Author: Dan Johnson

TL;DR–Heavy timber served as both venue and motivator for Mosby and his men.

In April of 1864, Moby Dick author Herman Melville—by then an expert chronicler of American tumult—accompanied his friend, Col. Charles Russell Lowell of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry, on a reconnaissance in force against Mosby from the Federal stronghold at Vienna.¹

Two years later, Melville published an epic poem account of the raid. “Scout Toward Aldie” wove a narrative from threads familiar to readers of the author’s other work. Brave, but anxious men carve their way through a dread-soaked ecology towards an inevitable battle with a cunning foe.

No mere fictionalization, “Scout Toward Aldie” was a high-fidelity recreation of the corridor between Vienna and Loudoun County to the west. The narrative arc of the poem itself conformed to the geography of Difficult Run, with the poet dropping breadcrumbs that identify familiar landmarks on the Federal cavalry’s trek westwards from Vienna. 

“They file out into the forest deep,” marks a point of departure, by which the Yankee horsemen ride down the Lawyers or Old Courthouse Road towards an intersection with Hunter Mill. There, “they pass the picket by the pine and hollow log—a lonesome place.” Only to “cross the freshet-flood, and up the muddy bank,” moments later as they negotiate the historically troublesome ford of Difficult Run near Hawxhurst’s burned mill.

The fire-eaten structure and its attendant decay caught Melville’s eye. A few stanzas later, he remarks “a squirrel sprang from the rotting mill.” It wouldn’t have been far from the ford to Money’s Corner (today’s intersection of Lawyers, Fox Mill, and the Reston Parkway) where an 1862 Federal map had the road from Hunter’s Mill intersecting with the Fox Mill Road that led to Frying Pan.

Melville phrases this place in ways an after-action report never could: “By worn-out fields they cantered on—Drear fields amid the woodlands wide; by cross-roads of some olden time, In which grew groves, by gatestones down—Grassed ruins of secluded pride: A strange lone land, long past the prime, Fit land for Mosby or for crime.”

A stanza later, at an interval when the 2nd Massachusetts could have been passing the Frying Pan church, a favorite target and assembly point for John Mosby, Melville describes, “Hard by, a chapel. Flower-pot mould danced and decayed the shaded roof; the porch was punk; the clapboards spanned with ruffled lichens gray or green; red coral-moss was not aloof; and mid dry leaves green dead-man’s-hand, Groped toward that chapel in Mosby-land.”

Melville’s journey into the heart of John Mosby’s Confederacy continues over 801 lines. Of these, 56, or nearly seven percent—an auspicious number for a casual poem—make explicit mention of woods, trees, leaves, thickets, or branches. 

It was, apparently, Melville’s seasoned judgement that one could not tell the story of the gray ghost without depicting the scenery that shielded the Confederate guerrilla from Federal raids. Melville probably said it best: “Maple and hemlock, beech and lime, are Mosby’s Confederates, share the crime.”

TWIN NARRATIVE

Symbiotic relationships between flora landscapes and John Mosby’s operations in Fairfax County represent a crucial linkage. Abundant hardwood timber and scrub brush or pine succeeding from previous land clearance efforts were the defining features of Difficult Run circa 1863. So too, these irregular groves were an important force multiplier for John Mosby and a motivator for locals who served with him.

This inextricable interrelation between people and forests long-preceded the outbreak of war. Understanding this long-standing co-evolution is an important pre-condition for grappling with Fairfax County during the 1860s. 

In the opening sections of the definitive Fairfax County, Virginia: A History, Donald Sweig contextualizes early colonial Virginia with a borrow from Richard Hofstader, in which the eminent historian recalls a 1750 account from a mariner who claimed to have smelled the sprawling pine forests of the Old Dominion as far as one hundred and eighty miles out to sea.²

Beth Mitchell, devoted Fairfax historian and expert student of early metes and bounds, titled her exhaustive study of colonial Fairfax County property lines “Beginning At A White Oak” in honor of the “king of kings” tree that served as the most common and prominent boundary marker for surveyors.³

This arbor-oriented thought was not a later graft, but a contemporaneous feature of the way the land was perceived and communicated. When a proposal emerged in 1789 to move the County Court House westwards from Alexandria to a point near modern Annandale, locals bemoaned the prospect of shifting the municipal institution “into the woods.”⁴

The move was a loaded proposition. Equal parts opportunity and obstacle. In a pre-modern world, forests were both asset and hindrance. 

An account from the late-17th century honed in on the labor-intensive raw forests of Virginia as a selling point to citizens of the Old World accustomed to the relative deforestation of their native land.

“So much timber have they that they build fences all around the land they cultivate. A man with fifty acres of ground, & others in proportion, will leave twenty-five wooded, & of the remaining twenty-five will cultivate half and keep the other as a pasture & paddock for his cattle. Four years later, he transfers his fences to this untilled half which meanwhile has had a period of rest and fertilization, & every year they put seeds in the ground they till. They sow wheat at the end of October and beginning of November, & corn at the end of April.”5

These forests and the nutrient-rich virgin soil they underlying them represented a tremendous prospect and a terrible burden. George Mason and other prominent landowners of Difficult Run property drew out prescriptive leases that stipulated tenants perform a variety of intensive upgrades to raw forest. The development and construction of fields, orchards, and tobacco barns all necessitated a huge outlay of calories and time.⁶

With this effort came an opportunity beyond crop yield. Old-growth hardwood harvested as a matter of necessity created a surplus of materials from which vernacular architecture and productive infrastructure sprouted. Forests quickly became houses, barns, distilleries, spring houses, outhouses, and miles of fencing. 

Traces of these process still exist in Fairfax County. 

Just south of the once-and-former Old Bad Road, otherwise known as Vale Road, the recently remodeled Squirrel Hill was first built with early-1700s hewn oak spline floors and rafters and a 1757 addition constructed primarily from chestnut.⁷

At Sully Plantation just south of Frying Pan, tulip poplar beaded siding harkens back to a history of abundant hardwood.⁸

Nearer still in both geography and chronology, George Waples III’s 20th century memoir, Country Boy Gone Soldiering, depicts the Upper Difficult Run valley being rich in chestnut trees. Waples specifies the iconic hardwood’s practical use as a farm instrument. “Those trees (chestnuts),” he wrote, “were also used for the rail fences throughout the south in the older times.”⁹

Locally-sourced, locally-processed, locally-utilized timber was likely the predominant pattern for early deforestation. In a region bountiful in old-growth timber, lands like Difficult Run that were poorly served by shoddy roads were unlikely to have fostered much interest for timber exporters. Instead, wood products probably stayed close to the areas from which they were harvested.

Adding complexity to the work-cost of these efforts was a lack of mechanical sawing capacity. The hand-sawn paradigm endured in Upper Difficult Run until the late-1780s when Amos Fox opened his titular mill.¹⁰ 

Fairfax historiography has a fixation with grain, which became the defining agricultural product of the 19th century. Historical narratives focus on the emergence of grifting capabilities at local mills while giving short shrift to the sawing operations that often co-occupied mill spaces with grist stones.¹¹

Fox’s Mill was known to have been fitted with a sawing operation in the first decade of the 1800s, but the substance of an 1802 lawsuit from neighbor Thomas Fairfax against Amos Fox’s son Morris suggests that extensive timber sawing occurred along Difficult Run beginning in the late 1790s. 

Fairfax took Fox to court for having illegally harvested a staggering amount of trees from the boundary between their two properties. The final tally was one thousand oaks, one thousand hickories, and one thousand other trees taken, amounting to a total of $6000 in damages.¹²

This is a staggering amount. Beyond the obvious work load of felling and milling three thousand trees, it is amazing that Thomas Fairfax didn’t notice the loss of timber until the pilfering had reached an immense scale. The case speaks to both a culture of absentee landlordism in Fairfax and the laxity with which timber resources were managed and adjudicated. 

In fact, trees—the defining natural feature of Western Fairfax County—were so common and undervalued as an asset that information about standing timber was a rare addendum to area real estate listings for the first three decades of the 19th century. 

When Ann Fox died in 1813, a listing for her property at Fox’s Mills included information about slaves, livestock, and even distilling equipment, but not a word about trees.¹³ When eight hundred acres of nearby property was advertised for sale in March of 1821, a similar silence surrounded the question of available timber.¹⁴ 

Simply, it was not important. 

TIMBER THRIVES IN PLAYED OUT LANDS

The apparent disinterest with which land brokers and investors treated timber in the early 19th century is an artifact of an interesting plateau in the relationship between humans of Fairfax County and their natural resources. 

After almost a century of extractive cultivation practices, the area was on the cusp of a crisis. “Frontier communities are, by their very nature, notorious exhausters of the soil,” writes agricultural historian Avery Odell Craven. Describing the economic pressures that shaped early colonial farms in Virginia, Craven elaborates, “the one crop with highest value in outside exchange, drives all other major crops from the fields.”¹⁵

In Fairfax and tidewater Virginia at large, tobacco was the definitive cash crop that pushed all other agricultural considerations aside, for a time. The soil simply could not support the degree of production encouraged by eager frontier Virginians who saw vast wealth in the endless horizons of virgin land. By 1800, tobacco was nearly played out as a cash crop in Fairfax County. The quality of what comparatively little broad leaf was grown paled in comparison to the harvests of a few years prior. 

