Richmond Hospitals 1861-1865

 Richmond became a major hospital center during the Civil War.  The Moore Hospital is seen below.  Running a hospital presented many challenges, none more challenging than obtaining supplies.  When the Civil War began, the Federal government cut off sales of medical supplies to the Confederacy. Unable to import enough medical supplies, the South began manufacturing medicines from its own native plants.

 

Chimborazo Hospital, Richmond, Va., April, 1865 (seen below) was the largest Confederate hospital.  With over five thousand beds in 150 buildings and tents, Chimborazo Hospital treated over 77,000 patients during the war.  The hospital relied on male slaves rented from local plantation owners to serve as nurses.

Women Doctors in the Civil War

Treasure Legends of Virginia

Richmond Offices of the Confederate Government 1861-1865

 The Custom House, the first Federal building ever built in Richmond is seen below.  This building provided offices for Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other executive staff, including the Confederate Treasury Department. At the end of the Civil War, the Richmond evacuation fire of 1865 left much of Richmond in ruins.

The view from the south side of Canal Basin is seen below, showing the Capitol, the Custom House and other structures after the fire of April, 1865.

The Custom House is seen below. With its stout granite walls and inflammable roof, the building survived the fire. In 1866, the Grand Jury of the United States District Court met on the third floor and indicted Jefferson Davis for treason. Davis was granted amnesty and never stood trial.

The Civil War Wedding

Civil War Humor 1861-1865

Woodrow Wilson's "Beast"

 

 

At the Woodrow Wilson Museum, Staunton, Virginia

Woodrow Wilson returned from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be greeted by cheering crowds and this gleaming new Pierce-Arrow limousine.

Leased by the U.S. Government, this car quickly became the President’s favorite. One of the finest luxury cars of the day, Pierce-Arrow sold cars to the Emperor of Japan, the Shah of Persia, the King of Greece and royalty throughout Europe and the Middle East.  The company was often referred to as “the American Rolls-Royce.”

When Wilson left office, five of his wealthy Princeton classmates bought the car and presented it as a gift to the ex-president.  Although the first president to join the American Automobile Association (AAA), Wilson never had a driver’s license.  His wife Edith, however, owned and drove her own electric car.

Edith Wilson and her electric car

The Gilded Age and Revolution

U.S. Intervention in Latin America 1898-1948

The Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond (1861-1865)

 

Once Virginia seceded, the Confederate government moved the capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond, Virginia.  Richmond was the South’s second largest city with a population of 40,000 (this tripled in the war years). The move served to solidify the state of Virginia’s position in the Confederacy. Virginia’s hundreds of factories, whose output nearly equaled that of the rest of the Confederacy, were vital to the new nation.

 

Richmond 1861-1865

Richmond was the iron and coal center of the South.  The Tredegar Iron works  manufactured a diverse array of products, including cannon and ordnance for the Confederate government.  Tredegar produced more than 1,000 cannons for the Confederacy.  It also made armor plating for use on Confederate ironclad warships.

The Tredegar Iron Works

                                                   Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

The 1865 Fall of Richmond in Pictures

Martha Washington: the First Lady of Fashion

                                                                      

Martha Washington

We don’t generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista.  She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frumpy, dumpy, plump, double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard type.  There may be more design than accident in this portrayal of Martha Washington and the women of the Revolutionary War generation (‘The Founding Mothers”).  The new Republic needed to make a clean break with the aristocratic ways of Europe and completely embrace simple republican virtues.  Both George and Martha Washington were transformed by generations of historians into marble figures of rectitude whose dignity and decorum fostered a sense of legitimacy for the new country.

At the time of her marriage to George Washington in 1759, Martha was 27 and George was twenty six.  Martha was one of the wealthiest women in Virginia, having inherited five plantations when her first husband died.  She was a bit of a clothes horse.  Then, as now, if you had wealth you flaunted it, making sure you had the best clothes ordered from London in the deepest, richest colors.  Such colors set the upper classes apart from poorer classes who wore drab homespun clothes in browns, beiges and tans. A woman from a wealthy family in Virginia in the 1770s could have worn a silk gown from China, linen from Holland, and footwear from England.

Tucked away in the recesses of Mount Vernon’s archival vaults is a pair of avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that Martha wore on the day of her wedding to George Washington.  Emily Shapiro, curator at Mount Vernon, describes the shoes as a little sassy and definitely “Over the top for the time….”

