Brawner Farm, Manassas National Battlefield Park Cultural Landscape Report

Early, Judith; Fanning, Kay

For nearly two hundred years, the Brawner Farm has been an unremarkable property. In the nineteenth century, it lay north of the Warrenton Turnpike (Route 29), situated between the towns of Centreville and Gainesville, near the hamlets of Groveton and Sudley. The land once owned by Robert “King” Carter passed to his heirs and then to a farmer, George Tennille, who built an imposing house on a prominent ridge. Tennille’s relatively early death led to its occupation by tenant farmer John Brawner. Accidents of topography and proximity to key settlements and other man-made features caused the farm to be the locus of the opening engagement of a major Civil War battle. Though his tenure there was relatively short, John Brawner happened to be occupying the farm in August 1862, during the brief but intense opening conflict of the Second Battle of Manassas and the ensuing struggles of the following two days. And thus Brawner’s name has become linked to a farm he never owned and to a house that it now appears he never occupied. Writing a Cultural Landscape Report on the Brawner Farm presented an unusual challenge. For two hundred years, with the exception of three violent days, nothing much happened there. Bachelor’s Hall, Tennille’s early nineteenth-century manor house, and the structures that accompanied it are long gone. The remnants of other outbuildings are scant. The Tennille, Douglas, Brawner, and Davis families left few traces on their land or in the public record. Descendants have been difficult to track. There are no historic photographs of the property. The small number of existing historic maps, survey notes, and descriptions record only certain aspects of the site as it appeared on a very few days in 1862 and 1875. The CLR team was left with having to piece together the story of the farm’s two-hundred years of occupation by drawing inferences from studies of other farms in Manassas National Battlefield Park, battle accounts, and the traces continuous farming has left on the land – fencelines, piles of stone, ridges along field edges. The Brawner Farm Cultural Landscape Report was written over a period of four years. Research began in 2001 and continued through 2002. Several matters then arose which temporarily put completion of the project on hold. Questions about the provenance of the farmhouse led to the development of an intensive Historic Structures Report. Discussions ensued about the future use of the site, and the decision to develop it as a Visitor Contact Station. Resolution of these matters gave the authors direction to follow in development of the preferred treatment alternative. This treatment presents the house as the place from which visitors will begin their exploration of the Second Battle of Manassas battlefield.

Brawner Farm, Manassas National Battlefield Park Cultural Landscape Report

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