With a quick stroke of ingenuity, Fairfax farmers replaced tobacco with wheat. Grain could be grown successfully on land too nutrient-sapped for tobacco.¹⁶ Alexandria quickly pivoted from tobacco hub to a leading wheat port. Those who segued into the new cash crop were handsomely rewarded as macroeconomic conditions in the Atlantic Basin created a strong international demand for Virginia grain. At its peak in 1811, Alexandria wheat merchants exported two million dollars worth of Virginia grain and flour.¹⁷

Many of the Civil War-era landmarks and much of the transportation infrastructure in Western Fairfax County was developed in the wheat years. Turnpikes were financed to bring Loudoun, Prince Willian, and Fauquier County granaries into alignment with Alexandria’s wharves. Innumerable mills represented enterprising attempts by savvy merchant middle men to intercept raw grain and process it for a premium. 

The defining ecological feature of the early wheat years was a continuance of tobacco-era land use strategies. For wheat as with its noxious leafy predecessor, trees were both hindrance to the plow and competition for sunlight. As Fairfax County farmers rode the wheat wave, it behooved them to seek out well-cleared, well-lit, and largely flat parcels of land that demanded the least amount of effort to bring a profitable crop to market. 

Hence, in 1813 flaunting available stands of timber in a real estate listing was not necessarily a wise strategy. 

As before, the market for this cash crop settled at more modest demand (and price) levels. A historic culture of over-production encouraged further soil exhaustion. Expensive sub-industries developed around practices designed to elongate plantability and increase yields.¹⁸ Clover and Timothy cover crops, gypsum soil-amendments, and the application of expensive, but effective Peruvian guano helped Fairfax wheat farmers continue producing wheat, but at a heightened cost. 

Large-scale gentlemen planters, like the owners of Sully Plantation, successfully kept their heads above water.¹⁹ Many others slipped into a cycle of asset liquidation and unceasing annual debt.²⁰

Plenty of Fairfax farmers could not keep up with either the debt nor the onerous burden of planting increasingly unproductive land. From 1800 to 1840, the County’s population fell by thirty percent.²¹

The economic panic of 1837 and a subsequent money shortage in 1842 capped off this precipitous decline with a liquidity crisis that pushed many owners of used-up land past the brink.²² Land in Fairfax County depreciated rapidly. Five to fifteen dollars was fair asking price for an acre. For comparison, the rate for a similarly sized plot of land in New York at the same time was between forty and seventy dollars.²³

As banking tumult and agricultural decline undercut the Fairfax farming community, timber suddenly began to factor heavily in real estate listings for land along Difficult Run.

Dogged by a lawsuit in the final year of his life, Fox Mill owner Gabriel Fox attempted to sell 203 acres of land along Difficult Run in January of 1843. Assurances that the property’s acreage was “a large proportion heavily timbered” figured prominently in the listing Gabriel took out in the Alexandria Gazette.²⁴

Three months later, the owner agents for a two hundred acre property located between Fox’s Mill and the Little River Turnpike promised would-be buyers that the “greater part” of the farm was in “heavy timber.”²⁵

“An ample quality of Wood and Timber” was the verbiage used to accompany the 1847 auction listing for a similarly sized plot of land west of Difficult Run near Frying Pan.²⁶

The inducement was clear. Gabriel Fox’s 1843 land listing put it most astutely: “timber will always find a ready sale at the Court House.”

For a community pinched in a liquidity crisis, timber represented an incredibly salable asset. Once harvested, timber became chattel. Like slaves, cut hardwood timber was one of the best liquid assets one could own in a monetary crisis. Easily sold, appreciating constantly, and requiring no upkeep—stands of old growth timber were a savvy way to convert existing resources into quick value.²⁷

As with tobacco and wheat before, microeconomies enveloped this fresh cash crop in tendrils of infrastructure that brought the resource to market. The 1850s found local investors and merchants reconfiguring to embrace and exploit this readily available timber into a network of demand. 

An 1853 announcement from timber dealers along Accotink Creek in Fairfax Court House emphasizes both the abundance of white oak and red cedar timber and its suitability for the “ship timber and plank, wharf timber, millwrights, or wheelwrights.”²⁸

Three years later, the Engineering Office for the then under-construction Alexandria, Loudoun, & Hampshire Railroad put out a public call for rail-road cross-ties “to be delivered in lots of about 2700 to each mile or section.” A hint at the available supply can be gleaned from the specificity of the request. The engineers sought only “perfectly sound White Oak, Post Oak, Chestnut Oak, Chestnut, or Locust timber, cut into lengths of 8 feet.”²⁹ Modern carpenters will never know what it feels like to be this picky.

The coup d’grace in this glut of hardwood timber pouring out of the Difficult Run area came from a disgraced English wool wholesaler named Benjamin Thornton. He and his brother skedaddled from their native land in the 1840s under duress from a cloud of accusations including forgery, the cashing of substantial amounts in bad checks, and general fraud. 

Thornton and his brother Joseph resurfaced in Fairfax County in 1852 with a new heap of investment capital and a vision for yet another crack at the merino wool industry. Having acquired 8,200 acres of prime forest land north of Lawyers Road in modern Reston, Benjamin Thornton apparently had a business epiphany. Sheep generally require pastureland and hardwood tree canopy generally precludes good grazing foliage. Benjamin Thornton identified an important opportunity as he cleared his land of oaks.³⁰ 

An 1857 profile in the Alexandria Gazette marks the departure of the brig Wabash from Alexandria with “a cargo of 300 sons ships timber, shipped by Benjamin Thornton, esq. of Fairfax County, who has yet about 3000 tons for the same destination.” 

Though Thornton was well-situated to exploit what the Alexandria Gazette called “the great scarcity (of timber) on the other side of the water,” he was not alone. The author concluded the piece by describing a network of Alexandria-aligned woodsmen who “for a year or two past…have been engaged in cutting timber and shipping it to the eastern markets, where it finds ready sale and pays a handsome profit.”³¹

Thornton initially used the Potomac canal to transport his timber to Alexandria. That changed in 1858 when the oak-rail hungry Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad began operations. Both Benjamin Thornton’s milling complex and Hunter’s Mill enjoyed stations that were no doubt planned into the rail route by virtue of the wealth of timber that was rolling out of Difficult Run by those points.³²

A few short years before the outbreak of war, an authentic boom was taking place along Upper Difficult Run. All of the important preconditions had been satisfied. An existing and previously undervalued resource was identified. Domestic and international markets emerged. Infrastructure developed. 

By the time a fresh national liquidity crisis emerged with the Panic of 1857, savvy landowners and eager speculators were already trading in a robust real estate market symbiosis premised on the value of timber leases.³³

An 1856 advertisement for the sale of one hundred and ninety seven acres of land near Frying Pan began by addressing the target audience: “TO WOOD AND TIMBER GETTERS.” The prime selling point was a tract “very HEAVILY TIMBERED with oak and pine of large size.” Ad copy quickly doubled back to business-minded woodsman. “Wood and timber getters are particularly invited to view this property,” the broker opined, “as property so suitable to their purposes is seldom offered in market.”³⁴

That same year, real estate investor MC Klein sold two tracts of adjoining land on Difficult Run just north of Fox’s Mills and south of Old Bad Road. A familiar pitch centered on the value of the trees that crowded the creek basin. The ad that Klein and business partner James Love ran in the Alexandria Gazette pointedly described the land as “bounded on the west by Difficult Run, on which there are Merchant Saw-MIlls of convenient access; also, abundantly supplied with timber of original growth.”³⁵

This amounted to a turn-key business proposition. Buy the land that has the trees, fell the trees, and then drag them south along Difficult Run to Fox’s Mills or north to Hawxhurst’s Mill where you can convert the trees into supplies or specie. 

Alexandria-based land speculators John and Wilmer Corse (younger brothers, incidentally, to Montgomery D. Corse—commander of the 17th Virginia Infantry and eventual skipper of George Pickett’s “lucky” fourth brigade that spent the Third of July, 1863 guarding the railroad at Hanover Junction rather than storming Cemetery Ridge), coined a phrase that appeared time and time again in late-1850’s advertisements for tracts of land in Western Fairfax County. 

Quoth the brothers Corse: “There could be wood and timber enough sold off this place to pay more than the price asked for it.”³⁶

More than a fad, the timber investment mentality had weight to it. By 1860, major lenders and investors like Tom Love, his son James Love, Lee Monroe, and Joshua Coffer Gunnell, had purchased large tracts of land on or abutting the upper Difficult Run Basin.³⁷

FORESTS AT WAR

To say that the Upper Difficult Run has been overlooked in Civil War historiography would be an understatement. With a few choice exceptions, it has been neglected entirely. The National Park Service knows with a degree of certainty where the wood lines were at Gettysburg, but a similarly rigorous understanding of the landscape jacketing the creek beds and undulating hills north of the Little River Turnpike has likely been lost to history. 

We’re left to reconstruct the wartime ecology from a hodge podge of sources ranging from tax records and real estate announcements to post-war accounts of land use and aerial surveys conducted seventy years ex post facto. What emerges is a landscape marbled with cultivated farmland and dense timber. Neither fully virgin forest nor rolling wheat fields, Difficult Run was a patchwork culmination of a century or more of extraction and processing practices writ large on the land. 

The 1870 agricultural census attests to mixed ratios of woodland and improved land. Along the Little River Turnpike and west of Fox’s Mill, one substantial tract enjoyed thirty cleared acres set amongst three hundred acres of trees. Across from today’s Waples Mill Elementary School, two hundred improved acres encircled sixty two timber acres. The area around Fox’s Mill was just about a fifty-fifty split. The modern intersection of Vale and Fox Mill Roads was similarly disposed. North of Fox’s Mill in the Difficult Run valley across from the property that MC Klein listed in 1856, John Fox paid taxes on two hundred and seventy five wooded acres in 1870.³⁸

Other such documents corroborate the abundance of timber on Difficult Run in the years after the war. 

