would feel and what would be the results of my rear experience. The above shows the killing of one and the wounding of eight of my men at the caissons, the wounding of my horse and a minnie ball striking my clothes. While at the front no one was hurt.
     Our army in this day's contest was very successful.
["Memoirs of the Stuart Horse Artillery: Moorman's and Hart's Batteries. Edited by Robert J. Trout. From the diary of Lewis Tune Nunnelee]

Nan Row

     A month after the battle of the Wilderness, Maria Dobyns - a daughter of the Leroy Dobbins mentioned above - wrote a letter to Nan Row describing the chaos and terror that had occurred at Oakley, the farm adjacent to and south of  Greenfield. Maria affirmed the wisdom of the Rows' decision to be absent from the violence:

     A long, long time has elapsed since I heard from you, and no doubt you are anxious to hear from your friends in Spotsylvania. Many changes have taken place since you left us, and I really think you should feel that it was an interposition of Providence which caused you to leave when you did - for had you remained here no doubt you would be as most of us are now.

George Washington Estes Row (right)

     Still six weeks shy of his twenty first birthday at the time of the Wilderness fight, George Washington Estes Row - Nan's younger brother - was a private in the Sixth Virginia Cavalry. The Sixth was part of the brigade of General Lunsford Lomax , for whom George Row served as a courier. Since he left behind no diary of his wartime experiences, I have often pondered what his feelings were as he was called upon to fight - almost literally- in his own backyard. What is known, however, is that George captured a memorandum book from a trooper of the Fifth New York Cavalry, in which was described the opening phases of the battle of the Wilderness and the fighting that continued for several weeks thereafter. Moreover, in the same letter written to his sister Nan, Maria Dobyns remarked:

     George was here last Wednesday. He was looking very well. His brigade was then at Waller's Tavern. Miss Nanny, when you write or speak to him about religion he seems very much concerned indeed, and from his conversation I trust he is a converted boy. He gave me a pen knife he captured together with a watch from Gen. Custer's Adj. General.

     For those of you who may be interested, I have written detailed accounts of well documented raids on four farms in Spotsylvania and Orange: Oakley, Walnut Grove, The Oaks and Ellwood.