The Cheesecake Factory
Weirdly enough, the easiest place to start this story is at the Fair Oaks Mall Cheesecake Factory location in Fairfax, Virginia.
The shopping center is an unlikely base of operations. Fair Oaks opened in 1980—long before I made the scene and long after the Civil War.1 Cheesecake Factory made its appearance in the early-2000’s in a previously dead corner on the northern flank of the mall.
From the gallery of glass windows jacketing the bar and the parking lot beyond, the horizon drops off into six lanes of Route 50. Once known as the Little River Turnpike, this highway debuted in the early-1800s as a resource thoroughfare connecting the grain merchants at Alexandria with the wheat producers of Loudoun County and the Shenandoah Valley beyond.2
For the entirety of my childhood (much of which was spent in a cul-de-sac of townhomes about a half mile north of the future Cheesecake Factory), the Little River Turnpike held the grandiose title “Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway.” In Loudoun County, the road became “John Mosby Highway.”
The name matters little to me. Not for want of social conscience, but because lip-service to dead men means less than the substance of a place. In this case, I’m more interested in the heavy belt of hardwood forests, wild thickets, swollen creek beds, and marshy flood plains that sprouted in the watershed just north of Route 50.
This is the first leg of Difficult Run, a 57.7 square mile basin that appears as a turquoise vein of low land on county topographical maps.3 Terrain nuance disappears from the vista at the front door of the Cheesecake Factory. A monolithic quilt of poplar crowns and oak leaves makes for a uniform blanket of green that sweeps northwards towards the Potomac thirteen miles distant.
A SHORT HISTORY OF A TOUGH CREEK
The name “Difficult Run” appears as early as 1731.4 “Difficult” is a descriptor name that also functions as a warning. At its mouth where the creek collides with the raging Potomac just downstream of Great Falls, Difficult Run slots through a prominent channel that is “difficult” to navigate.
Nearer to Fair Oaks mall, the creek is less imposing. It’s best defined by what it’s not: prominent.
Beginning at a gentle apex near the Fairfax County Government Center, two ridges fork into a V. The diverging heights are the most prominent landforms visible from the northern parking lot at Fair Oaks.
To the west, Ox Hill, once the highest height in the county (now eclipsed by the dump a mile south), commands the ridge that runs northwesterly along a path held by the West Ox Road and Reston Parkway.5 Beyond that ridge is the Culpeper Basin—a hundred mile long bowl of rolling hills, open land, and rich crystalline soils that mark the Virginia Piedmont.6
To the east of the mall and just slightly north, Old Glory waves on a flagpole perched atop the headquarters of the National Rifle Association. Located at the intersection of Waples Mill Road and Route 66, the main artery into D.C., the building marks a meandering curve of thrusts and hill clusters along which the Jermantown and Chain Bridge Roads trace northeast to the other historic heights commanding Fairfax County—Tyson’s Corner.
Every drop of rain that falls between these two ridges gives tribute to the Potomac via Difficult Run. It is a remarkable trap of low earth bearing silent witness to hundreds of millions of years of division and collision.
There was once a massive line of volcanos to the east, running north south along the current 95 corridor. When continents collided to form Pangea, the force of the tectonic junction brought those mountains to their knees.7
Today, ancient seams of igneous rock—robust granite and confusing quartz—line the hills on either side of the Difficult Run. In between, the earth is composed of micaceous schist—a metamorphic rock created from igneous that has been subject to intense pressure. Here, the earth pinched and the weight of the world cracked this place. Difficult Run fell here because tectonic forces weakened bedrock into something malleable, shifting, vaguely unstable and subject to erosion.8
There is a tremendous history of creation cut with conflagration and assault along Difficult Run—a place where it can be fairly said that the rival forces of the Civil War battled over the unresolved collision and separation of North America and Africa.
MY AREA OF OPERATIONS
With the right eyes, the entire world is fascinating, but I have to set limits for myself.
Otherwise, I get carried away.
I cannot afford to do justice to the entire 57.7 square miles of the Difficult Run Basin. It would take a lifetime. Instead, I’ve compromised. I will entertain history of any dimension and any time period, so long as it pertains to the tight geographic constraints of the Upper Difficult Run Basin.