A July 1867 real estate transaction between Thomas Lee and the new owner of Fox’s Mill, Henry Waple, yielded a prolonged legal dispute centered around disputed acreage that was “being in timber.” It’s clear that there was a belt of timber at least twelve acres large east of Difficult Run and spread between the road to Fox’s Mill and Fox’s Lower Mill to the north.³⁹

Just across Difficult Run, James Fox’s farm went to auction in 1877. The land was described as “well wooded.”⁴⁰ Identical verbiage was used as enticement in the auction announcement for an 87 1/2 acre farm “near Fox’s old mill” the following year.⁴¹

In 1881, the 617 acre Whited Tract south of Lawyers Road and west of Hunter’s Mill Road went to market as a “valuable tract of TIMBER LAND.”⁴² 

Not only was the market for timber intact in the decades after the war, but the supply was still available. Timber of the quality advertised here could not have sprouted magically in the interregnum between Appomattox and 1881. These valuable trees were surely in place and fully grown during the war years.

Stands of old-growth investment trees were only part of the equation. Extensive early colonization and especially tobacco cultivation on the sandy-soiled floodplains of Difficult Run likely established a succession regime of impenetrable undergrowth. Much of the Lawyers Road line—an early colonial corridor for both transit and homesteading—was known to be densely thicketed during the war.⁴³

Students of the Civil War in the east might recognize this description of thick undergrowth thriving where primary growth trees had been clear cut previously. The Wilderness in Spotsylvania County similarly beguiled fighting men of both armies who were pushed to the tactical brink by vision-obscuring brambles and bushes.⁴⁴

Interestingly, the Wilderness was the product of patterned deforestation beginning in the late 1830s and accelerating into the 1840s with the establishment of a smelting operation at the Catherine Furnace. Trees were felled and burned to feed the pig iron fires at the facility on a scale and timeline that matches the emergence of timber production in the Difficult Run Basin.

The comparison is worth pondering. As Melville plainly describes, dense foliage unsuitable for fighting sounds consistent with a mini-Wilderness within Difficult Run. 

ENTER MOSBY

John Mosby found his way through the forest of Difficult Run during the first winter of the war. On February 12, 1862, then Private John Mosby was on picket duty in Fairfax Court House when JEB Stuart ordered Captain William Blackford to detail Mosby on a curious mission. The future partisan was tasked with accompanying “two young ladies living at Fairfax Court House, acquaintances of his (Stuart) had arranged to send them to the house of a friend near Fryingpan.”⁴⁵ These women were likely the cousins Antonia Ford and Laura Ratcliffe who became frequent companions and admirers of Stuart. 

On that February night, Mosby likely ferried the women along today’s Waples Mill and West Ox Roads. A prominent local roadway at the time of the war, it was also the most direct avenue between the two points. This route would have taken the party within a stone’s throw of Fox’s Mill and throw the hardwood forests that crowded the banks of Difficult Run at Fox’s Ford. 

Mosby would be back, and soon. In the last days of August 1862 as Confederate and Federal forces brawled on the plains of Manassas southwest of Difficult Run, Mosby was fulfilling his duties as one of JEB Stuart’s most renowned scouts. Nervous Yankee farmers who were living in Fairfax County despite the ebb and flow of hostile forces sensed a new hazard. On August 28, Alexander Haight of Sully Plantation decided to flee to the safety of Union lines. 

John Mosby and a squad of Confederate cavalry interrupted Haight’s flight from Fairfax at the corner of the Chain Bridge and Hunter Mill Roads in modern day Oakton. At the iconic oak from which the town derived its name, Mosby asked Haight for his papers. Haight handed over the documents and spurred his horse on a mad dash for freedom. He escaped safely despite having to dodge seven pistol shots.

Mosby returned again four months later as the vanguard of a JEB Stuart raid that targeted Federal stores at Fairfax Station before escaping via the Hunter Mill Road/Frying Pan axis. As the Confederate force rode through Vienna, they captured “a large number of ‘contrabands’ engaged in felling timber in the neighborhood of Vienna.”⁴⁶

A few hours after intercepting an illicit deforesting operation conducted by freed slaves, Stuart signaled to Mosby his intention to establish the young scout as an independent partisan ranger.⁴⁷

It is little wonder that Mosby returned to the forested roads he had scouted over the prior two years. The belt of trees between Frying Pan and Vienna satisfied both conditions essential for John Mosby’s success. These forests were laced with little used paths—some ancient, others more recent, such as the timber skids that surely connected property’s like MC Klein’s to the adjoining commercial saw mills. So too, these little used paths connected plots of land that were home to families that were sympathetic or supportive of the Confederate cause. 

The sons of these families swelled the ranks of Mosby’s Rangers and augmented the command with an encyclopedic knowledge of paths connecting mills to markets, highways to shunpikes. By no coincidence, an overwhelming number of Rangers from Difficult Run were connected to the timber industry. 

The forest ecology was also an economy and that economic/ecologic guild was the lifeblood of Confederate families in the basin. 

As sons of the family that owned a significant sawmill, Ranger Lieutenant Frank Fox and his younger brother, Private Charles Albert Fox, benefited from an obvious connection to healthy timber resources. Their brother-in-law, Jack Barnes, not only married into a milling family, but had inherited his own mill on Pope’s Head Creek. Their neighbor, Jim Gunnell, became a professional charcoal producer after the war.⁴⁸ 

Just up the road, neighbor and early ranger enlistee Minor Thompson was a carpenter by trade. Still other neighbors, the Trammell family, benefited from the Hunter Mill timber economy. Deepening their ties to that economic sphere was the marriage of Margaret Trammell to woodsman John Underwood. 

It was said of Underwood that he knew paths even rabbits hadn’t found.⁴⁹ Described as a native of the Frying Pan area, Underwood likely worked the timber belt near the Thornton holdings north of Lawyers Road. As a favorite scout for John Mosby in 1863, Underwood converted his former workplace into a maneuver corridor and ambush venue.⁵⁰

MOTIVATION BY THE CORD

In retrospect, secessionist thought feels like an automatic product of Southern identity. We allow ourselves to assume these sentiments were the prime motivators for Confederate service. It’s important to consider that the economic and ecologic context of their lives inspired a deeper practicality. 

For men who were tied to the forests of the Upper Difficult Run Basin, independence meant safeguarding one’s family and one’s livelihood. Regular Confederate service could satisfy some abstract sense of protecting the South from the Yankees, but the reality of Civil War armies and the nature of logistics in the conflict could potentially have inspired men connected with the local timber industry to pursue a special pragmatism. 

Civil War armies consumed resources at prodigious levels. More than food or gunpowder, brigades of men ate trees and wood. One estimate puts the rate of wood consumption at 400,000 acres of trees used per year of the war amounting to two million acres of trees used by the end of the conflict.⁵¹

Fairfax County, Virginia saw the worst of this process. The post-war landscape resembled a “prairie” devoid of trees and structures.⁵² An account of wartime Fairfax Court House printed in the New York Times painted a similarly bleak portrait of the landscape: “Farms and orchards have been made into common roads, fruit trees are uprooted, forest burned, fences destroyed, and the whole country presents a melancholy air.”⁵³

Local records from the post-war Southern Claims Commission further attest to the scale of timber and timber products consume during the war. William Ansley of Flint Hill had an entire home consumed for firewood as well as 5000 yards of fencing. Josiah Bowman, who lived on a hill overlooking the Union cavalry camp at Vienna, claimed 2000 shingles, 38,334 rail stakes, 10,000 rail posts and 3,254 cords of wood. Flint Hill’s Squire Millard lost a paltry two cords of timber, 1467 rails and 2705 cords of wood on top of the loss of a 30’x40’ wood barn and a dwelling house that were consumed for fire wood.⁵⁴ All taken by the Army of the Potomac.

No matter the affiliation, an army occupation had the potential to eat away a literal fortune worth of resources. A passing two week interlude of camp life near Difficult Run could erode the prospects of secessionist farmers and woodsmen for a generation to come. If the South won the war, but locals lost all of their timber, would they still be victorious? 

By December 1, 1863, the Confederate army had occupied the area around Difficult Run twice and the Army of the Potomac had been through three times. Worse yet, the “contraband” free slaves that JEB Stuart and his men captured near Vienna in late December of 1863 were symptomatic of a larger deforestation effort. On August 18, 1864, Lt. Col. Benjamin Alexander, Chief of Engineers for the Military District South of the Potomac, provided an insight to the sourcing efforts that provided timber assets to the prodigious fort-building efforts around Washington, D.C.

Alexander wrote, “We are again in want of a considerable quantity of timber and abates for the works South of the Potomac. That obtained from vicinity of Vienna last spring will be exhausted by the structures in progress at Fort Wards and Fort Ellsworth.”⁵⁵ In this case, “last spring” would indicate a time frame of Federal timbering in Vienna at some point early in 1863—precisely the time that John Mosby arrived and local men joined his efforts. This immediate pressure to valuable timber reserves cannot be understated in the motivational matrix for local Confederate rangers.

It behooved locals to assert control over the landscape by turning the basin into a no-go zone for marauding Yankees and an area whose challenging landscape and absence of enemy threats would not encourage the presence of a mainline Confederate unit. Whether intentional or not, zealous partisan warfare was possibly the smartest strategy for ensuring valuable timber remained at war’s end.

