Ellwood: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park
Commisso M. 2025. Ellwood: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Cultural Landscapes Inventory Report. 300177. National Park Service. NPS Northeast Regional Office, Boston, Massachusetts / CRIS-CL Database
Ellwood, a modest Virginia plantation founded in the late eighteenth century, is a rural landscape of approximately 177 acres with a Federal-period house facing east across rolling farm fields framed by woods. Located near a historic crossroads, the quiet Ellwood of today was the scene of significant action during the Civil War, including use as a Confederate field hospital during and after the Battle of Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, and as Federal headquarters a year later in the Battle of the Wilderness. A small granite monument in the Ellwood cemetery, in a field south of the house, marks the place where the amputated arm of General Stonewall Jackson was buried following his wounding at Chancellorsville. The house, fields, cemetery, and some of the roads that existed at the time of the Civil War are still extant and continue to evoke its significant role in the Civil War despite a century and a half of change. Ellwood became part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park over time in the 1970s. With the restored exterior of its late eighteenth-century house and the surrounding farm fields, Ellwood today preserves a rural landscape that dates back to the Civil War and settlement of the Wilderness nearly a century earlier. In addition to its Civil War connections, the landscape contains many traces of its long domestic and agricultural use, including its most recent operation as a livestock farm in the twentieth century. The site also reflects the park’s efforts over the past three decades to remove post-Civil War features from the landscape and maintain the historic agricultural use of the fields. The park has not attempted to restore landscape features that have been lost since the Civil War, such as barns, slave quarters, and gardens. Ellwood is a part of the Wilderness Battlefield but is outside of the park tour route, and it has limited public access or connection to adjoining park lands. The visitor experience of the historic landscape is limited by entrance through a non-historic drive and by successional woods that have blocked views and altered field patterns.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Commisso, Michael
- Date of Issue
- 2025
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- FRSP , NER
- Keywords
- Agriculture, Alexander Spotswood, amputation, Architecture, Battle of Chancellorsville, Battle of the Wilderness, Battle Site, Battlefield Preservation, cemetery, Churchill Jones, Civil War, Commemorative Property, Confederate Field Hospital, Crossroads, Federal-period, General Stonewall Jackson, Georgian (1730-1780), headquarters, historic site, Livestock, Manahoac, Military, monument, plantation, rural landscape, Slave Quarters, Vernacular Landscape, Virginia, Wilderness Tavern, William Jones