tl;dr—To the south and west of the Difficult Run Basin, a belt of Mosby men and sympathizers owned large tracts of land with ideal terrain features for guerrilla warfare
The doctrine of any successful guerrilla war has two important preconditions: an unwieldy aspect of landform and the proverbial hearts and minds of those who occupy it.
Mosby found both in Fairfax County, Virginia.
In his memoirs, the celebrated partisan illuminated the methodology he brought to the field.
“Recruits came to us from inside the enemy’s lines, and they brought valuable information. Then, I had picketed for some time in Fairfax the year before and had acquired considerable local knowledge..we began operations on the outposts of Fairfax. The weak points were generally selected for attack.”1
These local recruits and their supportive families never disappointed Mosby. After the war, he gushed about the heroic quality of their devotion.
“Although that region (northern Virginia) was the Flanders of the war, and harried worse than any of which history furnishes an example since the desolation of the Palatinates by Louis XIV, yet the stubborn faith of the people never wavered. Amid fire and sword they remained true to the last, and supported me through all the trials of the war.”2
These are deeply felt, but politically-worded hints at Mosby’s fighting doctrine. Like a newly-elected president thanking his many donors for their contributions without specifying what those donations were and why they were offered, Mosby accounts for his successes with respectful ambiguity.
We’re left to cobble together a specific portrait of Mosby fighting methodology in Fairfax County from various and sundry shards left littered about the historic record.
In his Reminiscences, Mosby bemoaned the fine quality of the rolling hill landscape of Fauquier and Loudoun Counties because “there was no such shelter there as Marion had in the swamps of the Pedee.”3
Mosby hungered for the marshy lowlands and thick timber that shielded his idol, the Swamp Fox—Francis Marion, from the British two generations before. He found just such a place along Difficult Run.
A trace published on August 15, 1864 in a New York Tribute article entitled “Rebel Scouts” describes perfectly the situation off the highways of western and central Fairfax County. “Our scouts are on the alert on the hills, valleys, and through the dense woods, but are unable to catch these picket-shooting assassins and marauding highwaymen.”4
There is significant evidence to support the idea that the Upper Difficult Run Basin served Mosby as both hidden highway and ad hoc forward operating base. The hills, valleys, and dense woods therein were some of the most socially and topographically appealing places for prolonged guerrilla occupation during most of 1863. Here he found a place that offered many of the same tactical advantages as Marion’s Pee Dee swamp.
Demonstrable Confederate presence along Difficult Run begs a wider question: how did they come to be there in the first place? Located just over a dozen miles from the Federal capital, this region was not exactly an easy place to infiltrate in 1863.
The sprawling depression in western Fairfax County (covering thirteen square miles between the Fairfax County Government Center and modern Oakton) sat behind well-travelled Union picket lines on the north/south roads connecting Herndon and Centreville.
A signature pattern of Mosby warfare emerges in the study of places where loyal citizens inhabited advantageous terrain features that were just off the beaten path, but still adjacent to prized objectives.
DUNBLANE
In northern Virginia, the example par excellence was Dunblane. Built in 1829, the home at modern 2400 Loudoun Drive in Haymarket, Virginia sat just east of an off-map pass over the Bull Run Mountains some four miles south of Aldie.
A rebuilt version of the home remains at 2400 Loudoun Drive in Haymarket. Here, Route 15 parallels the squat obstacle of the hills that feed the headwaters of the famed Bull Run that runs through the battlefield eight miles southwest to which it lends its name. Today, the combined Dunblane and Edgehill estates preside over an unmarked thoroughfare that represents one of the few roads passing over these mountains. Just to the north is Buchannon Gap, a minor pass that connects contemporary drivers to “Deep Hollow Lane.”
The landscape and language of hidden places is rich here.
In 1862, Dunblane’s owner, Dr. Jesse Ewell, received his wounded cousin, Confederate Major General Dick Ewell, after the latter lost his leg at Brawner’s Farm. The loyalties of the man of the house were unquestionably Confederate.5
Ewell’s sympathies and his willingness to leverage his property for the Southern cause were no great state secret. In May of 1863, Federal authorities received information that Dr. Ewell was making arrangements with neighbors on behalf of his Confederate quartermaster son to pasture thousands of cavalry horses for a great southern host on or near the Bull Run Mountains. This intriguing prelude to the area’s role as a staging ground and early conflict point in the Gettysburg Campaign three weeks later has its center of gravity fixed firmly on Dr. Ewell’s property.6
Extant Federal documents fail to record whether the Yankee braintrust in northern Virginia understood that Dr. Ewell’s Dunblane property was also serving as a shortcut and staging area for John Mosby and his men.
Virgil Carrington Jones wrote frequently of an “unguarded bridle path” in the Bull Run range, which served as a conduit for Mosby’s raids in 1863.7 Ranger John Munson described a Gettysburg-era prisoner of war collection point that Mosby’s men “established in the Bull Run Mountains.”8 Robert O’Neill, modern Mosby scholar and astute observer of landform, identifies Dunblane as a favorite Mosby haunt set astride a “seldom-used path over the Bull Run Mountains.”9
O’Neill’s granular approach to studying John Mosby yields another important hint. As early as February 1, John Mosby paid a visit to a friend at Arcola while he side-stepped Federal pickets at Chantilly in a maneuver towards the week defensive position at Frying Pan.10
Arcola was a minor agricultural community north of the Little River Turnpike and west of Gum Springs (today’s Dulles Airport). Positioned six miles northeast of Dunblane, the hamlet’s wartime connection to the Ewell house that Mosby frequented can feel tenuous.
There’s distortion here. In fact, it’s the very same deception that handicapped Federal forces whose inability to capture John Mosby suffered from a cartographical fixation on roads.
Federal missions against Mosby and contemporary attempts to locate the Confederate partisan in the geography of northern Virginia share a bias towards known highways and roads as landmarks and thoroughfares. Commanding broken columns of single-file riders that traveled without heavy baggage, Mosby himself was not spatially constrained by established roadways.
A different geography reveals itself in a paradigm where terrain features are more prominent than highways.
The Little River Turnpike was the predominant vehicle for punitive federal raids into the communities of Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville where John Mosby was known to roost. Yet, well-equipped and decently-informed Federal forces were unable to capture the Gray Ghost.
The solution to this paradox is topographical: Mosby and his men utilized an elaborate network of creeks and rivers that fan outwards from the “seldom-used” path over the Bull Run Mountains at Dunblane. Tributaries of Goose Creek and Little River dart southwards from the Turnpike near Rector’s Crossroads and Middleburg. If the main road was occupied by Federal forces, a generous complex of low-slung creek beds could obscure Mosby’s command from the point of rendezvous almost to the entrance of the Bull Run pass.