As the 1870 agricultural census and post-war real estate listings attest, the abundant timber along Old Bad Road survived the war. Fairfax County rebuilt in the ensuing decades. The many burned fence posts, railings, and structures were replaced with freshly hewn timber that was processed at places like Waples Mill, as Fox’s Mill came to be known after it was reopened in 1867.

The fact that a commercial saw mill was able to sustain business within two years of Appomattox hints at the degree of timbering occurring in the basin. Fifteen years later, the Vale area (where modern Vale and Fox Mill Roads intersect) was known as a hub for charcoal production.⁵⁶ Charcoaling was typically a follow-up industry that rode the coattails of broad-scale timber harvesting to convert unsatisfactory wood products into a viable fuel product. 

With an abundant supply of timber and eager local markets for both wood products and charcoal, the extensive scale of deforestation along the route once known as Old Bad Road is easy to express. In 1964, County Planner Rosser Payne connected the success of previous charcoaling endeavors to the lack of large trees in the land north of Vale Road.⁵⁷ 

Timber sustained Difficult Run after the war as it had before. This economic incentive presents important context to the area’s role in the Civil War. Mosby’s war in Fairfax County and the fervor with which he occupied and manipulated the land along Difficult Run created a symbiotic strategy. Mosby could terrorize and maraud against Federal forces while local men could preserve an asset by fostering an enduring notion that the basin was a place best left alone. 

Though woodland assets enriched the community in the wake of the conflict, this success was purchased at cost. Frank Fox and John Underwood—men whose economic identities were premised on preserving productive woodland—did not live to benefit from the arrangement. Minor Thompson’s younger brother William did not survive to partake in his brother’s post-Appomattox successes. Still others were tarnished by diseases contracted in service or the physical toll of prolonged time spent in Federal POW camps. 

Human cost aside, it’s essential to consider the potent confluence of ecology and microeconomics that preceded, potentially motivated, and likely sustained guerrilla warfare on Difficult Run.

A CENTURY LATER

In a curious twist of synchronicity, the same area where a blend of forest and motivated locals played host to a successful guerrilla campaign provided a venue for an important chapter in 20th century counter insurgency.

One hundred years after John Mosby infiltrated Difficult Run, a state department employee named Robert Hilsman rode out to Hickory Hill—a tony house off Chain Bridge Road north of Vienna. Fresh from Vietnam, Hilsman pitched then Attorney General RFK on a group of strategies designed to eradicate communist Vietnamese guerrillas who fought not unlike Mosby had a century before.⁵⁸

Prominent in this package was a program named Strategic Hamlets in which rural civilian Vietnamese were to be removed from the countryside and concentrated in more developed areas that could not hide guerrilla fighters. The less well-publicized corollary to this project was still another initiative, this one more sinister. 

Instituted the same year as Strategic Hamlets, Operation Ranch Hand pursued the systematic deforestation of the Vietnamese landscape by chemical amendment. Incredibly toxic, this broad scale ecocide has reverberated in the genetics of all the Vietnamese and Americans who—unwittingly or not—participated in it.⁵⁹ 

On the ridge overlooking Difficult Run, a latter-day Phil Sheridan in bureaucratic garb was attempting to process lessons learned during the Civil War. The only imaginable way to win against the VC was to parse the insurgents from the population and peel away the ecology that sheltered them both. 

The key to victory in Vietnam was well known to Herman Melville and the Federal troopers with whom he rode through Difficult Run in 1864: there would be no war without the trees.

SOURCES

1. Melville, Herman. “The Scout Toward Aldie.” In Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, DeCapo Press, 1995. Published via American Battlefield Trust. https://battlefields.org/learn/articles/scout-toward-aldie-herman-melville 

2. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 58.

3. Mitchell, Beth. Beginning At A White Oak. Fairfax: Fairfax County Administrative Services, 1977. P. 9. 

4. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 43.

5. Durand de Dauphine, A Huguenot Exile in Virginia, or Voyages of a Frenchman exiled for his Religion with a description of Virginia and Maryland, (Gilbert Chinard, editor), The Press of the Pioneers, New York, 1934, p. 117. As cited on “Colonial Agriculture in Virginia” at virginiaplaces.org.

6. Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. P. 14. 

7. Joe Reeder Interview. Conducted with Jason Hampel at Squirrel Hill sometime in 2013. Video provided by Jason Hampel. 

8. Gamble, Robert S. Sully: The Biography of a House. Chantilly: Sully Foundation, 1973. p. 163.

9. Waple, George Henry, III. Country Boy Gone Soldiering. Bookman Publishing, 2004. p. 37. 

10. Lundegard, Marjorie. “Mills and Mill Sites in Fairfax County, Virginia and Washington, DC.” Society for the Preservation of Old Mills Mid-Atlantic Chapter (August 10, 2009). https://spoommidatlantic.org/uploads/editor/files/Mid-Atlantic_Mills/Fairfax_County%2526_DC_Mills-Book-5-8-2009.pdf p. 23. 

11. Zimiles, Martha, and Murray Zimiles. Early American Mills. New York City: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973. p. 51. 

12. Court Case 523. Fox Morris 1119 13 May 1802 NN Z: 185. Box 1, Folder 7: Research Notes, Deeds, Tax Records & Cemeteries, 1969. Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library.

13. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> August 10, 1813. p. 1, col. 4. 

14. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> March 6, 1821. p. 3, col. 3. 

15. Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. p. 19-20.

16. ibid 68.

17. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 184-185.

18. Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. p. 94.

19. Gamble, Robert S. Sully: The Biography of a House. Chantilly: Sully Foundation, 1973. p. 78.

20. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. p. 89.

21. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 184-185.

22. ibid 261.

23. Abbott, Richard H. “Yankee Farmers in Northern Virginia, 1840-1860.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76, no. 1 (1968): 56-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4247368

24. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> January 18, 1843. p. 3, col. 6. 

25. Fairfax Gazette. Virginia Chronicle: Library of Virginia. <https://virginiachronicle.com> Vol. 1, Number 4, 25 April 1843. P. 1, col. 3. 

26. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> February 10, 1847. p. 1, col. 6. 

27. R.H.P. “Timber Deeds in Virginia.” Virginia Law Review 37, no. 6 (1951): 885-99. https://doi.org/10.2307/1069334

28. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> July 20, 1853. p. 2, col. 7. 

29. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> February 1, 1856. p. 3, col. 2. 

30. “Benjamin Thornton, Joseph Thornton, & Samuel Stead: English Rascals, Vienna-Area Landowners.” Vienna Virginia History. September 5, 2022. Https://viennavahistory.com/2022/09/05/benjamin-thornton-joseph-thornton-samuel-stead-english-rascals-vienna-area-landowners/

31. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> July 10, 1857. P. 3, col. 3. 

32. Harwood, Jr., H.H., Rails to the Blue Ridge. Falls Church: Pioneer America Society, 1969. p. 2-3.

33. Huston, James L. The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. p. 70-71.

34. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> November 13, 1856. P. 3, col. 6.

35. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> March 3, 1856. P. 3, col. 7. 

36. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> December 25, 1858. P. 3, col. 6. 

37. Gunnell owned a good chunk of Ox Hill from Ox Junction to the Little River Turnpike and east to a point roughly coinciding to the eastern boundary of today’s Penderbrook golf course. An account penned by Colonel AJ Grigsby of Winder’s Confederate Brigade described this area as “a densely-wooded crest.” The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. <https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/war-rebellion-official-records-civil-war> Serial 027 Page 1010 “OPERATIONS IN N.VA., W.VA., MD., AND PA.” Chapter XXXI.

38. United States Agricultural Census 1870. ancestry.com. <https://ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/> Fairfax County.

39. Fairfax Co., 1880-017, Cff102J. Chancery Records Index. Virginia Memory—Library of Virginia. <https://lva.virginia.gov/chancery/>

40. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> September 24, 1877. P. 3, col. 6. 

41. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> March 15, 1878. P. 3, col. 6. 

42. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> August 26, 1881. P. 1, col. 3. 

43. O’Neill, Robert F. Chasing Jeb Stuart and John Mosby. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2012. p. 207. 

44. Stackpole, Gen. Edward J. Chancellorsville. Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1988. P. 101-102.

45. Mosby, John Singleton. Reminiscences. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1887. P. 19.

46. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> January 2, 1863. P. 2, col. 1. 

47. Keen, Hugh C. And Horace Mewborn. 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry Mosby’s Command. Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc, 1993. p. 6. 

48. Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. p. 63.

49. Jones, Virgil Carrington. Ranger Mosby. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944. p. 90. 

50. O’Neill, Robert F. Chasing Jeb Stuart and John Mosby. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2012. P. 207. 

51. Nelson, Megan Kate. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. p. 104-120. As cited in Boutin, Cameron. “The Roles of Natural Environments in the American Civil War.” Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History, Vol. 5, Issue 2. 2015. 

52. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 371. 

53. Johnson II, William Page. “McClellan at Fairfax Court House: First Advance of Army of the Potomac.” The Fare Facs Gazette 9, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1-17. https://historicfairfax.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/HFCI91-2012.pdf 

54. Southern Claims Commission Records. ancestry.com. <https://ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/

55. Crouch, Howard R. “A Virginia Artillery Camp at Centreville, Virginia.” HSFC Yearbook 19 (1983): 65-71. https://archive.org/details/hsfc-yearbook-volume-19

56. Joe Reeder Interview. Conducted with Jason Hampel at Squirrel Hill sometime in 2013. Video provided by Jason Hampel. 

57. Box 1, Folder 3: “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult.” 1991-1995. Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library.

