Belle Grove After the Split

Hat tip to reader Stu Younkin for bringing this to my attention….

From today’s issue of the Winchester Star newspaper:

Belle Grove soldiers on after Cedar Creek split
By Jason Kane
The Winchester Star

Middletown — For the first time in decades, Belle Grove Plantation commemorated the Civil War alone.

The entirety of this year’s Battle of Cedar Creek re-enactment took place on the adjoining Civil War Battlefield south of Middletown, leaving Belle Grove visitors to contemplate gentler things.

A league of women in hoop skirts told guests about everything from Civil War food rations to parlor games Sunday as the sounds of musket fire and cannon blasts echoed from the battlefield next door.

The separate events stemmed from a disagreement in June between Belle Grove Inc. and the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation over the expansion of a quarry near the 18th century plantation and the adjoining battlefield.

Elizabeth McClung, executive director of Belle Grove, said of this weekend’s divided festivities, “We don’t really see it as separate, but complimentary events. They provide battle re-enactment and we provide the social history.

“Both are windows into the past. People come here to have more of a low-key experience.”

In addition to a wreath-laying ceremony Sunday afternoon in honor of all those affected by the battle on Oct. 19, 1864, the mansion brought in the Frederick [Md.] Ladies Relief Society, a Civil War-based living history organization, to give tours of the plantation house turned museum.

On Saturday and Sunday, people from all over the United States, including California, Michigan, Texas, and Washington state, drove up the plantation’s long entrance.

Rather than hearing a litany of battle names and war-related dates, visitors instead learned of the Cooley family, which lived in the plantation house when the battle broke out in 1864.

Many civilians starved in those years, but not the Cooleys, who probably would have been “comfortable” during the war, said Marty Riddell, vice chairwoman of FLRS. They had money, she said, and were able to continue raising livestock and growing vegetables in their garden.

Still, they weren’t immune to the common inconveniences of the times, Riddell said.

Cut off from drinks like coffee, the Cooleys probably made a substitute concoction composed of sweet potatoes and dried chicory. Black molasses made a nice fill-in for sugar, and if the family wanted salt, they probably scraped it off the ground of their smokehouse.

Riddell has been participating in the Belle Grove battle commemoration for the past 10 years, and said the crowd this year was particularly sparse.

“I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the economy,” she said.

Attendance figures were not available Sunday, McClung said.

In one of the mansion’s rooms, Tammy Strickland and Breanne Lamb sat in hoop skirts, showing visitors a sampling of war-time games from the 1860s including a board game similar to Chutes and Ladders. A “gentleman’s only” game drilled young boys on morality by illustrating “scenes from the life of a country gentleman.”

Visitors learned how to produce fine lacewear through needlework and knitting — which continued to be the vogue throughout the war, even as entire cities were reduced to rubble.

Another guide told of how the Cooleys moved to safer ground when the bullets began to fly around the mansion on Oct. 19, 1864. A few stayed behind, as was the tradition, to “make sure that not too much walked away” in the hands of soldiers, said Larry Keener-Farley.

Several shots hit the front of the plantation house in the rain of gunfire, but “if a [mortar] shell would have come in and exploded, the damage and the resulting fire could have destroyed the house,” Keener-Farley said.

He loves to tell visitors about Confederate Maj. Gen. Stephen D. Ramseur’s death in the mansion.

During the Battle of Cedar Creek, he had been wounded once and had two horses shot from beneath him, but he still rallied his men. He was wounded in both lungs and died the next day.

After he took his last breath, Union officers visited Ramseur’s body in Belle Grove’s library.

“They were killing each other during the day, but when the battle was over, they would stop to honor a gallant foe,” Keener-Farley said.

Dave Lamb, an archaeologist from Des Moines, Iowa, stopped to visit the plantation during a pilgrimage to Middletown.

Since he was a little boy, Lamb had been hearing stories about his great-grandfather being captured at the Battle of Cedar Creek and taken to a Confederate prison camp outside of Savannah, Ga.

The long wait to visit the battlefield was worth it, he said. “From a preservation standpoint, this is tremendous.”

In the front yard of Belle Grove, a group of soldiers lounged and laughed, playing fiddle music and singing. The scene mimicked a picture of war-time Belle Grove, minus the battle.

That this sort of thing happened at all is a tragedy, but not so much of a tragedy as a stewardship organization that abrogated its sacred duty, all for eight lousy acres.

And my guess is that attendance was down at the Foundation’s event because people heeded the call to boycott an organization that would sell its soul to the devil for eight acres. I’m glad people stayed away. Maybe, just maybe, the Foundation will get the message that it screwed up in epic terms. At least I hope so.