East of Dunblane, it’s a short mile and a half jump to the upper reaches of Bull Run. A mile past that, the south fork of Broad Run offers shelter and a winding path northwards to Arcola. From there, a quick jaunt over open flatland at Gum Springs separates the home of Mosby’s unknown friend from Horsepen Run, which traverses the forests of Frying Pan to the shoulder of Difficult Run.
Creeks deserve consideration as alternative roadways in Confederate service. They would have been the epitome of the local knowledge that Mosby prized. Thanks to networks of mills and a pragmatic practice of driving livestock and access trails to convenient fords on adjacent waterways, they also very likely connected to a substantial network of intermediary bridle paths that laced through the landscape of northern Virginia.
On a more basic level, creeks are the lowest part of the Piedmont terrain. They naturally obscure horsemen in abundant brush and cut banks. Crucially, these local topographical minima connect to other creases in the earth where the positive feedback loops of thousands of years of flowing water dig paths of least resistance into the earth itself.
Most importantly, the pattern at Dunblane—Confederate sympathies controlling advantageous paths over land that skirted known highways while connecting to creek beds—repeats itself time and time again in the periphery of Difficult Run.
A network of families who either harbored Confederate sympathies or supported members in Confederate service ringed the boundary of Upper Difficult Run and provided access to numerous avenues of approach that sidestep picket posts and major roads in favor of known paths and winding creek beds.
THE FRYING PAN NEIGHBORHOOD
One of the most storied Mosby locations in Fairfax County, Frying Pan deserves top billing in any discussion of the confluence between landform and loyalty. The area surrounding the Baptist Meeting House presented a number of valuable spatial opportunities for advantageous tactical dispositions.
Federal forces concentrated pickets here because the landmark sat along the major north/south thoroughfare on Fairfax County’s western edge. So too, the church was sited at the original terminus of the famed Ox Road, which darted via multiple channels along the ridge that separated Difficult Run and the Piedmont Basin before lacing into both the Little River Turnpike and Warrenton Pike to the south.
Augmenting these conventional mobility corridors were twin creeks that bifurcated west of the Frying Pan meeting house into diverging branches. Today, you can hoof your way up the Frying Pan Stream Valley Park east from the shuddered Baptist Church to a point where Fox Mill Road and the Fairfax County Parkway intersect. To the southeast, the more robust Horsepen Run reaches down towards Chantilly before petering out in the Franklin Farms neighborhood. At its highest point, the low crease of Horsepen Run is a mere half mile west of the headwaters of Little Difficult Run and a half mile north of the origin point for Flatlick Branch.
If creeks carried road potential for Confederate guerrillas, then this square mile of terrain on the cusp of Difficult Run would have been a rich intersection for irregular traffic. If Mosby bemoaned the flat plains of Loudoun County as an inopportune ecology for the concealment of partisan cavalry, the area around Frying Pan offered a much more appealing character.
Real estate listings from the half decade preceding secession offer a tantalizing portrait of a forest regime near Frying Pan. An offering of eight hundred acres of land posted in the Alexandria Gazette in March of 1857 promises “a large portion of which is in timber; the original growth being chiefly oak.”11 Another listing dating to December of 1856 and describing a property “within one (mile) of Frying Pan Church,” capitalized “HEAVILY TIMBERED” and assured would-be buyers that “wood and timber getters are particularly invited to view this property.”12
Fortuitous hydrology, rich stands of obscuring timber, and an abundance of established and well-travelled roads drew John Mosby to Frying Pan long before his tenure as an autonomous partisan. As early as February 12, 1862, an aide to JEB Stuart, acting on the General’s explicit commands, ordered Private John Mosby to escort two loyal women from Fairfax Court House to the area around Frying Pan.13 These loyal women were very likely Laura Ratcliffe and Antonia Ford, two vehemently secessionist cousins who enjoyed flirtatious and adoring relationships with the very married JEB Stuart. Ford, who belonged to one of the most prominent families in Fairfax Court House, and Ratcliffe, a prominent citizen of Herndon, were known to visit one another frequently.14
If Mosby did indeed trek through Frying Pan that snowy winter’s eve, he possibly returned five months later. A report from the Evening Star published on the day that the Second Battle of Manassas began traffics in reports of bold encroachments by Confederate forces west of the District of Columbia.
“Three rebel scouts were seen upon the highway near Frying-pan Church (in Loudoun County, about 20 miles from this city), last evening. We hear that this forenoon there were signs of the presence of rebel scouts in the vicinity of Vienna, Fairfax County.”15
As Confederate horsemen projected deeper into Fairfax County, no single figure in the Army of Northern Virginia was superior to John Mosby in both his knowledge of local land and credentials for providing theatre-scale intelligence. The future Gray Ghost was very likely among this bunch.
At very least, we can confirm that Mosby joined JEB Stuart at Frying Pan in December of 1862 at the tail end of the Fairfax Station raid. Here, on Laura Ratcliffe’s literal doorstep, JEB Stuart unofficially formalized the idea of an independent Mosby command.
Confederate Major John Scott penned an account of the moment in his post-war memoir.
“Stuart…called, in company with several of us, to make a visit to Miss Laura Ratcliffe, who resided near Frying-pan Church, in Fairfax County. As our party rose to bid this lady farewell, I was surprised and pleased to hear the general address her in the following language. 'You are such good Southern people through this section, I think you deserve some protection, so I shall leave Captain Mosby, with a few men, to take care of you. I want you to do all you can for him. He is a great favorite of mine and a brave soldier, and, if my judgement does not err, we shall soon hear something surprising from him.'”16
What emerges from these anecdotes and muddled clues is the other half of the Frying Pan equation: dumb luck in the arrangement of resources, roads, and terrain features guilded with vast human resources to create a potent opportunity zone.
Laura Ratcliffe demonstrated time and time again that her knack for collecting actionable intelligence was matched only by the zeal with which she delivered it to John Mosby.17 Still, her many invaluable contributions to Mosby’s operations played second fiddle to another local who came to be the highest revered scout in Mosby lore—John Underwood.
In the early months of Ranger Mosby’s tenure in Fairfax County, John Underwood, a known resident of Frying Pan, provided integral route and place knowledge to the budding partisan.18 Underwood was said to know “paths that not even rabbits had found.”19 A woodsman by trade, Underwood was familiar with the fertile timber belt that stretched from Frying Pan eastwards into the sawmills of Difficult Run and the Thornton Brothers’ impressive old-growth export operation west of Hunter’s Mill. Professional geographies merged with personal spaces in December of 1861 when John Underwood married Margaret Trammell, a daughter of a once prominent milling family who lived on Old Bad Road in the heart of Upper Difficult Run.20
As Mosby began raiding down the Ox Road and into Difficult Run in the spring of 1863, he did so on the advice and expertise of John Underwood. The local woodsman and staunch southerner guided Mosby through the woods and across Federal lines via the Horsepen Run axis.