58. Friedman, Andrew. Covert Capital. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. p. 94. 

59. Buckingham, William A, Jr. The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia: 1961-1971. Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1982. https://nal.usda.gov/sites/default/files/agent-orange/04154.pdf p. 72. 

TL;DR–Places are always constructed and dynamic, never stationary, and rarely purely natural.

It’s easy to forget that the Civil War was fought on a planet spinning at a thousand miles an hour while it hurtled through space going 67,000 miles per hour around the sun. 

Our civil war is a hyper object—a massive thing that weighs heavily against the fabric of history. The minutiae of the conflict and its broad scope represent immense challenges to subject mastery.¹ We struggle to get our arms around the whole thing. Many—myself included—choose to pick apart tiny corners of the thing to get even the smallest taste of understanding. 

Fashioning the amorphous flood of sources and sentiments that fed into, crystallized, and erupted from the war years has occupied the efforts of generations’ worth of historians far more talented than I. Standing on their shoulders affords an opportunity to step back and question a necessary evil of Civil War historiography.

For simplicity’s sake, much of history is built on the assumption that historical subjects are actors on a stationary stage. They deliver their lines and act out their arcs. We applaud or hiss. The theater remains roughly the same. The boards that absorb so much shoe leather wear out in place. We can predict where the curtain will fall and where all the exits are. 

The existing stable state model is brilliant in use cases where it’s appropriate to obsess over the events of a single afternoon. As soon as you begin to wonder about longer stretches of time, a certain uneasy shifting can be felt beneath the feet. This is seasickness; a deep understanding that you are in motion married to a constructed conviction that you remain in place.

Maybe this explains why Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote were content to follow the armies through the war. The momentum of retrograde maneuvers and brave advances masks the nauseating churn of life in a dynamic world. 

I am not so lucky. My area of expertise belongs less to the soothing swing of great campaigns and more to the queasy undulations of an idea called place. 

Grappling with a fragment of a watershed—thirteen square miles of uncelebrated creek valley, forest, and thicket in Northern Virginia—invites the frequent use of the single most destabilizing word in the English language: why. 

Why did roads appear? Why did populations concentrate where they did? Why have people been drawn to this place for thousands of years? Why does this valley rarely appear in histories of the Civil War? Why is there mounting evidence that this place nonetheless figured prominently in the conflict? 

The simple answer is also the most compelling: it’s complex. 

All places are complex. Any attempt to argue otherwise is futile and foolish. This also explains why we avoid wrestling with the complexity of place when we tell stories. Simplicity in setting foregrounds humans and magnifies their agency. We are a vain species, after all. One that loves telling stories about ourselves. Sharing the limelight with the inanimate has never been our forte. 

Personally, I think the time is right to invert that pattern. In an age of influencers and celebrity-worship, it can feel cathartic to decenter people from narratives. Besides, we live in the Anthropocene where we’re keenly aware of our impact on the natural world. So too, the increasing litany of catastrophic and unprecedented natural disasters invites a dialogue that frames the world as an ecosystem of phenomena and not necessarily a hierarchy with humanity sitting tall on top. 

I want to share the framework I’ve explored as both corollary and necessary precondition to studying the place where I was raised. Like Deleuze and Guattari offer in “Of the Refrain,” “what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is itself mobile.” Let’s stand still together for a second and let the world spin around us.² 

Somersaulting Through Time

In a letter from December 1817, John Keats credited Shakespeare’s success to an esoteric psychological skill set that could be useful for our purposes. “I mean negative capability,” Keats wrote, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”³

Negative capability—the ability to embrace uncertainty and allow contradicting impulses to exist side by side without feeling the need to subordinate one beneath the other—is valuable when considering places. 

The Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation advises that “a landscape is a collection of related landforms.”⁴ A monolithic face fractures into many smaller components upon closer inspection. Still deeper analysis reveals a wide variety of constituent parts therein: rocks and plants and animals. All of which have different properties that respond to one another in different ways. Over a long enough timeline, higher level forces like tectonics or climate cause these supposedly inert forms to collide and act upon each other. 

Systems of systems is probably the best way to put it, because living and non-living facets of the natural world that share spaces adapt or conform to one another in interesting ways that support or squash certain modes of life. Other groupings flourish nearby and the adjacencies where they collide—the infinitely prolific ecotones—incubate still other forms of life. There is an inexpressible complexity to this physical world.

At a raw level of first nature set to the tempos of deep time where the impact of humankind is barely a trifling concern, our complex world and its many landscapes express a dynamic equilibrium. There is no single story or narrative that can render these spaces in high-fidelity. Instead, it’s worth considering that the supposedly straight forward track of natural systems is actually the mean tally of the contradictory net forces pushing against one another to constitute that place. Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis put it best whey they describe systems as gyroscopic shock absorbers that find balance by “adapting to a continuous pull in opposing directions.”⁵

This alone might be enough to challenge preconceptions about the stage upon which human events play out, but this model of dynamic equilibrium needs to be augmented and amplified before it’s sufficient. Assuming that nature is a closed loop neglects an impactful force on the world: human agency. 

Landscape phenomenologist Christopher Tilley describes the deceptively invisible and impactful human/nature interfaces that exist in every place. Says Tilley, “A centered and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-human environment.”⁶

Murray Bookchin offered a version of these same ideas wrapped in the more conversational shorthand of social ecology. Bookchin’s theories elaborate on models depicting a sum of processes shaping the natural world by suggesting that human processes entangle themselves with the natural world. This social dynamic finds abstract patterns like philosophy, culture, cosmology, psychology, and economics honing concrete behaviors like agriculture, land use, building science, infrastructural development, and transportation that both act upon the physical world and are acted upon by this same material world in kind.⁷

Just as succession patterns and system stabilizing responses in the natural world channel the reverberations of impactful events in the distant past, human processes focus, interpret, and sublimate a long dependency chain of perceived pasts. 

For better or for worse. Often these pasts are not entirely pleasant. Yesterday’s tragedies have a way of becoming the bone broth starter for the soupy morass we humans float through today.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk offers scientific proof of an intuitively understood phenomenon, by which trauma lives in the body of the traumatized. “Long after the actual event has passed,” says Van Der Kolk, “the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.”⁸ 

These signals are powerful enough that they do not die with the body, but communicate downwards by genetic inheritance through the branches of the family tree. What one acutely self-aware sufferer might recognize as an inorganic behavior learned by a person to overcome a traumatic event has the potential to propagate, broaden, and ultimately crystallize from an informal reaction into a rigid cultural form. 

Thomas Moynihan elaborates a particularly bleak take away from this mode of thinking that bridges epigenetic behavior with long term physiological evolution. In Spinal Catastrophism, Moynihan postulates that the human neural system itself is a refined pattern of pain responses. Moynihan eventually asks a question designed to draw electric pangs of anxiety from the sacrum up to the brain stem: “What is a spine and a brain other than a way for trauma to enter into self-relation and to recollects its history?”⁹

If this reactive, solipsistic, long-suffering articulation of trauma shapes behaviors that ultimately pour into relationships with and on space, it is not alone. In one of his more cogent and conciliatory passages, Nick Land pours the foundations for a model of earth history he coins “geotrauma.” Here, ancient catastrophes ripple forwards in time and leave marks on the natural world in much the same way human history sears itself into generations of homo sapiens. 

“Fast forward seismology,” Land quips, “and you hear the earth scream.”¹⁰

These traumatic ecologies—be they natural or humanistic—have become the subject of intense inquiry under the auspices of Chaos Theory. A sub-sect of which obsesses over “complex adaptive systems.” This school of non-linearity eschews the idea that world dynamics achieve a laminar forward flow. As if to borrow from the dynamic model, complex adaptive systems study the push and pull of contradictory forces that nudge, shove, or draw systems—including geologic landscapes, biomes, and human societies—into “basins of attraction” that are intensely sensitive to initial conditions. Crucially, a sensitivity to yesteryear’s horror, be it the collision of continents or the Thirty Years War, affects the properties that emerge when all this complexity stews together.¹¹

Suddenly the static stage has absorbed all of human history as a mere foot lamp in a higher drama with huge arcing feedback loops and possibilities for tectonic ruptures. It’s almost too much to handle. Our world has been and continues to be shaped by energetic and often painful cross-currents that resemble more the sheer patterns and shifting track models of a hurricane than the steady simplicity of a road map.

The easiest way to begin to come to grips with the immensity of potentials from which our spatially-rooted existence has been carved is to consider its most accessible expression: place. As Susanne Kuchler theorizes, landscape is memory.¹² For an astute observer staggering beneath the existential weight of complex trauma that informs our world, braiding these forces in an understanding of place can be a tremendous relief.

The earth is striated and scarred. It has been plotted, carved up, extracted from, augmented, folded, flooded, and burned in ways that bear silent testament to intensely intriguing and immensely concerning narratives of both nature and mankind.

Interpreting this world requires a change in language to accompany a change in perspective. Gone are the actors from the old stage. In their place, we struggle to articulate a vomitorium of effects: variability, resilience, persistence, resistance, sensitivity, surprise, possibility, aspiration, colonization, erosion, weathering, wasting, and cohesion. This is the language of complex places. A phraseology of slippery focus where man and its domain cannot be fully separated from one another. 

Perceptive Divide

These negotiations are rough as is. Taking spaces for granted only to have some blogger inculcate you into a deep time network of complex power dynamics is its own trauma.

Unfortunately, we haven’t gone far enough yet.

If we perceive place as a system of contradictory impulses negotiating itself, we owe it to ourselves to reconcile how similarly ambiguous interpretations buck consensus in the way humans see landscapes and negotiate their meaning. 

