Wilderness Battlefield: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Auwaerter, John; Mealey, James

Wilderness Battlefield is part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (NMP), located in northeastern Virginia halfway between Washington D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. Covering over 7,000 acres, the park was designated by Congress in 1927 as a national military park for the purpose of preserving and commemorating the Civil War battles of Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania Court House, Wilderness, and Chancellorsville. Seven distinct, noncontiguous landscape units compose the park’s landholdings. Wilderness Battlefield, the westernmost and most expansive unit, stretches across more than 2,800 acres of federal land. For more than two days, from May 5–7, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant led the Army of the Potomac through the heart of the Wilderness, marking the beginning of the Overland Campaign that led to Confederate surrender eleven months later. Union forces clashed with General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the difficult, dense, and confusing terrain of the Wilderness. The fighting was a tactical stalemate, but a strategic victory allowed the Union army to continue advancing south. After the war, the rural community rebuilt and interest slowly rose in commemorating the 1864 battle, culminating in the park’s establishment, which was initially administered and developed by the U.S. War Department and then transferred in 1933 to civilian administration of the National Park Service (NPS). Preservation of narrow tracts along the key defensive lines was expanded during the second half of the twentieth century to preserve more of the battlefield and interpret the significant events of 1864. This shift in preservation strategy came in response to the encroachment of suburban housing developments which began to alter the once remote and sparsely settled character of the Wilderness. The battlefield landscape today is characterized by fields, woods, and rolling terrain. The historic rural and wooded character remains largely intact within park boundaries, but the woods are generally more mature than they were in 1864, when dense second-growth made for especially difficult fighting conditions. Within the northern sector of the battlefield is Ellwood, once an extensive plantation that today contains the only standing antebellum building within Wilderness Battlefield. Ellwood was ringed by several smaller farm clearings, including Saunders Field, the Higgerson Farm, Jones Field, Chewning Farm, and the Tapp Farm (also known as Tapp Field). Most of the woods south and east of Ellwood were part of the 4,648-acre Catharine Furnace Company Property that extended east to Chancellorsville. Although the park preserves large areas of the battlefield, most of the core between the Confederate and Union lines from Route 20 to south of Orange Plank Road has been lost to suburban development. Areas along Brock Road and north of the park have also been developed. The historic designed park landscape, developed between ca. 1891 and 1940 with later additions through the mid-1960s, is an overlay on the battlefield landscape, primarily at the so-called Monument Lot along Orange Plank Road—the earliest commemorative landscape in the Wilderness—and along Hill-Ewell Drive, completed in 1935 and named to commemorate two Confederate commanders. Longstreet Drive, also completed in 1935 and named after another Confederate commander, has been incorporated into a residential subdivision. The park landscape features stone bridges and culverts, mown road shoulders, metal identification tablets, specimen trees, remnants of earthworks, and reproduction artillery. The park’s eleven commemorative works (monuments, markers) are along the park drives, in the Monument Lot, at Ellwood, and along Orange Plank Road, Brock Road, and Constitution Highway (Route 20). Trails, once named to commemorate other key figures in the battle, also contain remnants of their original rustic design completed in the 1930s.

Wilderness Battlefield: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Series

Collections