Still more privileged local knowledge was available at Frying Pan via calculated coercion.
Today, the intersection of Frying Pan Road and Monroe Street in Herndon carries the little-used place name Hattontown in honor of its wartime owner, Ben Hatton. A prominent merchant, Hatton voted in favor of secession at Fairfax Court House.21 His patriotism had waned, apparently, by 1863 when he began to see the wisdom of trading with Federal pickets in western Fairfax County.
Virgil Carrington Jones described the nature of Hatton’s transgressions most poetically, characterizing Old Ben as a “farmer who traded mostly with Yankees and whose tongue loosened as the pile of Federal coins grew in his palm.”22
Mosby himself put it more succinctly. “One night I went down to Fairfax to take a cavalry picket,” said Mosby. “When I got near the post I stopped at the house of one Ben Hatton. I had heard that he had visited the picket post that day to give some information to them about me. I gave him the choice of Castle Thunder or guiding me through the pines to the rear of the picket. Ben did not hesitate to go with me.”23
The picket post in question was a baited trap set by the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry at the Tyler Davis house near the place where a firehouse sits today on the Reston Parkway, just behind Glory Days Grill.24 The closest route between Hatton’s home and the target was a winding trip down Frying Pan Branch up into a stand of woods that opened into the rear of the Federal position.
The raid was a success for Mosby. Unfortunately, Ben Hatton got shot in the thigh for his troubles.25
RICHARD TURLEY
Few in western Fairfax County had more at stake in secession than C.W. Turley.
Known to his neighbors as a rabid secessionist, the elder Turley was deeply invested in the institution of chattel slavery and the attendant cornerstones of social subordination, concentrated wealth, and monoculture upon which the Confederacy was founded.
C.W. Turley’s 450-acre Clover Hill was a sprawling and prosperous instance of the iconic Piedmont Virginia plantation. Located just over a mile south of Frying Pan, the Turley estate experienced immense growth over the decade prior to secession. They owed their success to their slaves, whose labor brought in solid crops and allowed their ranks to swell as C.W. Turley established himself as a prime buyer at the Alexandria auction block.
In 1851, the Turleys were taxed on fourteen slaves over sixteen years of age. By 1860, they owned nineteen slaves of age sixteen or older and twenty total who were at least twelve years old. Their household’s total aggregate value on the eve of the war was $7,910. They paid a princely sum of $56.44 in taxes that year.26
Richard Turley, C.W.’s son, cast his lot with John Mosby in 1864.27 His enlistment only formalized the tacit approval with which the Turleys treated local Confederate forces. More than just another plantation, Clover Hill was tactically valuable.
Perched on the eastern fringe of the Culpeper Basin, the home, its fields, and its dependencies sat at an important intersection where flatlands began to integrate into the wooded ridges separating the warren of bad roads in Difficult Run from the rolling plains to the west.
Nearly fifteen hundred acres stretched west from the Frying Pan Road to the Loudoun County border. For comparison, imagine the Turley home on or near the Chic-Fil-A that is nestled between two unmarked, but very sophisticated office buildings protected by Federal guards.
The Turley holdings encompassed the highest reaches of Dead Run and stretched as far as the headwaters of Cub Run. Both of which represented important hydrological pathways lacing southwards towards Pleasant Valley where John Mosby was fond of fighting.
Those same lands today include the southern limit of runway 1R and the easternmost area of runway 12-30 at Dulles Airport.
On the other side of the Turley holdings, Cain Branch darts northwards from near Clover Hill towards the Episcopal Church on Franklin Farms Road. It terminates within a half mile of the forested farmland near West Ox Road where Horsepen Run, Flatlick Branch, and Little Difficult Run come closest to one another.
If this disposition were not appealing enough, there was an added manmade feature near Ranger Richard A. Turley’s home that would have been alluring to even the most novice partisan.
Sick of sharing rails (at an onerous fee) with the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, the Manassas Gap Railroad in 1854 undertook the construction of an independent rail right of way westward from Alexandria. The line was never completed, but its terrain-accommodating features were completed before the Panic of 1857 made the company insolvent. Today, this abandoned infrastructure is best known in Civil War circles as the procuring cause of the ready-made trenches that Stonewall Jackson’s Corps occupied at Second Manassas.28
Little known and seldom appreciated was a spur line that was partially built and similarly discarded at the same time. The Loudoun Spur broke from the mainline at a point near today’s Chantilly High School. Poplar Tree Road was built on the mainline’s right of way and the spur arced north across the Little River Turnpike near Lee’s Corner Road.
Just northeast of Sully Plantation on that property’s boundary with the Turley estate, a sizable cut had to be dug out of the soil to accommodate trains. Readily apparent on modern LiDAR scans, that remarkable gash in the land created an avenue of invisible mobility for horsemen looking to dart between the Dead Run/Cub Run corridors and Cain Branch to the east.
WRENNS, TUBERVILLES, LEES AND HUTCHISONS
More than any creek bed or railroad cut, the obvious choice of landmark for John Mosby to gain entry into Fairfax County and the friendly hiding holes around Difficult Run was the Little River Turnpike.
Growing up, a paved and revamped version of this same nineteenth century turnpike served as the main east/west thoroughfare in my neck of woods. Until 2023, it bore the name “Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway” in Fairfax County and John Mosby Highway in Loudoun. The names were at once a pointed recognition of the roadway’s historical import to the Confederate war effort and a not-so-subtle statement about the pro-Confederate sentiments that inundated state and local government.
The road looked very different during the war, but served a similar function as a conduit for power. Fifty feet wide and paved with the macadamized process, the Little River Turnpike was an infrastructural development designed to integrate the fertile wheat fields of Loudoun County into the economic hierarchy of Alexandria.29
By the outbreak of hostilities, wheat exports were the furthest thing from anyone’s thought. The prominent resource extraction avenue soon became a double-edged sword. The Little River Turnpike was a dagger that carried the potential to funnel Mosby and his men directly from his base around Aldie into the Federal stronghold at Fairfax Court House. So too, Federal cavalry co-opted the many major intersections and tollbooths that were interspersed along the highway and created a net of pickets that stymied Mosby and offered staging points for raids against him.
