“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word…

—William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust on Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg

One cannot spend any fair amount of time in Virginia without some echoes of the Civil War resonating through their conscious.  I am not what Faulkner would call a Southern boy, but after having lived in Virginia for over thirty years, I have begun to understand what that period of time means to those who were born and raised as descendants of that seminal event.  And the inescapable truth is that if you live here, you are surrounded by it, no matter where you go or how much the landscape has changed since those four years in the early 1860s.

Thankfully, both public and private groups have had much success in a second, more protracted battle to preserve and protect many of the sites where significant events took place.  It is one thing to read about the battles, it is quite another to walk their fields, measure the terrain, feel the sun or the rain, and share a common ground with those who were there when it mattered most.

One of the best examples of this can be found at the Manassas National Battlefield Park, a 5,000 acre piece of history located just north of Route 66 along the Sudley Road.  Besides, offering ample opportunity for hiking along its many trails, the park embraces the main battlefields for two key conflicts of the war: the Battles of First and Second Manassas.  The first battle holds more interest for me: this is where it started, where all the grand illusions held by both sides of a quick, glorious, and honorable victory were left scattered on the battlefield along with its almost 3,500 killed or wounded.

My most recent visit to the Park was only a few weeks ago, just as the weather was turning warm and the trees were starting to fill out.  My niece was going to visit the battlefield as part of a school project, and her mom called and asked if I wanted to tag along.  Jumping at the chance, I spent no small part of that afternoon, walking with them around the park, likely boring the poor girl and her mother with minutiae on the evils of leaving ones flanks hanging in the air or of the confusion of a smoky battlefield crowded with two armies that had not yet agreed what uniforms and flags would be used to tell the two apart.

But it was during the guided tour when I realized exactly how much this war is still with us, and that it’s not a dead issue, but one that still invites opinions to be shared or perhaps even spark battles of their own.  In the course of our tour, the guide centered her discussion on Thomas, ’Stonewall’, Jackson, the storied Confederate general who earned his famous nickname on Henry House Hill that day for standing firm on the face of particularly vicious Union artillery.  As an aside to the drama of that day, she told us that Jackson, a bigger than life character with a string of quirky traits, liked to suck lemons, and he was often seen riding around his troops with a fresh lemon in his hand.

As one who has read a bit on the Civil War, my first impulse was to pipe up and tell her that the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson was a professor prior to the war, emphatically rejects this so-called lemon myth—and offers up instead that although he enjoyed almost every variety of fruit, Jackson had no special fondness for lemons; in fact, peaches were his favorite.  But for once, I keep quiet: she was the park ranger in charge and it was her tour.  Maybe next time.

So after, almost 150 years, there are issues with the Civil War—some great and some, maybe, not so great—that continue to generate controversy and discussion, but that can serve sometimes to bring people and their ideas closer together.  And that while its most hallowed grounds provide ample opportunity to walk, explore, and appreciate large, unspoiled parts of Virginia, they can also challenging us to imagine what it might have been like to have been in these important places during one of the most critical times in US history.

In this part of Virginia, such parks and preserves are everywhere, scattered sometimes in the most unlikely places, but each filled with history; all you have to do is look, or ask.  Someone within earshot is bound to know something interesting.

If you would like to know a bit more about the Civil War before strapping on the hiking shoes, a great place to start is James M. McPherson’s Pulitzer-winning book, Battle Cry of Freedom, although some may say that it has a decidedly ‘Yankee’ flavor to it.  For me, Shelby Foote’s expansive three volume The Civil War: A Narrative, continues to be the definitive treatment of the War Between the States while standing toe to toe with the best that classic Southern literature has to offer.

Henry House in the distance at the far right—site of some of the days fiercest fighting—as seen from the Visitors Center