This place name is not in common usage, but is relatively easy to define. It is the section of the Difficult Run watershed bounded by commercial landscapes. A ring of shopping centers holds the forested valley like two hands cupping a rinse of fresh water.
Beginning at the Wegmans north of Route 29, skirting chic Fairfax Corner, flagging Fair Oaks Mall, narrowly avoiding abominably anti-historic Fairfax Town Center and clutching against a Harris Teeter mini-mall, the western ridge boundary shoots towards the Fox Mill Shopping Center and the prominent planned shopping destinations in Reston. From Fair Oaks Mall, the opposite ridge strides eastward to embrace the sprawling and never-cool suburban big box haven at Jermantown before lacing together a string of grocery stores, Starbucks, disparate mini-malls, stand alone chain restaurants and retail banks through Oakton into Vienna.
Across the top, the W&OD Trail—itself a shadow of a pre-war railroad bringing the area’s raw resources to market—denotes the limit of the Upper Difficult Run basin.
In the thirteen square miles between these lines, you cannot purchase so much as a cup of coffee. The place is barren of retail and restaurants. No gas stations offer up unleaded to desperate motorists. There are no bars in which to wet one’s whistle.
This want of formal brick and mortar commerce is significant and defining. A 1966 vote by residents of the Upper Difficult Run basin west of Hunter Mill Road put the kibosh on a proposed connection to county sewer services.9 The rest, as they say, is history.
There are farmhouses here. Some of them dating to the early 18th century. For the most part, the homes here are clustered in medium-scale developments ranging from post-war ramblers to full-on, mega-monstrosity McMansions. However, the want of sewer service compels all builders to comply with codes dictating no less than acre lots for each home to accommodate septic leach fields.
So too, individual fifty-unit neighborhoods have never been able to fully preempt existing road networks. It is painfully obvious to anyone who frequents the warren of twisting, diving, narrow, and ultimately treacherous roads that lace through the Upper Difficult Run Basin that this place has never been subject to a decisive master plan executed with bulldozers and berms.
The one possible exception is Hunter Mill Road, a relatively well-kept corridor darting into the heart of Difficult Run from its origin at the Chain Bridge Road in Oakton. Known to pre-date European settlement, today’s Hunter Mill Road already knew many iterations before it became the prime axis of colonial English agriculture in the area.10
ROADS, PATHS, and PATTERNS
The Hunter Mill Road was one of a few famous “ridge roads” that wound through the dense forests of prehistoric Fairfax County. It is significant, because it offers a direct route from the heart of the county to a ford of the Potomac at Seneca Falls. The indigenous groups of Northern Virginia were known traders who existed as a people between. Material resources and cultures intersected here. Hunter Mill Road is one of the corridors where commingling commercial and cultural interests interfaced.
Not only did the road provide access across the river, but it connected people to a lithic deposit buried in Oakton. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, in the orogeny phase of the great volcanic chain that once towered above the area, a throat of magma cooled into a vein of white quartz beneath what is now Marbury Road in Oakton.11
European settlers mistook this exposed rock for flint and gave the place its first name: Flint Hill. For millennia prior, this same stone was prized by natives for the creation of tools. Similar white quartz appears in archaeological debitage pits throughout the Potomac Basin.
This lithic determinism is perhaps a prime motivator for the creation of Hunter Mill Road. It’s mere existence—potentially as a noticeable deformation or traceable declivity guided European settlement and the establishment of early metes and bounds.
By the mid-1700s, this well-travelled thoroughfare was bisected by a legal corridor. The county cut a road to facilitate travel from its western districts to the first courthouse at Freedom Hill, now Tyson’s corner. The “Lawyers Road” as it was and is known, cuts roughly east-west through the Difficult Run basin. Historically, it crested to the Ox Hill ridge and slicing down towards modern Chantilly and Centreville.