In many ways, the Little River Turnpike became the definitive axis of Mosbyana. Not only was the Gray Ghost known to frequent the road, but the highway itself appeared in high-fidelity on every available map and pointed a direct line towards the Confederate guerrillas known staging area. What Federal authorities began, historiography continued. The telling of the Mosby story is itself intertwined with the geography of the Little River Turnpike.
And yet, the raft of writing about John Mosby’s war in Northern Virginia is rich in hints that the gray raider would knowingly shun the turnpike at critical moments.
A thorough comparison of the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion and the 1860 property map of parcels south of the Little River Turnpike reveal a familiar pattern: die hard Rangers like Lycurgus Hutchison, Albert Wrenn, and George Tuberville, Jr., lived in the belt of woods south of the Turnpike where Mosby successfully executed some of his most impressive fetes.
This patchwork landform has yet to be thoroughly investigated and offers an ethnographic key to understanding prolonged Confederate presence in and around Fairfax. Three sprawling properties stretching from Pleasant Valley (near today’s Costco) eastwards to a place near the Fair Lakes Shopping Center offered John Mosby a valuable avenue of ingress and egress through friendly farms.
Any discussion of the possibilities afforded by people and place south of the Little River Turnpike should begin near Foamhenge, the plastic replica of Stone Age marvel that Cox Farms installed east of South Riding on the Braddock Road. In 1860, this area near the boundary of Loudoun and Fairfax Counties would have been the heart of the Hutchison family’s holdings.
A large patch of siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles spread between a few thousand acres that straddled both counties and the Little River Turnpike. Today, Apple Maps identifies the section of Herndon above the Dulles Toll Road and west of 657 as “Hutchison.” This place name recalls the fact that a thick belt of this surname could be found on property maps bridging the area between Gum Springs (present day Dulles Airport) and the Frying Pan/Sully corridor. In 1860, one of the most important extended Hutchison family homesteads was the Silas Hutchison House (still standing today at 4322 Cub Run Road) and saw mill on Cub Run.30
The saw mill is particularly important. Rebuilt in the twentieth century, the mill dam survives as a two hundred foot long, seven feet tall, cement-reinforced embankment. By 1863, the Hutchison dam would have carried the potential for a massive mill pond that could have defined the length of Cub Run between the site and the Little River Turnpike to the north.
The area between Hutchison’s Mill and the Little River Turnpike figured decisively in an early iconic Mosby victory on March 23, 1863. Seeking to attack a Federal picket at the Chantilly Plantation, John Mosby scouted east from Aldie on the Little River Turnpike. Mosby described his approach: “When I got within two or three miles of it (the Federal post), I turned obliquely off to the right, in order to penetrate, if possible, between them and Centreville, and gain their rear.”31
Though not initially a success, the maneuver Mosby related seems to involve the Cub Run area of Pleasant Valley where the Hutchison family was strong. The area afforded strong cover in the form of timber and hydrological topography. Both of the latter features came in handy as Mosby found his command riding exhausted horses into a gunfight in which the rebel raiders were heavily outnumbered. The Yankees chased them as far as the northern limit of the Silas Hutchison property where Mosby determined to act on the maxim of Frederick the Great and retain the offensive.32
A reciprocal report filed by Mosby’s federal opponent, Lt. Col. Robert Johnstone describes the scene where Mosby and his men routed their blue-coated pursuers by doubling back through a stand of heavy timber.
Per Johnstone, “Between Saunders tollgate and Cub Run there is a strip of woods about a half a mile wide through which the road runs. Within the woods, and about a quarter of a mile apart, are two barricades of fallen trees; our troops pursued the enemy between these barricades.”33
No Hutchison was yet in Mosby’s ranks on March 23, 1863, but the area was staunchly Confederate. Silas Hutchison’s three sons were away serving in Thrift’s Rifles, the locally-raised company G of the 8th Virginia Infantry. Charles Hutchison died of Typhus at Chimborazo Hospital on June 24, 1863. His brother, James, was captured in the collapse of Picket’s Division at Gettysburg nine days later. Their sibling, Joshua, survived Confederate service into 1864 when he was granted a transfer to Mosby’s command.34
Crucially, Joshua Hutchison was preceded in Mosby’s Rangers by three of his cousins, Lewis E. Hutchison and his first cousins Lycurgus and Philip Augustus Hutchison. These latter two are important, especially in the context of understanding how Mosby integrated the area south of Pleasant Valley along the Little River Turnpike into a corridor for guerrilla activity.
Near the farm of Lycurgus and Philip Augustus’ father, Redding Hutchison, Fairfax County’s meager corner of the Culpeper Basin begins to rut and slough off southwards as a delta of tributaries—Elkins, Upper Cub, and Flat Lick Runs—join and twist towards Bull Run. Masked with timber and the marshlands we would associate with a prominent milling operation, the Hutchison properties represented the entrance to a vast hydrological path network that stretched east towards modern Greenbriar and Chantilly where Big Rocky Run darts deeper towards Jermantown and Difficult Run along a low profile.
Mosby was fond of this area. Its topography dovetailed with a Federal fixation for placing pickets and patrols on high, established roads. This slice of land east of Pleasant Valley was the site where John Mosby and his men left the Little River Turnpike and darted through a known gap in the Yankee line on the ranger’s famous March 9, 1863 raid into Fairfax Courthouse.
To quote Virgil Carrington Jones on the episode, “Mosby’s idea was to cut through the triangle formed by the Little River Turnpike, the highway from Warrenton through Centerville to Fairfax, and the Frying Pan Road, in this manner avoiding the pickets on each of the two main highways and passing through the Federal outpost line in the woods north of Centreville.”35
The area Jones details is exactly the acreage abutting the Hutchison properties—a known haunt of Mosby Rangers until the end of the war. Anyone speculating as to the relationship that local enlistees enjoyed with their chieftain (and the attendant delivery of place/route knowledge that entailed) need look no further than this rare post-war photo of Colonel Mosby with three of his men.
Mosby was not fond of reunions and seldom attended gatherings of his men. Nonetheless, he sat in July of 1914 for a photo sandwiched between Lycurgus Hutchison and George Turberville V.
Turberville and “Curg” Hutchison both enlisted in Mosby’s Rangers on the same day—June 10, 1863.36 This was likely not a coincidence given that the two were neighbors. George Turberville’s father, also, predictably, George Turberville, owned a massive farm of seven hundred and eighty nine acres in the wedge of land between the gash of Flatlick Run, which cuts across Little River Turnpike near Sully Plaza, and Frog Run. His property encompassed modern Chantilly High School.37
These boys, who clearly earned Mosby’s favor, grew up in a place that afforded them intimate knowledge of bridle paths that would have inevitably crossed or aimed towards these road-spanning creeks.