How Martha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs 

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington House

    George Washington Parke Custis, aged three, inherited eleven hundred acres of land overlooking the Potomac River, when his father, the stepson of General George Washington, died in 1781.  Young “Wash” and his sister “Nelly” were raised at Mount Vernon by George and Martha Washington.  Upon reaching legal age in 1802, the young man began building a lavish house on a high hill overlooking the Potomac which was to be not only his house but a living memorial to George Washington (who died in 1799).  Originally the name “Mount Washington” was considered for the house, but in the end it was named after the Custis family estate in the Virginia tidewater area and became known as “Arlington House”.  The house took sixteen years to complete.

    Custis married and had one daughter, Mary.  Mary Custis, one of wealthiest heiresses in Virginia, fell in love with a penniless soldier, Robert E. Lee.  Although Lee came from a prominent family, at the time of his birth there was no family fortune left.  Lee had only his army pay and his person to offer a bride.  One afternoon, while taking a break from reading aloud from a novel by Sir Walter Scott, Lee proposed to Mary.  Mary’s father reluctantly agreed to the marriage.

     In 1857 Custis died.  His will allowed Mary to live in and control Arlington House for the duration of her life, at which point the house would pass to her eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee.  Mary and Robert E. Lee lived in Arlington House until 1861 when Virginia seceded from the Union and Lee went south to join the Confederate army.

     Union troops moved into Virginia in May, 1861, immediately taking up positions around Arlington House.  Two forts were built on the estate including Fort Whipple (now Fort Myer) and Fort McPherson.  The property was confiscated by the federal government when property taxes were not paid in person by Mrs. Lee. The property was offered for public sale Jan. 11, 1864, and was purchased by a tax commissioner for "government use, for war, military, charitable and educational purposes." More than 1,100 freed slaves were given land around the house, where they farmed and lived during and after the Civil War.                                           

     At this point Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs, commander of the garrison at Arlington House (and Quartermaster General of the Union Army) enters the picture.  Meigs and Lee had served together many years earlier as military engineers on the Mississippi River.  Lee was a 1^st Lieutenant and Meigs his subordinate, a 2^nd Lieutenant.  Did Meigs bear Lee a personal grudge?  Some historians think so, or perhaps he was just embittered by the war itself, or by Lee’s defection from the Union army.  In any event, tasked with finding additional burial grounds for battle casualties, on June 15, 1864, Meigs wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that “the grounds about the mansion are admirably suited to such a use.” Meigs himself reported his “grim satisfaction” of ordering twenty six Union dead to be buried near Mrs. Lee’s rose garden in June, 1864.  Meigs had graves dug right up to the entrance to the house.  The entire Rose Garden was dug up and the remains of some 1800 soldiers recovered from the Manassas Battlefields buried there in a huge burial vault.  Such an unusual positioning of graves was malicious.  Meigs intention appeared to be to prevent the Lee family from ever again inhabiting the house.  By the time the Civil War ended, more than 16,000 Union soldiers were buried on the grounds of the estate.  Ironically, Meig’s own son, John,  was killed in October 1864 and sent to Arlington Cemetery for burial.  

   The Grave of John Meigs      

Neither Robert E. Lee nor his wife ever set foot in Arlington House again. General Lee died in 1870.  Mary Custis Lee visited the grounds shortly before her death in 1873, but was overcome by emotion and unable to go inside the house.  After the death of his parents, George Washington Custis Lee claimed that the house and land had been illegally confiscated and that, according to his grandfather's will, he was the legal owner. In December 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, returned the property to George Washington Custis Lee, stating that it had been confiscated without due process.

Would the dead have to be transferred to a new site?  General Lee's son diffused the crisis by selling the house and land to the government for its’ fair market value.

The 1865 Fall of Richmond in Pictures

Virginia and the Dirigibles

Dirigible

Under the heading, “What might have been”, it should be noted that one bold entrepreneur once had the dream of bringing the largest airport in the world to Northern Virginia.  In the late 1920s, Henry Woodhouse purchased 1,500 acres in Fairfax County’s Hybla Valley, with the dream of converting the existing dairy farms into the "George Washington Air Junction".  Woodhouse was convinced that Zeppelins were the future of aviation, and conceived of gigantic runways and mooring fields to accommodate trans-Atlantic Zeppelin flights.  An article in the March 3, 1938 issue of the Herald Times proclaimed, “Hybla Valley, flat as a table and 3,800 acres in extent, lies 3 miles south of Alexandria, flanked by U.S. Highway #1.  On it could be located the largest runways in the world, and it could be converted into the largest airport in the world.”  Nothing came of the plan, and not a single aircraft ever operated from the site.  Woodhouse succumbed to his creditors, and the land was eventually purchased by the government in 1941 for use by the military.  In 1975 the land was sold to Fairfax County for $1 to be used "exclusively for public park or public recreation purposes in perpetuity”.  The land is now known as Huntley Meadows Park.

Hidden History of Northern Virginia