These intersecting axes happened to collide near a most-fortunate funnel of low land where the flow of Difficult Run could be channeled into motive power for the processing of both timber and grain. Beginning with Broadwater’s Mill, a crop of ambitious middle-class service providers began to develop infrastructure for the processing of raw resources coming out of the uneven terrain of Upper Difficult Run. This commercial landscape was fully integrated into the greater sphere of Alexandria, Virginia—a prime shipping port for the export of both timber and grain.
By 1861, the people who lived around Hunter’s Mill and the products they produced had created a socio-commercial landscape that was known, mapped, and easily-utilized. Travelled by both JEB Stuart’s Cavalry and the Union 6th Corps during the war, the Hunter Mill Road was also the inspiration for a Herman Melville poem.12 Today, the Hunter Mill Defense League has rigorously documented and disseminated historical information about this well-recorded section of the Upper Difficult Run Basin.
A much different historiographical paradigm exists south of Hunter’s Mill and above it on Difficult Run. This area was poorly known, incompletely mapped, and largely written off for much of its history as a muddy collection of bad roads, middling farms, and two apparently insignificant mill complexes.
Here, nothing happened during the Civil War. Or at least that is the dominant narrative established by the otherwise gifted and dedicated local historians who devoted their time to this basin.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE
The official history of the hamlet of Vale (a post office-centered village once located at the corner of modern Fox Mill and Stuart Mill Roads) offers this incredibly curious take on the region’s non-impact in the Civil War:
“There is no convincing evidence that the area now comprising the Fox Mill Communities was the site of any major skirmish or significant action during the Civil War. In fact, it was described by one Union Officer ‘as a charming region, not much desolated by the war..being rather out of the beaten track of the armies.”13
Manifest desolation has long been the yardstick of Civil War significance for Fairfax-oriented historians. The county’s official history describes “land ‘like a prairie’” where hungry armies denuded the landscape of fences or dwellings for miles.14 Extant sources from the war years convey a sense of shock at how eaten away once prosperous Fairfax was.
One yankee stationed in Fairfax in 1863 wrote, “No fire, even if it should burn every house in our village of Brattleboro could be half as desolating to the place as war has been to this place of Virginia. Houses, cattle, fences and inhabitants nearly all gone—lands desolate running up to weeds and briars, and no encouragement for the future. The people here look dispirited, and ruined, as in fact they are. I will stop for words fail to convey any adequate idea of the picture one sees on every hand. Desolation is the word that most nearly conveys the idea, but that is hardly sufficiently emphatic.”15
With such accounts held as lodestars, a logical complex has organized around the assumption that any place spared this fate was somehow able to withdraw from participating in an all-consuming conflict.
This, I contend, is a logical fallacy and the origin of a historical misrepresentation. There was no opting out of the Civil War in Fairfax County.
Instead, we should consider three scenarios to explain why the Upper Difficult Run Basin near Fox Mill—about a mile north of today’s Cheesecake Factory—was spared.
- This place was unknown to either army—both of which had ravenous appetites for foodstuffs and wood.
- This place was protected—by one army or another for a variety of reasons.
- Both of the above are true simultaneously and a group of people conspired to keep the area around Fox Mill apart and protected.
Grappling with these possibilities incentivizes a unique opportunity to trace historic roads and paths in the Upper Difficult Run Basin. Place problems are axial problems, after all. By studying the development and layout of local axes that were built up from pre-history, modified, borrowed, absorbed, and co-opted by local interests, it is possible to recontextualize observations about wartime ecology not as an exemption, but as evidence of meaningful efforts on behalf of pro-confederate families living in the area.
INTRODUCING OLD BAD ROAD
The key element in this equation is Old Bad Road. Known today as Vale Road, a winding collection of ninety-degree turns set amidst bulging oak trees and meandering floodplains, Old Bad Road was developed in the 1840s to unite farms on Hunter Mill Road with the Fox Mill Complex and Ox Road to the south and west.16 By 1862, when it appeared with its dubious and less than flattering nom de guerre on the Federal McDowell Map of 1862, the road had fallen into patent disrepair.17
Still, from a shape perspective, Old Bad Road was an important piece of connective tissue bridging ridge roads through a little travelled and less than hospitable valley that separated the Federal supply hub at Fairfax from the partisan-rich plains to the west.