Better still, the area between the Hutchison and Turberville families was rich in Confederate sympathies. Curg Hutchinson lived just west of the Hermitage, a prominent plantation owned by Thomas W. Lee, whose wife, Harriet Hutchison Lee, was born into the Hutchison clan.38 Thomas and Harriet’s son, Phillip DeCatesby Jones Lee, served under John Mosby beginning on April 25, 1863.39 Prior to his formal enlistment, Phillip Lee was rounded up alongside four other prominent secessionists who all happened to belong to the Baptist congregation at Frying Pan.40 So it was that Phillip Lee found himself incarcerated with Richard Johnson who administered the fulling mill on Difficult Run where evidence suggests that a corridor of friendly farms, bad roads, and advantageous terrain created an avenue for Mosby and his men. Also locked up with Phillip Lee was Frank Fox, stepson of Richard Johnson, future Lieutenant in Mosby’s Rangers, brother to Mosby Ranger Charles Albert Fox, and brother-in-law to prominent Ranger Scout John Barnes.
George H. Cook, who disappeared into the folds of history shortly thereafter, rounded out the bunch. Also listed as a Confederate Vedette under Federal arrest was another remarkable figure who won laurels serving John Mosby and whose family name saturated the area south of Little River Turnpike between the Turberville Plantation and the Hutchison Mill and Pleasant Valley: Albert Wrenn.
Often stylized with a single “n,” the Wrenn name carries back deep into the earliest chapters of Fairfax County history. James Wren, Albert Wrenn’s great-great grandfather, was an early justice of the piece who carries the distinction of having designed the Falls Church and Fairfax County Courthouse among other local historic treasures.41
Architectural historians will recognize the surname thanks largely to Christopher Wren. A first cousin seven times removed to Lieutenant Albert Wrenn of Mosby’s Rangers fame, Christopher Wren was the gold standard for sacred architecture in 17th century London.42 With the pedigree came prominence and with the prominence came land.
By the outbreak of the Civil War, the Wrenn family retained ownership of significant parcels of land throughout western Fairfax County. Between familial genealogy and geography, we can center the world of Albert Wrenn along a piece of connective land rich in both hydrological and road resources that transpose neatly over future Mosby operations.
Like the Hutchisons, with whom they had intermarried, the Wrenn family real estate holdings south of the Little River Turnpike between Chantilly Plantation and Pleasant Valley were owned by individual brothers in a network of adjacent plots typical of extended kinship networks. Eight hundred acres stretch from the Centreville Road (present Route 28) north and east towards an important parcel of ninety six acres that paralleled Flatlick Branch at its intersection with the Little River Turnpike. There, Albert Wrenn’s father owned the former McAtee Tavern, a roadside “ordinary” or watering hole dating back to 1814.43
The pattern, which finds James Wrenn IV, his four brothers, and their brother-in-law, William A Hutchison, incorporated into adjacent real estate parcels varying in size from seven acres to one hundred and eight five acres, suggests the fissures and arrangements of post-primogeniture inheritance. The Wrenn boys clearly inherited this land and kept it without selling out to one another. This is a safe inference, chiefly because the pattern repeats itself three miles to the east.44
At the southwest corner of the intersection between Little River Turnpike and the Ox Road, all five Wrenn boys and William Hutchison retained adjacent woodlots between six and eight acres apiece. The six plots cover the area between modern Pender Vet and the movie theatre at Fairfax Town Center.
Absent conglomeration or an established record of intrafamily litigiousness, we can presume a certain shared cordiality between the brothers and their families. As an inheritor to those relationships, Albert Wrenn would have enjoyed intimate place knowledge garnered over a childhood spent roaming the eight hundred acre swath of creekside farms joining the Hutchison, Lee, and Turberville properties. More importantly, he would have grown up adjacent to the turnpike at a point where the road dips into a steep local creek valley and a hydrology basin fans outwards from the highway both north and southwards.
This spatial understanding alone would have been a tremendous asset to John Mosby. Luckily for the Gray Ghost, young Albert was raised at the heart of a widely distributed kin and friendship network that spanned multiple highways and at least three major creek networks.
Albert Wrenn’s father owned land astride both the Little River Turnpike and the Warrenton Pike (Route 29) to the south. The family woodlots along West Ox Road would have brought Albert Wrenn in contact with that historic thoroughfare, the nearby wooded slopes of Ox Hill and the Difficult Run Basin beyond. To the south, a similar sixty six acre plot in his father’s name would have familiarized Albert Wrenn with the spaces between Big Rocky Run and Little Rocky Run where the Warrenton Turnpike carved southwest from Fairfax to Fauquier County.45
More privileged perspective would have come in the form of visits to his Uncle Samuel, who lived on two hundred and thirty eight acres at exactly the place where Horsepen Run darts southeast from Frying Pan, Cain Branch pulls northeast from the Turley farm and Pleasant Valley and Flatlick Branch cuts upwards from the James Wrenn owned tavern on Little River Turnpike.
The Samuel Wrenn House survives to this day on—you guessed it—Wrenn House Road just east of the Fairfax County Parkway.46 Modern surroundings are very different from environmental conditions in 1860. Nonetheless, a quick glance at a topographical map measured against a road map from the Civil War era presents at interesting possibility. It would have been far more convenient for a young Albert Wrenn to utilize some portion of Flatlick Branch as a route to Lees Corner Road and Thompsons Road to visit his uncle. Still more convenient when considering total mileage, Albert Wrenn and his younger brother James (also a Mosby Ranger) could have plodded along the creek banks of Flatlick Branch to a point under half a mile from their Uncle’s farm.
More enticing still for anyone attempting to winnow down John Mosby’s use of the Ox Road above Little River Turnpike is the small matter of land ownership at Ox Junction. The Civil War era tripartite intersection on the northeastern slope of Ox Hill marked the beginning of the Difficult Run Basin and the union of the West Ox Road with the Fox Mill Road (known to Federal forces during the war as the Ox Road and today named Waples Mill Road) with modern Vale Road, which bore the map name “Old Bad Road” during the war.
Samuel Wrenn, Albert’s uncle, owned a modest five acre plot fronting Ox Junction. Whether this was a wood lot or a commercial location is unknown, but the fact remains that the uncle of a noted partisan lieutenant owned property at a vital landmark.