Dickering about the when and where in natural histories demands that we quibble about the how and why in human perception. Like Heraclitus and his river, the species never produces the same mind twice. Rarely do two humans who have not been coerced into agreement by media of some form achieve natural consensus on their own. 

As discussed previously, the thinking, perceiving brain is not a zero-degree device that enters the world free from bias. Thousands of years of ancestral experience leave fingerprints on our gray matter. So too, the earliest circumstances can drastically affect vision. Would Ted Kaczynski have become the Unabomber if he hadn’t have been put in full hospital isolation at nine months old? Could we have avoided the Holocaust if someone had just validated Adolf Hitler’s greeting card art? These are contingent, but important considerations.

In “The Beholding Eye,” D.W. Meinig connects the panoply of potential human perceptions to the all-important locus of place. Frameworks from the aesthetic to the historical to basic survival became archetypal relationships between mankind and its surroundings for Meinig, who prefaces the essay by offering wisely that “the individuality of places is a fundamental characteristic of subtle and immense importance to life on earth, that all human events take place, all problems are anchored in place, and ultimately can only be understood in such terms.”¹³

With so many adventures to choose between, Meinig accounts for the somersaulting variability of self-reference with which humans of similar backgrounds and shared geographies can embody so many divergent ideas about their habitat. Nostalgia, progressivism and barren doom co-exist with opportunism, radical indifference, and a blissful concept of infinite bounty in simultaneous and complex interrelationships. 

Put simply: there is no single consensus, no exclusive ownership over the interpretation of place. Instead, another degree of complexity emerges in the form of parallax. Two people can look at the same place and have entirely different interpretations. Yikes. 

An excellent example looms large in Fairfax County, Virginia, where a team of preservationists fought doggedly in the late-1980s against Jack Herrity, the development-inclined Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, to save the Chantilly Battlefield. Herrity saw the place’s highest and best use as a shopping mall while Ed Wenzel and Bud Hall felt the battlefield deserved preservation. You can guess where my allegiances fall. Even two decades later, people with whom I grew up and shared an identical education with felt very differently than I. Go figure.

Inevitable conflict between perceptions of purpose for place spill over into ruptures of scale. We delimit place and its processes in curious ways that are not uniform. This, in turn, begs another layer of complexity—time. 

In what remains an avant garde curiosity deep in the complex adaptive system of historiography, Reinhart Koselleck bandied about the idea that continuity and rupture coexisted within recurring structures and phenomena of perceived time. The long and the short of his offering was that differing ideologies produced different awareness of temporal position. This accounts for the aching laments of people who perceive themselves as having been born too late or too soon or those who feel either bored to tears by their age or utterly frightened by its rapidity.¹⁴ 

The stratified temporal angle is important, because time is inherently bounded in space. If an ideology or inherited mentality can shape the way we understand the tempo and hour of our existence, it can surely translate into important variations in the way people perceive the vessel of time: place. 

Storms of interdependent complexity that surround places are more than heady abstractions. They are productive, constitutive, definitive mechanisms for concrete things. Like a loom, human and natural systems interweave to create a geographic fabric in which history appears as flecks of color or texture. 

The trick is to read the often confusing, if beautiful, patterns that splash and run across so much warp and weft. Magma cools and butts upwards before continents collide and bake the earth into a soil form that favors melting away against the last tendrils of glaciation so that a valley of alluvial soil set amongst calorie-rich acorn forests unfolds beneath a seam of white quartz suitable for the creation of hand tools, which was set at a confluence of ridges that became roads that later ushered a group of tobacco farmers down into that deep cut valley where they eventually learned to produce wheat before shepherding timber and sheep that their sons killed enthusiastically to preserve before the forests became fields for dairy and the fields became homes for people who used rare earth to make machines talk to one another—each successive generation interpreting and extracting from this same place. 

Or at least that’s how I see it, because these same complex processes that have loomed the varied threads of Difficult Run together over millennia have woven me in place as well. This final conceit is the most important. I, too, am a complex person who is the product of a complex place. My genetic and cultural inheritance informs the way I act upon and interpret my place, which acts upon me reciprocally in ways I do not fully understand.

Don’t forget, Dan: you are in a complex place, hurtling through space away and toward things that are truly unknowable.

Sources

1. For anyone with a hunger for a quasi-psychedelic philosophy to undergird new perspectives on the war, Harman’s chapter on the American Civil War here is a magnificent portal. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. New York City: Penguin Random House, 2018. p. 114.

2. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. P. 344. 

3. Wigod, Jacob D. “Negative Capability and Wise Passiveness.” PMLA 67, no. 4 91952): 383-90. https://doi.org/10.2307/459816

4. Conta, Jay, Tom Saxton, Erik Severson, and Steve Thomas. Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation Curriculum. Richmond: Virginia Department of Health, 2014. https://vdh.virginia.gov/content/uploads/sites/20/2016/05/Virginia-Site-and-Soil-Evaluation-Curriculum_2014.pdf p. 43. 

5. Smith, Wendy K. And Marianne W. Lewis. “Toward A Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing.” The Academy of Management Review 36, no. 2 (2011): 383-403. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41318006

6. Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Oxford: Berg, 1994. p. 10.

7. Best, Steven. “Murray Bookchin’s Theory of Social Ecology: An Appraisal of ‘The Ecology of Freedom.’” Organization and Environment 11, no. 3, (1998): 334-53: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26161633.

8. Van Der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. New York City: Penguin Books, 2014. p. 54.

9. Moynihan, Thomas. Spinal Catastrophism. Windsor Quarry: Urbanomic, 2019. p. 267.

10. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena. Cambridge: Urbanomic, 2011. P. 499.

11. Lansing. J. Stephen. “Complex Adaptive Systems.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 183-204. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25064826

12. Kuchler, S. “Landscape as Memory: the Mapping of Process and Its Representation in a Melanesian Society,” in B. Bender (ed.) as cited in Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Oxford: Berg, 1994.

13. Meineg, D.W. “The Beholding Eye.” In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. https://csun.edu/~rdavids/404JAF09/404JAreadings/Meinig_The_Beholding_Eye.pdf 

14. Koselleck, Reinhart Javier Fernandez Sebastian, and Juan Francisco Fuentes. “Conceptual History, Memory, and Identity: An Interview with Reinhart Koselleck.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 2, no. 1 (2006): 99-127. Https://www.jstor.org/stable/23731013.

tl;dr — Considered at their smallest levels, rival Confederate and Federal maps of Difficult Run reveal superior Rebel place knowledge and multiple Yankee discrepancies

THEY WERE LOST

Consider the privilege of our age. We walk the world with super computers in our pockets that carry satellite-charted maps with finely-detailed knowledge of the earth’s surface that references our location every second. Even the robust accuracy of the old physical edition Thomas Guides seems arcane by comparison.

It can be difficult to relate to the Civil War from this perspective. Especially when you stop to consider that we have trained our awesome bevy of cartographic resources on documenting the War of the Rebellion. 

It can fairly be said that we know where the soldiers were better than they themselves knew. 

The armies were often lost in a landscape of unfamiliar hills and little known creeks laced with ad hoc roads and paths that were frequently mistaken for other such avenues. In this sense, the mapmaking efforts of each army are wondrous epics in their own right. Engineers and topographers on both sides mapped the American landscape in detail with a necessary thoroughness that surpassed any previous effort to do so.

When the armies of the Civil War fought one another, they groped across an American landscape that was in the process of being truly mapped for the first time.

The resulting body of cartography is imperfect in the best of ways. Each flaw is a hint at the methodologies used to integrate specific place knowledge with a rarely reliable collection of existing maps. 

A TALE OF TWO MAPS

Among the rich assortment of maps in the Library of Congress’ collection are two compelling renditions of Northern Virginia, one Confederate and one Yankee.

The Confederate map is a sprawling 1864-vintage conglomeration attributed to the Topographic Bureau of the Army of Northern Virginia.¹ Its Federal counterpart is the 1862 “Map of Eastern Virginia,” better known as the McDowell Map in deference to the general tasked with its completion.² 

Both maps chart the same area of operations on the same massive scope. Each served the same function—to facilitate large scale strategic operations in the war’s eastern theatre. Nearly identical in substantial details, these maps were products of massive work executed by similar teams using similar methodologies.

Yet, when it comes to depicting the Upper Difficult Run Basin in Fairfax County, Virginia, the Confederate map is far superior. In this thirteen square mile pocket of ox cart paths, mill roads, and winding muddles, three roads that do not appear on the yankee map reveal themselves exclusively via southern cartography. 

Modern Oaktonians might recognize the trace of today’s Fox Mill Road and Bennett Road as well as a defunct byway connecting Vale Road to Waples Mill Road via Lyrac and Willow Green Court. 

The presence of these three roads on a Confederate map and not a Yankee map reflects privileged place knowledge. They are etchings of the bridle path phenomenon by which the know-how and recollections of friendly locals turned partisans became tactical assets for John Mosby. 

When men of Difficult Run enlisted in Mosby’s Rangers, they integrated their internal compass into a collective navigational instinct that was eventually formalized into an official piece of cartography. 

ALL ROADS LEAD TO MOSBY MEN

A week after John Mosby’s famed March 1863 raid into Fairfax Courthouse, the Federal Provost Marshal cleaned house in the vicinity of Fox’s Mills. Yankees arrested southern sympathizers living in and around the milling community in Upper Difficult Run and charged them with “acting as Confederate videttes.”