The name itself—Old Bad Road—almost feels obvious, especially in the context of crafty Confederate guerrillas who thrived on misperception. Either this thoroughfare was an irrelevant wasteland or a critical corridor—the interior line and rosetta stone that unlocks a critical mystery.
What opacities lurk along Old Bad Road exist at the interface where one man’s legacy mapped on to the landscape itself.
ENTER MOSBY
John Singleton Mosby—the Gray Ghost—was an acerbic, unconventional, hyper-effective partisan leader. His service in Fairfax County began in the Fall of 1861 when he picketed many of the roads surrounding Fairfax Court House.18 He returned in late August 1862 when JEB Stuart’s command scouted Stonewall Jackson’s advance at the Battle of Chantilly.19 Four months later, Mosby accompanied and preceded Stuart on a raid to Fairfax Station that ended with Confederate cavalry sweeping up the Hunter Mill Road and across Lawyers Road to Frying Pan—a church just over the western ridge bounding Difficult Run’s watershed.20
Armed with Stuart’s blessing in early January of 1863, Mosby and a squad of hand picked me initiated a guerrilla campaign in northern Virginia. What occurred over the next two years wrote Mosby’s name into Confederate legend. Credited with occupying and absorbing the interest of as many as 50,000 Federal troops and thus prolonging the war, John Mosby sewed chaos within yankee lines.21 He and his men dominated parts of Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William, Shenandoah, and Fairfax Counties to the point that the region was informally christened “Mosby’s Confederacy.”22
PLACE PREJUDICE
When it comes to mapping Mosby’s Confederacy, there is an established place prejudice at work. Mosby memory privileges a romantic impression of a swashbuckling, devil-may-care cavalier riding hell bent for leather over hill and dale on the sweeping plains of Virginia’s open Piedmont.
This is partially true. After all, the three locations where John Mosby was most apt to rendezvous his men—Upperville, Rector’s Crossroads, and Frying Pan Meeting House—were nestled in one corner or another of rolling hills or open fields where a gray horsemen at a gallop feels like a nice aesthetic compliment.23
Picturesque panoramas suit Civil War memorialization. Both Hollywood and historians have been happy to lend their weight to painting such portraits. Even authorities in the Mosby field gravitate toward these scenic depictions that place Mosby atop a horse riding masterfully through open ground.
Virgil Carrington Jones, the long-departed dean emeritus of Mosby studies, offers this place-specific scene by means of typifying the partisan commander’s behavior in a certain style site:
“The strip of country spreading toward the Blue Ridge from the Potomac at Washington, the area from Dranesville and Leesburg to Warrenton, was ideal ground for cavalry fighting. It was made up of beautiful vistas, bare rolling hills, little clumps of trees. Stone and rail fences girdled occasional wheat fields and orchards, sprinkled about expansive pasture lands. Villages were small, far apart. In the western part of this stretch is a valley, small compared to the Valley of Virginia. It is bordered on the east by the Bull Run and Catoctin mountains and on the west by the Blue Ridge, the mountain wall passing across the state from the Potomac to the southwest. This range rises to above 2,000 feet and is broken at intervals by gaps through which roads lead to the main valley. There is Snicker’s Gap, opening the way to Winchester; Ashby’s Gap; Manassas Gap, where the Manassas Gap Railroad from Manassas Junction to Strasburg and other valley points tops the wall; still farther south, Chester Gap, around which the hills drop to afford passage to Front Royal, and finally, Thornton’s Gap, making way for the road from Culpeper west. Through this country Mosby had determined to operate. It was rich and pastoral and would afford his command a not too difficult subsistence. But more important, the towering Blue Ridge and the lower-lying Bull Run range, within easy gallop of each other, would enable him to find quick cover when hard pushed by the enemy.”24
This geographic context is only a partial truth, one warped by the desire to imagine Mosby as a miniature hero fighting on “ideal ground.” But such picturesque (and predictable) scenery was not Mosby’s forte. Furthermore, a band of rascals with pistols on open ground presumes a certain level of engrained ineptitude on the part of their qualified and very well-equipped federal opponents.