Amplifying the likelihood that Albert Wrenn enjoyed intimate knowledge of the property around Ox Junction—the gateway to Fox’s Mill—comes from Sarah Summers Clarke’s biography, Then We Came to California. A niece to rangers Frank Fox and John Barnes, Sarah Summers grew up at Fox’s Mills and was privy as an adolescent to the social structure there that merged seamlessly with Mosby’s wartime efforts. In describing locals from the area who transitioned into Mosby Men, Clarke said, “Another boy who had been raised right near our family at Fox’s Mills was Lieutenant Albert Wren.”47
The places Albert Wrenn knew before the war knot together into a critical piece of the puzzle that is Mosby’s War in Fairfax county. Anyone needing further proof that Albert Wrenn socially straddled the geography between Pleasant Valley and Fox’s Mills need look no further than his marriage in 1866.
One year after the close of the war, Albert Wrenn married his cousin Lucinda Fox.48 Lucy Fox was the daughter of John F. Fox, who was the son-in-law of Jane Fox, matriarch at Fox’s Mills. More importantly, John Fox owned the land north of Fox’s Lower Mill where I contend that John Mosby penetrated Federal lines throughout most of 1863.
KINCHELOE INTERLUDE
So far, a raft of evidence has knitted together the idea that geographic features in the hands of Confederate sympathizers tied together by kinship, religion, and mutual social interest could illuminate a network of paths and roads beyond the purview of traditional roadways.
An L-bracket of Hutchisons, Wrenns, Lees, Turbervilles, Underwoods, and Ratcliffes built a frame to the south and west of Difficult Run where the winding creeks of the Culpeper Basin tuck against the unmarked boundary points in which thicketed forests provided immediate access into Fairfax Court House, Vienna, and Annandale beyond.
South of the Warrenton Pike, the terrain is closer to that of Difficult Run than the broad flatlands of Loudoun County. Was this area similarly utilized as a guerrilla corridor? A quick roster analysis of the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry presents a potential theoretical corroboration.
Mosby was not the only Confederate guerrilla in Northern Virginia. Members of the Black Horse Cavalry, Elijah White’s Comanches of and the 35th Virginia Cavalry, and Captain Brawner’s Prince William Rangers all marauded within specific domains. The latter case is especially interesting.
Raised by Captain William Brawner, the Prince William Rangers centered around the Centreville/Manassas axis along Bull Run. Officially Company H of the 15th Virginia Cavalry, the unit was chartered beneath the same Partisan Ranger Law that enshrined Mosby’s Command. In fact, the two units collaborated at times. Fifteen of Brawner’s men accompanied Mosby on his June 11/12, 1863 raid across the Potomac.
That night in Maryland, Brawner caught some Yankee lead that laid him in his grave. A native of the area south of Union Mills along Bull Run, James C. Kincheloe, assumed command.49
A year later, Kincheloe disbanded the Prince William Rangers and merged his men with Mosby’s Rangers. He and his command augmented Mosby’s ranks at a time when the fighting shifted westwards towards the Shenandoah Valley. Nonetheless, in a war of heavy attrition, it’s worth wondering how Brawner, Kincheloe, and the rest of the Prince William Rangers were able to survive in southern Fairfax County for multiple years.
Familiar motifs emerge from genealogies. The Kincheloe family was long-tenured in the milling industry. In the late 1700s, Willoughby Newton hired James Lane, Jr. to build a grist and saw mill at the meeting point of Cub Run and Big Rocky Run west of Centreville.50 After renting the mill for many decades, the Kincheloe family purchased it in 1857.
Farther south, another Kincheloe-owned mill fell into disrepair in the early 1800s and its site was eventually integrated into the Union Mill complex—itself a famous landmark during the Civil War.51 Early processing prosperity helped solidify the Kincheloes, who retained nearby land assets along Pope’s Head Creek through the Civil War.52
Unsurprisingly, the same Kincheloe family that furnished no less than nine sons to Confederate service was also firmly established on three major creeks in an area ill-served by roads and known to be heavily forested, boggy, and prone to obscuring cardinal directions within winding creek valleys.53
Time and time again an aptitude for Confederate guerrilla service coincides with having spent a childhood traversing creek basins. The Kincheloes are no exception.
DON’T TRIFLE WITH THE THOMPSONS
The Kincheloe men were well-remembered in Fairfax County for their service to the Confederacy. A few miles north, at the juncture where Difficult Run nestled against the Ox Road on the farthest reaches of Little Difficult Run, the Thompson family has received relatively short shrift for its considerable sacrifices to the southern cause. Not least of which was a devoted body of service to John Mosby that potentially unlocked the area between the Wrenn holdings and Old Bad Road.
This Thompson family was the same collection of kin whose real estate holdings gave the name “Thompson’s Corner” to the intersection of Thompson Road and Ox Road. Today, this lane enters West Ox Road just northwest of Navy Elementary. Thompson’s road ducks westwards off the crest of the Ox Road ridge on a winding path through suburbia that takes it over Flatlick Branch before dead ending at the Fairfax County Parkway. The original road trace picks up again on the other side of the major regional connector where it briefly parallels Cain Branch before terminating on Lees Corner Road near Franklin Middle School (Go Falcons).
During the war, the twelve foot sound barrier jacketing abutting homes from the din of four lanes of the Fairfax County Parkway was obviously not a consideration. Instead, the farm lane would have been a natural point for Federal forces to establish a picket post. The Thompson Road began at a point within a half a mile of the railroad cut through Sully plantation adjoining the Culpeper basin. Its proximity to Cain Branch and Flatlick Branch, which were known and utilized by members of the pro-Confederate Wrenn family would have been a potent asset for guerrillas and conventional cavalry alike.
More importantly, Thompson’s Road ended on Ox Road at a point where the headwaters of Little Difficult Run began to gather into a substantial catchment. On the eastern side of Ox Road, Ellzey Thompson and his wife Eliza lived adjacent to their son, Austin D. Thompson, on a collected parcel of nearly two hundred acres sited along modern Fox Mill Road. Just to their north, where West Ox Road met Lawyers Road (today’s Fox Mill Shopping Center), was the home of Tyler Davis, Eliza Davis’ brother.
Properties belonging to both surnames hosted Mosby raids in the first six weeks of the partisan’s independent command in Fairfax County. On February 2, a sizable Federal picket post at the Tyler Davis house was ambushed. Three weeks later on February 25, another 50-man post at Thompson’s Corner found itself on the business end of John Mosby’s revolver.54
The selection of these two targets had little to do with the allegiances of the greater Thompson/Davis clan. The properties had been predetermined for use by Federal cavalry due to their advantageous location along the Frying Pan Road. Mosby hit them because they were sited along lines that were easily accessible from Horsepen Run, Frying Pan Run, and Thompson’s Road—all lines of approach leading to the flatlands of the Culpeper Basin where the Gray Ghost held sway.