Among them were prominent future Mosby Rangers Albert Wrenn, Frank Fox, and Philip Lee. Also included in the haul was Richard Johnson, who never appeared on Mosby’s roster.³

A native of Fauquier County, Richard Johnson was the third husband of Jane Fox. Mother to two Mosby rangers, including Frank Fox, Jane was the widow of Gabriel Fox, whose father founded Fox’s Mill in 1787.⁴

William Summers, Jane’s son from her first marriage, administered the lower of Fox’s Mills, a fulling and carding operation set back on a particularly narrow defile of the Difficult Run valley adjoining the property of John Fox, who not only kept sheep, but had also taken William Summers’ sister (Jane Hervey Summers, Jane Fox’s daughter from her first marriage) as his second wife.⁵⁶ 

After William died from Bright’s Disease in 1853, Richard Johnson assumed administrative duties of the lower mill, which came to bear his name. 

Though he married Jane Fox in 1848, Richard Johnson’s connection to the Fox Family dated to the marriage of his younger sister, Mariana Johnson, to Jane Fox’s son, William Summers in 1844.⁷ 

Anyway you slice it, Richard Johnson came to be a fixture of the neighborhood. In 1860, the slave schedule of the U.S. Census records his ownership of twelve slaves ranging in age from one to fifty years old.⁸ This was a substantial estate for Fairfax County in the antebellum era. 

This wealth translated into a certain prestige. Johnson served as executor for a number of wills and was elected justice of the piece for the sixth district of Fairfax County in 1860 and again in 1865.⁹

Prominent as he was, Richard Johnson’s social credentials don’t quite explain the curious disposition of Johnson’s Mill on the 1862 McDowell Map. Yankee cartographers apparently 

deemed the wool-processing operation significant enough to be included on the map at its location on a narrow choke deep within Difficult Run, three quarters of a mile north of the Old Ox Road (today’s Waples Mill Road). 

However, Johnson’s Mill was rendered on the Federal map without the benefit of any roads that connected it to the larger world. If you were to believe the yankee chart, Johnson’s Mill was just something that one stumbled upon while walking deep in the woods and thickets of Difficult Run.

More curious still is the fact that Johnson’s Mill—the lesser of two mills included in the catch-all place name “Fox’s Mills”—appears on the map, while Fox’s Upper Mill does not. Established long before the lower mill and much more economically productive as a gristing and sawing operation, the upper mill was a roadside landmark that hosted an entire regiment of Federal cavalry in June of 1863.¹⁰

The knowledge and representation of Johnson’s Mill can be explained through the lens of Federal counter-insurgency efforts. Richard Johnson was on the proverbial radar of Yankee authorities. However, the Federal McDowell Map’s lack of a road connecting this bastion of Confederate thought and deed with the main road is an important omission.

During the war, the road to Johnson’s Mill worked south from its intersection with Old Bad Road. At the point where the modern Fox Mill Road makes a sharp ninety degree turn before weaving along the western bank of Difficult Run, the wartime iteration of the road tucked across the creek east of the mill dam and wove south on the opposite side of Difficult Run.¹¹ 

Missing on the Yankee map, this route is patently obvious on the Confederate variation. 

Subject to inconsistent conditions beholden to environmental stimuli, the road to Johnson’s Mill was known to travel through heavy marsh and ford Difficult Run at a point known to be frequently washed out. 

More importantly, the point at which this road forked from the Old Ox Road that dipped out of the Federal base at Jermantown sat on land owned by a Mosby family. Ranger Thomas Lee was the son of the school teacher at the Fox’s Mills School, for which Jane Fox was the patron.¹²

In 1867, Thomas Lee bought twelve and a half acres of land off of the mills’ new owner, Henry Waple. That land was the subject of a many-decade long legal battle regarding unpaid debts between Lee and Waple. Critically, we know from the chancery file that the land on which the Lee’s resided—that section of valley floor just north of the main road and east of Difficult Run where the wartime road from the lower mill cut into the Ox Road—was stripped of trees in the late 1860s. This is a valuable hint in determining that the area surrounding the road was forested. 

Today, all the remains of the Lee family is a untended family cemetery plot behind the modern home at 11306 Waples Mill Road.¹³ In 1862, this land would have hosted the first stretch of roadway that sliced up the eastern bank of Difficult Run to its junction with Johnson’s Mill.

Because of the proximity of the Lee farm, there’s a strong likelihood that the turn off for Johnson’s Mill could have been mistaken for a private driveway.

A mile above the lower mill, the road to the fulling facility intersected Old Bad Road at James O. Wrenn’s farm. This Wrenn was a first cousin once removed to the father of prominent Ranger Lieutenant Albert Wrenn, the very same man who was arrested with Richard Johnson on the charge of being a Confederate vidette.¹⁴

Obscured on either end by less than ideal road conditions and potentially perplexing home dispositions, the vital road that the Federals failed to identify was also anchored on properties that enjoyed very close kinship ties to Mosby’s Rangers.

Similar ownership dynamics can be attributed to a curious dotted line on the Confederate map that darts up from the Old Ox Road just west of Fox’s Upper Mill before joining with Old Bad Road. Today, no such thoroughfare connects Waples Mill Road to Vale Road. However, solid hints suggest that the dotted line marked the position of a farm lane composed of modern Willow Green Court, Lyrac Street, and Wayland Street.

Those three roads represent cherry-picked sections of a longer historic access point, which the Fox family used to travel between their mills and their family home.

Today, a discernible divet on Wayland bears quiet testimony to the former road trace connecting the Fox family estate with Old Bad Road.¹⁵ To the south, the cul-de-sac on Willow Green Court is host to yet another tell tale cemetery, in the form of the long-neglected Fox plot.¹⁶ 

These roads no longer connect, but a simple satellite view highlighting the trajectory of all three is a nearly identical match with the dotted line on the 1864 Confederate Map. Tellingly, the Federal map marks this area with the name “Fox.” 

By 1862, the Fox family was no longer connected to the area around the Wyland/Lyrac/Willow Green axis. However, local knowledge would have been indelibly marked with the family’s association to the land and its signature home—Squirrel Hill. 

Built in 1705, Squirrel Hill was an impressive piece of vernacular architecture for its time.¹⁷ Steadily built up with more significant additions, the original log home form built from stacked and daubed chestnut timber bears tell tale signs of professional carpentry work. 

Roman numbers marking doweled roof rafters and hand hewn floor joints express a more professional skill set and time/cost investment than the rough structures typical of its time and place on the Virginia frontier. 

Acquired by Amos Fox in the late 1700s, Squirrel Hill grew to become the center of family life for Gabriel Fox, his wife Jane, and their many children. After his passing in the 1840s, Gabriel’s son and future Mosby Ranger, Frank Fox, and his sister, Mary Barnes, along with her husband Jack Barnes, future Mosby scout, briefly held title over Squirrel Hill before selling to the Cross Family.¹⁸

Today, the original Squirrel House structure has been lovingly restored and integrated into a larger home at 3416 Lyrac. Prior to being renovated, the new owner, Jason Hampel, hired a videographer to interview Joe Reeder, a former Army photo analyst who owned the structure since 1957. These tapes represent an invaluable piece of contemporary place knowledge tying one of the last known 18th century structures in Fairfax County to its current use.

Included in these interviews are unsubstantiated and tantalizing rumors that have followed Squirrel Hill since the Civil War. Lore has it that the home was used by John Mosby as a temporary headquarters. 

True or not, the home’s role as a personal landmark and the tactical advantage offered by its farm lane would more than merit inclusion on a Confederate map. 

In similar form, the farm lane connecting the Poplar Vale farm to the Ox Road also appeared on the Confederate map without gracing its Union counterpart. The road reached its terminus on today’s Fox Mill Road two miles northwest of Johnson’s Mill. This section of road was a very early thoroughfare used from earliest colonial days to denote the eastern boundary of King Carter’s Piney Ridge Tract.¹⁹

This extended section of the road to Fox’s Lower Mill/Johnson’s Mill from Lawyers Road roughly follows the path of modern Fox Mill Road. However, both the main thoroughfare and the Poplar Vale cut-off appeared only on Confederate maps. As far as Yankee cartographers were concerned, this area was roadless. 

One possible explanation comes from a post-war account placing three young friends, Thomas Clarke, James Gunnell, and John Saunders, who lived in the area and volunteered their services to John Mosby beginning in the summer of 1863. Clarke’s grandson reported that the three men lived on adjoining properties. Clarke the elder at 11801 Stuart Mill Road, John Saunders at 11825 Stuart Mill Road, and James Gunnell on today’s Fox Mill Manor Drive.²⁰

Adjoining properties would have presented a valuable asset for Mosby and his command who staged and bivouacked on friendly farms.

If this plot of conjoined properties wasn’t incentive enough, the land above the road to Poplar Vale was in the possession of Elzey Thompson and Austin D. Thompson. These two were the father and brother, respectively, of prominent early Mosby enlistee Minor Thompson.²¹ 

The privilege of place knowledge that Confederates enjoyed with these roads that paralleled and punctured known Federal thoroughfares can be directly correlated to men in Mosby’s command who lived along them and likely brought this knowledge into their units.

No account directly ties these individual soldiers to the appearance of their driveways and favorite cut-overs on Confederate maps, but a review of mapmaking methodology in Virginia during the war shines light on a culture of cartographic opportunism. 

Years of neglect from professional mapmakers delivered unwelcome consequences in the first months of active campaigning in Northern Virginia. Irwin McDowell’s bold plan to destroy Confederate forces at Manassas Junction in July of 1861 came to grief in no small part because of inadequate and inaccurate maps.²²

In the aftermath of First Bull Run, McDowell found himself tasked with providing more rigorous cartography to ensure future Federal success. His mapmakers started on the wrong foot by tracing from existing maps that were erroneously considered to be reliable.