There’s something missing, a gap that has been shellacked over with a narrative fallacy.
PIEDMONT vs BRIDLE PATH
Taken at face value, the Piedmont privilege inherent to Mosby stories creates a positional puzzle. If Mosby was a conventional cavalryman dashing about in the shadow of the Blue Ridge, how was it that so many of his most famous exploits occurred in the area around Fairfax Court House where thick forests and thicketed creek beds like Difficult Run are the predominant land form?
This is the underbelly, the shadow realm of the Mosby story. One hinted at and implied, but never fully fleshed out. It is alluded to and passed quickly over. Jones himself makes a fleeting, one sentence reference to the “bramble thickets” of Fairfax County as an occasional Mosby venue.25
“Bridle path” is the magic phrase used to fill in critical ambiguities about how Mosby and his men traversed rough, undeveloped terrain in Fairfax County.26 The Federals preferred the descriptor “thicket” to refer to the marginal spaces where dense-packed thorns prevented meaningful pursuit of single or banded Confederate guerrillas. Both are vague enough to be of little help.
In the context of Difficult Run, the bridle path hypothesis is especially vexing because historical records drawn from official wartime reports have John Mosby and his men appearing in force on one side of the basin only to disappear and reemerge unseen and unfollowed on the opposite side of the watershed. Mosby was here and no one seems terribly interested in understanding how he passed over and through the land.
A report from Colonel C.R. Lowell, Jr of the 2nd Massachusetts dated August 12, 1863 is particularly instructive.
“Mosby’s and White’s men—together about 140 strong—came down Little River Turnpike the day before yesterday, and passed that night near Gum Springs. Moved down yesterday forenoon through Ox Road Junction toward Flint Hill. Hearing that our pickets were there, turned to the north again, and passing through Vienna by Mills Crossroads to Little River Pike, near Gooding’s Tavern, captured one sutler’s train there between 3 and 4 p.m. and another about a mile farther east. An hour later half plundered some of the wagons, took all the horses and mules, and started back in a hurry through Vienna, toward Hunter’s Mill.
“About 1 mile south of the mill they divided, one-half going toward Dranesville, the other by Hunter’s Mill, nearly down to Chantilly, then turned to the right, and, I presume, passed through Gum Springs early this a.m.”27
To interpret that report for those more accustomed to the 21st century, Mosby and his men camped on the broad flatland that would one day serve as runway for Dulles Airport before threading a needle across successive phase lines of known Federal patrols on the Centreville Road and West Ox Road whence he descended into the Difficult Run Basin at Ox Junction—now the misshapen three-way corner of Waples Mill, West Ox, and Vale Roads.
In 1863, this was the place where Old Bad Road intersected the road to Fox Mill and Jermantown.
Here, Mosby disappeared. Encountering Federal pickets on the other side of Difficult Run watershed, Mosby doubled back and sidled along unknown avenues (because no direct route was known to exist between the objectives listed in the report) and again threaded his way unseen between prominent federal patrols on Hunter Mill Road and the Tysons-Vienna-Oakton line.
From there, Mosby proceeded as far as Annandale where he marauded and captured before returning via Difficult Run at Hunter’s Mill.
This sequence of events and the language used to convey it express Difficult Run as both terra incognita for Yankee cavalry and a honey hole full of maneuverability potentials for Mosby and his men.
My sleep suffers and my brain aches from the tantalizing implications and want of sources to back up the obvious—Difficult Run was an opportunity space for Confederates and a no-go zone for Federals. Bridle paths alone do not suffice to explain this phenomenon.
A DOSSIER OF FRIENDLY FARMERS
Robert O’Neill—today’s preeminent scholar of Federal responses to John Mosby—offers a doctrinal hint. Mosby and his men used “friendly locals and little used paths.”28 One such local—John Underwood—was Mosby’s favorite scout, and a woodsman who frequented western Fairfax County before the war such that people said he “knew paths not even rabbits had found.”29
Still vague, these tidbits are promising hints in that they imply a reservoir of personal relationships and firsthand knowledge that located and interpreted spatial dispositions for Mosby.