There was immense latent potential available to irregular Confederate forces at the point on the Ox Road between the Thompson family and their cousins in the Davis family. If Upper Difficult Run was a potent avenue for single-file maneuver conducted over unmapped bridle paths known only to locals, Little Difficult Run carried these same potentials.
Inside the basin beyond the Ox Road, tendrils of minor creek tributaries lace through forest-jacketed bottom lands that frequently hold obscuring fogs after rain events. The two legs of Little Difficult Run begin mere feet from the Ox Road and dip quickly into camouflaged thicket and floodplain before colliding with the main course of Difficult Run just above Hawxhurst’s Mill at a point on Lawyer’s Road known to host Confederate ambushes.55
Firsthand knowledge of the Little Difficult Run corridor presented itself to Mosby in the form of four enlistments. Minor Thompson—son of Ellzey and Eliza Thompson—enlisted in the 43rd Battalion on March 30, 1863.56 Minor’s brother, William Thompson, joined Mosby on June 10, 1863.57
Early in 1864, the Thompson brothers’ first cousins, Edgar and William H. Davis, added their names to the Mosby rolls. Edgar Davis rode with Mosby’s Rangers for three months until he was killed in a fight at Upperville on October 29, 1864. William survived long enough to be paroled at Winchester with a good many other Mosby Rangers on April 22, 1865. The enduring presence of William H. Davis in Mosby’s fold suggests a long-lasting piece of place knowledge connecting the Frying Pan cove to the Little Difficult Run basin until war’s end.58
More intriguing from a spatial perspective are the respective biographies of Minor and William Thompson. Minor Thompson was a fixture of the Vale neighborhood for decades to come. His name appeared on a list of local farmers in Chataigne’s Directory of Alexandria and Fredericksburg.59 Minor, however, was not living the bucolic life of a quiet country farmer. In February of 1896, he caught a $20 sentence for carrying a concealed pistol when he “caused a disturbance” in Alexandria.60
This was not a one off occurrence. In 1858, Minor Thompson was convicted of assaulting Cornelius White after he “did wound and ill treat” White.61 This event came five years after Minor’s Uncle, Tyler Davis, assaulted his father, Ellzey Thompson, in a rigorous enough fashion to force a trial.62
The family had a penchant for the rough and tumble. This characteristic proved to be a boon for both William and Minor Thompson. In 1851, William served the Machen Family as overseer for their substantial Walney Plantation on Big Rocky Run. Not a profession typically associated with weakness, William Thompson would have been equipped with a whip and ample permission to use this implement to coerce labor.
Walney was located on Big Rocky Run just south of the Hutchison/Lee/Wrenn/Tuberville complex. Not only would William Thompson have been accustomed to the application of cruelty, but that vocation would have been spatially contextualized in a way that connected his professional haunts near Centreville to the many roads and creeks separating him from his home on Little Difficult Run.63
In similar fashion, Minor Thompson parlayed a certain for violence into a successful career as a tavern owner. He owned a grubby watering hole on the northern limit of Fairfax Court House on what is Jenny Lynne Lane today. There were even rumors that men in General Edwin Stoughton’s command spent the night of the general’s capture at Mosby’s hands getting drunk in Minor Thompson’s establishment.64
If William Thompson maintained a mental map of the routes between Walney and his father’s home, Minor Thompson would have had a similar body of knowledge that was augmented by yet another career. Before the war, ranger Minor Thompson was established as a carpenter and builder. In the case of both his boyhood home and his tavern, the nearest sawmill for the purchase of processed timber would have been Fox’s Mills.
Both Thompson brothers had wide-reaching spatial connections that brought them far afield from the Difficult Run Basin and back again. They would likely have been asked to utilize this knowledge in service of John Mosby.
Back at the ranch, the Thompson farm would have carried strong potential as a hiding place for Rangers. Not simply because of William and Minor’s affiliation with the Mosby command, but because the family was staunchly pro-Confederate.
Ellzey Thompson lost three sons during the war. William Thompson died of diarrhea he contracted at the prisoner camp in Point Lookout, Maryland, after being captured in November 1863.65 The eldest brother, Austin D. Thompson, died mysteriously in 1862. Austin wasn’t included in any Confederate service records for Fairfax County. In the case of the Thompson family, this doesn’t preclude Confederate service.
The youngest Thompson brother, Charles T., was not mentioned on any Fairfax County rolls of Confederate veterans. Yet, we now know he ran away from home in August of 1861 as Confederate forces retook Fairfax Court House in the wake of the Battle of Bull Run. Enthused by the cause, apparently, Charles T. Thompson threw his lot in with the 19th Virginia. His year-long enlistment ended early when Charles died in hospital on February 1, 1862.66
With at least two sons who sacrificed their lives in Confederate service, it would be bizarre if Ellzey Thompson didn’t provide some form of material or behavioral assistance to Mosby.
FRIENDLY FARMS
Similarly affiliated properties bordered the Little River Turnpike from the crest of the Ox Hill ridge that defined the boundary of the Difficult Run watershed east into Jermantown.
Though Mary Thrift and Mary Jerman were not connected to Mosby himself, they had family in conspicuous places in Confederate service. Mary Thrift owned one hundred and ninety three acres of prime farmland where Fairfax Town Center is now located on the West Ox Road. Her property played host to most of the action at the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862.
Mary’s father was Major James Thrift, the man who enlisted most of the Confederate soldiers in the Dranesville district into his company of the 8th Virginia Infantry, known as “Thrift’s Rifles.”67 Located in the triangle formed by the Warrenton Pike, Little River Turnpike, and Centreville Road, the Thrift property would have been wide open to Confederate partisans.
Two miles to the east where the Federal cavalry maintained an immense encampment at the intersection of the Warrenton Turnpike, the Little River Turnpike, and the road to Fox’s Mills, Mary Jerman and her son, Middleton, lived on a hundred acres. The Jerman family lent their name to the hamlet of Jermantown and were mainstays there before and after the war.
Middleton Jerman was himself in Confederate service with the 18th Virginia Cavalry.68 His mother was in absolutely no position to render aid to John Mosby. We cannot even prove conclusively that she was present in Jermantown during the war. Nonetheless, the pro-Confederate ownership of the land deserves mention.
As does the case of the sprawling Thomas property that bridged the Jerman holdings with Ox Hill on the north side of the Little River Turnpike. Occupying almost all of Valley Road, Fairfax Farms Road, and the eastern half of today’s Penderbrook development, the Maaziah and Mary Thomas farm was wedged at the time of the war between the Fox Mill pond and the Little River Turnpike.