The prime culprit was a 1:314,000 scale map of Virginia, which was commissioned in 1816 and released in 1826. A nice stab at suitable cartography, the 1826 Virginia map that came to serve as foundation for Civil War maps of Northern Virginia was fundamentally flawed from its very inception, as Major David Nettesheim records in his Masters Thesis from the US Army Command and General Staff College.

“The accuracy…was questionable. The surveyor got his initial information from county courthouse maps, if any were on file. He then made a rough ‘survey’ of county roads using an odometer to measure distance and a magnetic compass for direction. Compared to a trigonometric survey using instruments, this method was only a gross estimate. On the outline, he sketched the approximate local road network, and from ‘personal observation’ added the landscape. This normal procedure resulted in considerable inaccuracy. In addition, some surveyors were unscrupulous and compounded inaccuracies geometrically. Since they were paid by the amount of area ‘surveyed,’ they used shortcut methods. Some completed the map of an entire township in less than three days by dispensing with the magnetic compass and odometer, which were themselves only approximation techniques. The surveyor merely guessed general directions and estimated distances by buggy speed. The entire ‘survey’ was conducted without leaving the buggy.”²³

Confederate mapmaking suffered from a similar bias with availability trumping accuracy. An excerpt from famed southern Cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss’ memories hints at a methodology of copying existing maps with some verification. 

“Monday, August 10th (1863). Worked at a map of Spotsylvania and verified some other maps. The weather is very warm, almost suffocating. Mrs. Ewell and her daughter went away today.
Tuesday, August 11th. Worked at map of vicinity of Winchester, until P.M. then went down to General Lee’s to see Col. Smith and obey an order of General Ewell’s to obtain a map of our line of defense, and also see what COl. Smith wished me to do. He gave me a portion of the country to map carefully for General Lee. It was very warm and we had rain in the night. All quiet.”²⁴

Revered for his ability and activity, Hotchkiss was not above tracing. Nor were his companions in gray. Evidence of cartographic borrows is clear in the 1864 map, which obviously utilized elements of either Federal-produced maps or the very same base layers which were grafted into Federal maps. 

The resulting situation found elements of both armies getting lost routinely throughout the war in Northern Virginia. Even John Mosby with his roster of elite local scouts got lost trying to cross Seneca Falls into Maryland on June 12, 1863.²⁵

Behind the scenes, a silent knowledge race pitted Confederate and Yankee cartographers against one another in hard fought attempts to render the landform of Northern Virginia with accurate maps. 

The general balance of cartographic advantage fell principally to Confederates, who enjoyed substantial existing place knowledge and a home field advantage that made traveling through the seat of the war substantially easier.

Men like Jedediah Hotchkiss worked existing maps into a plastic medium which they were eager to manipulate with firsthand observation or the help of patriotic locals. In his rich history of the bitter Yankee defeat at Chancellorsville, General Edward Stackpole hangs Rebel success on the ability to rapidly integrate volunteer road information into battle strategy.

“The bold Confederate plan to turn the Federal right flank has been variously attributed to both Lee and Jackson, but more likely it was a joint conception, arrived at independently. While the decision of course rested with the commanding general and his was the major risk, it was a triple play from Fitzhugh Lee (via Stuart) to Robert E. Lee to Stonewall Jackson that set the stage. For it was the cavalry brigadier whose thorough reconnoitering first discovered Hooker’s exposed right flank; while Jackson’s staff officers, Tucker Lacy and Jed Hotchkiss, made a vital contribution when they ran down the local resident who provided the intelligence as to the available road, without which the ‘concealed’ march would have been impossible.”²⁶

Similar efforts beneath the stars and stripes were equally valiant, but understandably less successful. Robert Knox Sneden, who famously mapped the Chantilly battlefield and adjacent stretches of Upper Difficult Run without having ever inspected the terrain firsthand, offered an account of Federal officers scrounging up details for the McDowell map.

One such anecdote involves German-born Captain Heine who “has all this section of country under his supervision, and by constant scouting with map in hands extends information as to roads, bridges, Rebel earthworks and forces, while every house is marked on the map where rabid secessionist live or congregate. A [southern civilian] scout regularly employed by the secret service goes with him on nearly every adventure.”²⁷

For those wondering about the efficacy of scouting enemy territory in Northern Virginia with the expertise of a German officer, try this exercise: fly into Dulles Airport and attempt to weave your way to the library in Fairfax City without using major roads or maps. Sketch your route on a pad of paper including directions and distances. If you feel inclined to slow down, imagine there are one or more armed people in the woods who would sooner kill you than look at you. When you eventually arrive at your destination, compare your work to a satellite map. 

Ordinary navigational challenges, an atmosphere of terror, and a sunken landscape poor in horizons and rich in confusion made mapping a place like Difficult Run an appropriately complex task. 

Comparing Confederate and Federal maps over one and a half centuries after the fact provides a wealth of information about allegiance and information dynamics in the Difficult Run basin. The divide between invading a place and fighting on one’s own farm congealed into a disparity in maps. 

These designed documents reflect very real operational advantages and express better than any artifact the salient fact that Confederates knew and communicated particulars about this advantage amongst themselves.

SOURCES

1.  Map of Eastern and Central Virginia. Scale not given. 1864. “Library of Congress Civil War Maps.” < https://www.loc.gov/resource/gvhs01.vhs00379/?r=0.498,0.265,0.13,0.076,0> 

2.  McDowell, Irwin. Military Reconnaissance of Virginia. 1/24000. 1863. “Library of Congress: Civil War Maps.” < https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3880.cw0481400/?r=0.679,0.499,0.114,0.067,0>

3.  Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. March 18, 1863. Image 1. < https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/vi/batch_vi_dior_ver01/data/sn85025007/00415663535/1863031801/0472.pdf>

4.  Lundegard, Marjorie. “Mills and Mill Sites in Fairfax County, Virginia and Washington, DC.” Society for the Preservation of Old Mills Mid-Atlantic Chapter (August 10, 2009). https://spoommidatlantic.org/uploads/editor/files/Mid-Atlantic_Mills/Fairfax_County%2526_DC_Mills-Book-5-8-2009.pdf p. 23. 

5.  Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. “Then We Came to California.” HSFC Yearbook 8 (1962-1963): 1-44. https://archive.org/details/hfsc-yearbook-volume-8 

6.  United States Census 1820-1880. ancestry.com. <https://ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/> 1850 Census records “Jane H. Fox” as married to John Fox. 

7.  Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. March 5, 1888. Image 2. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/vi/batch_vi_pink_ver01/data/sn85025007/0017503433A/1888030501/0030.pdf

8.  United States Census 1820-1880. ancestry.com. <https://ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/> 1860 Slave Schedule, Fairfax County. 

9.  Term Papers (Judgments), 1818-1952. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse. Term Papers by Plaintiff – 1860-1869

10.  Vale Club Records. Collection 05-53. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult” p. 12. 

11.  Fairfax County Road Petitions. Box 1: 1844-1908. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse. John Fox, RP-051 April 1867.

12.  Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. “Then We Came to California.” HSFC Yearbook 8 (1962-1963): 1-44. https://archive.org/details/hfsc-yearbook-volume-8 p. 14. Mr. Lee was fond of corporal punishment, apparently. Sarah Summers Clarkes, William Summers’ daughter and one of the sole witnesses to Fox’s Mills to record her memories, remembers lee as “very strict and seemed to delight in whipping the scholars for the least offense.” 

13.  “Lee Family Cemetery.” Fairfax County Cemetery Survey, Fairfax County Libraries. < https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library_cemeteries/Cemetery.aspx?number=FX316>

14.  Mitchell, Beth. 1860 Fairfax County Maps. 1977. “Fairfax County History Commission. “ < https://fairfaxcounty.gov/history-commission/1860-Fairfax-county-maps > map 36-4.

15.  Joe Reeder (former Squirrel Hill owner) in conversation with Jason Hampel (current owner), 2013. 

16.  “Fox Family Cemetery.” Fairfax County Cemetery Survey, Fairfax County Libraries. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library_cemeteries/Cemetery.aspx?number=FX166

17.  “Log House Lives On Surrounded By Family and Friends.” Ian Shapiro. Washington Post. January 5, 2014. 

18.  Fairfax County Historic Deed Book: 1742-1866. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse. <https://fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/historic-records-center/finding-aids/deeds>

19.  Vale Club Records. Collection 05-53. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult” p. 8.

20.  ibid 35-36

21.  Mitchell, Beth. 1860 Fairfax County Maps. 1977. “Fairfax County History Commission. “ < https://fairfaxcounty.gov/history-commission/1860-Fairfax-county-maps > map 36-1.

22.  Nettesheim, Daviel D., MAJ, United States Army. “Topographical Intelligence and the Civil War.” Masters Thesis, (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth, KS, 1978). p. 1-2

23.  ibid 27. 

24.  Hotchkiss, Jedediah. Make Me a Map of the Valley. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1973. p. 166-167.

25.  Keen, Hugh C. And Horace Mewborn. 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry Mosby’s Command. Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc, 1993. p. 66.

26.  Stackpole, Gen. Edward J. Chancellorsville. Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1988. p. 203. 

27.  Bryan, Jr., Charles F. And Nelson D. Lankford, eds. Eye of the Storm: Written and Illustrated by Robert Knox Sneden. New York City: The Free Press, 2000. p. 12-13.