Strip away Mosby myth and the stage scenery of post-war hagiographies and a more detailed, factual understanding of people and place in Difficult Run forms around an interesting body of research.
Relationships forged between economic interests, religious sects, and educational ties that were cemented generationally and solidified by marriage flesh out a more compelling map of the Upper Difficult Run Basin.
Booms, busts, soil exhaustion, capital flows, and fickle fate had by the opening of the war shaped the valley north of today’s Cheesecake Factory into a multi-faceted timber economy. It was then a place where sawmills and investment forests speckled with sheep, some grain, and other post-tobacco chattel mirrored an elaborate kinship network of devoted Confederates. Sons of these families translated boyhood adventures and professional journeys that laced together hardwood assets with processing facilities and commercial centers into meaningful knowledge that was leveraged in Confederate service with John Mosby.
Two brothers born into the mill-owning Fox family—Frank and Charles Albert—as well as their neighbors—Phillip Lee and his brother, Thomas—enlisted early after their older sister Mary’s husband Jack Barnes—one of Mosby’s best scouts—joined the Gray Ghost. Their neighbor, a carpenter named Minor Thompson, was already in the ranks.
Farther up Old Bad Road, James Gunnell and his cousin, George West Gunnell, brought valuable knowledge of the Little Difficult Run tributary and unlocked a web of Gunnell places along Hunter Mill Road. More critically, two Trammells—sons of a long-ago milling family centered around Hunter Mill and occupants of farms along Old Bad Road—eagerly served Mosby. As did their brother-in-law, the one and only John Underwood, whose own brother and fellow woodsman, Bushrod, offered critical experience navigating the warren of timber trails along Difficult Run.30
Farther to the west, Charles Turley’s family owned a massive plantation where Confederates could use a railroad cut to slip out of the Culpeper Basin towards Lawyers Road where both Saunders and Clarke had grown up.31
Just east of Difficult Run, Albert Wrenn—cousin and nephew of landowners along Old Bad Road and Ox Road and a boyhood friend of Frank Fox—lived nearly adjacent to fellow ranger Frank Williams along the AL&H railroad just on the other side of the Chain Bridge Road demarcating Difficult Run.32
These men and the places and people they knew was a world that was little recorded and less preserved. Nonetheless, the patterns of association and axes of travel they utilized have left marks—literal and otherwise—on the earth.
HISTORIC DESIRE PATHS
Permissible travel, a certain freedom of movement in the Upper Difficult Run can be partially contextualized. Bad roads and an expensive turnpike encouraged enterprising farmers and their crafty sons to articulate inventive routes around the toll both located at the Difficult Run Bridge over the Little River Turnpike just northeast of the Cheesecake Factory.
Shunpiking and notoriously poor alternative roads inspired the creation of desire paths connecting people directly with places where they wanted to be without the need for official sanction.33 This practice continued well into the 20th century when a high school opened in Oakton and locals in the Vale district remembered that few of the school children took the roads, preferring instead to cut their way over field and through forests to shave off a little time.34
What facilitates a connection? How do we recognize this relational fingerprint in records or on the land? How did these people see the world and what landmarks or practicalities underscored the patterns they used to maneuver through the land?
These are the essential questions that penetrate the veil of Mosby mystique and unlock new thinking and new cartography. In the light of these insights, creeks, paths, draws, railroad beds, fence gaps, and game trails all invite scrutiny and offer fragments of a larger puzzle. Piece it together and you get more than a Mosby map. You get a localized memento of a lost world at a critical juncture.
Roads, thoroughfares, avenues, and paths cut across the landscape with purpose. These spatial relationships and the traces offer clues to a Civil War mystery drenched in still more curious questions about people, the places they create, and the ways that places produce people in turn.
Untouched farms in an otherwise wasted land are remarkable things. Think of them as a gateway to a larger maze where complex landscapes weave together.
One thing is clear in the forested valley beyond the Cheesecake Factory: something happened here.