Maaziah Thomas died in 1857. His wife and son retained possession of the land briefly before initiating an installment sale to John G. Bedell and his wife, Philmena Hunt. The issue of ownership came to the courts in 1867 with Bedell and Maaziah Thomas’ widow going at it over the trifling matter of two missed payments during the war. Of particular interest is an affidavit describing the house as unoccupied and the land being under cultivation by an abutting neighbor. When laced together with the sequence of missed payments during the war, it seems likely that Bedell and his wife were not at home during the conflict.69
Like the Wet Bandits in Home Alone, absentee owners presented tremendous opportunity for a Ranger like Mosby who preferred to cut overland when the Turnpikes were too busy with Federal forces. The interval between Mary Thrift’s land near Chantilly and Mary Jerman’s property in Jermantown featured a landscape that further incentivized Mosby to use the land to his advantage.
A post-battle report from Major H.J. Williams of the Fifth Virginia Infantry who commanded Winder’s Confederate brigade at the Battle of Chantilly described Ox Hill as a “densely-wooded crest overlooking the little village of Germantown.”70
In his memoirs of the war, Heros von Borcke, a professional German soldier serving on JEB Stuart’s staff described the stretch of roadway fronting Thomas’ property as “thick pine-woods which lined the turnpike on either side.”71
At the highest points of the Difficult Run Basin, a forested landscape of either absent or politically amenable property owners created an opportunity for guerrilla operations.
THE OAKTON THRUST
Beginning at the Jerman farm and extending northeast to modern Oakton and historic Flint Hill is a geologic thrust that supports a ridge. This protracted hill defines the local boundary of Difficult Run and overlooks the area. In 1863, the Oakton Thrust and its many avenues up out of the Difficult Run floodplain and over the Chain Bridge and Jermantown Roads were owned by Confederate sympathizers with sons in Confederate ranks.
Where Oakton Road takes two close ninety degree turns near Miller Heights Road before dipping into the Difficult Run Basin, Lee H. Monroe owned two hundred and fifty acres of heights in 1860. The forested western edge of this property would have occupied the bluff overlooking both of Fox’s Mills and the schoolhouse on the eastern side of Difficult Run.
No wonder then that Mosby Ranger Thomas Lee, whose father was the schoolteacher at Fox’s Mills, married Lee Monroe’s daughter, Martha Jane Monroe, in 1860. During my childhood in Oakton, Virginia, we typically paid visits to friends on adjoining properties by way of the shortest paths possible. Cumbersome driveways and street access were seen as unnecessary impediments to simple friendship. It’s difficult to believe that courtship in the mid-19th century was any different. It’s distinctly possible that Thomas Lee’s expertise as a Mosby’s Ranger was augmented by the journeys he took from his family’s bottom land up a hillside to the home of his future wife.72
The Monroes were loyal Confederates themselves. Thomas Lee’s brother-in-law, Deskin Monroe, served in the Fairfax Rifles of the 17th Virginia Infantry before deserting from the Army of Northern Virginia in the Spring of 1865. He was detained by Federal forces and sent to Washington, D.C. in a group of “rebel deserters” gathered from the vicinity of Fairfax Court House in March of 1865. This suggests that Deskin was at home for some period of the war.73
Immediately to the north of the Monroe spread on the Oakton thrust was an immense four hundred and thirty acre farm that stretched all the way from the Jermantown Road near Flint Hill proper to mid-course along Difficult Run, where it abutted the property of John Fox.
In a previous post, I’ve outlined how this particular segment of Difficult Run is rich in evidence suggesting that it could have been used by John Mosby as a hidden corridor for cutting through Federal lines. When analyzed from the heights above, this section looks equally promising.
The substantial property separating John Fox’s farm from Flint Hill was under the ownership of James J. Love and Lewis D. Means. Lewis Means was rumored to be a Confederate supply officer during the war.74 More germane to the topic at hand was Means profession as a serial real estate speculator. A quick search of the Freedman’s Bureau’s survey of abandoned lands after the war returns multiple properties in Means’ name.
So too, the other name on the title had affiliations to the Confederate Army that were equal in magnitude to his connection to available speculative capital. Future Judge James Monroe Love was the second son of one of Fairfax’s most wealthy citizens, Thomas R. Love. The elder love was himself a prodigious speculator. There’s a strong change that he backed his son’s play with Lewis D. Means.
At the war’s outbreak, James Love enlisted in the Black Horse Cavalry—Company H of the 4th Virginia. This unit was known to maraud through Fairfax County in its own guerrilla war that ran parallel to that of John Mosby. Their area of operations was slightly south and west. There’s no evidence to suggest that James Love brought his compatriots to his investment property.75
However, James was not the only Love in the ranks of the Confederate Army. His older brother, Robert, was killed in action at Seven Pines. His younger brother, Thomas R. Love, Jr., was in Mosby’s Rangers. In fact, Tom Love, Jr was one of two men riding personally with Mosby when the partisan commander was gut shot at Lud Lake’s house in 1864.76
Interestingly Thomas Love, Sr., just happen to own eighty seven acres on the northwest corner of Old Bad Road and Hunter Mill Road. Exactly the terminus of the route through the valley of Difficult Run that figures so prominently in Mosby histories.77
Further coincidences abound in the Love family genealogy. Thomas Love, Jr. served in Mosby’s Rangers with his first cousin, Thomas Moss. Thomas Moss’ father was Alfred Moss, the Clerk of Court for the City of Fairfax at the time of secession. In Alfred Moss’ custody was George Washington’s will, which he deemed to be unsafe in Fairfax. Moss absconded with the document and hid it at Evergreen Farm, the home owned by his daughter’s husband between New Baltimore and Warrenton, Virginia. There the map remained until October of 1862.78
So it was that both Thomas Love, Jr. and his cousin Thomas Moss had knowledge of the area around Fairfax Court House, but also knew a safe place to hide things on the plains above the Warrenton Pike near Dunblane.
PERKS OF MARRIAGE
One final spatial relationship worth mentioning is the dowry that Margaret Trammell brought to her marriage with John Underwood. Not only did Margaret enjoy a kinship familiarity with the Difficult Run corridor, she was also the owner of one hundred and ninety two acres of land on the Potomac just south of Perry Island.79
It’s interesting to think that the man who “knew trails rabbits didn’t even knew about” also enjoyed a connection to a rare point on the Potomac River where two islands help bridge the distance between shores downstream from Great Falls. What a tremendous asset that could have been in the hands of a seasoned guerrilla.
These coincidences have been largely glossed over as a casualty of the scale of John Mosby’s operations and the magnificence of his myth. The reality is that a series of very fortuitous place relationships galvanized by political affiliation and military service into a hidden map of waterways and kinship trails that provided access to the Difficult Run basin and Fairfax beyond.
