Civil War Battlefield Hike
Richmond, Virginia was the capitol of the Confederate States of America, which lasted all of four years and dissolved with the conclusion of the American Civil War. As such, this entire region is rich with areas of historical significance associated with the CSA and the Civil War, including over a dozen battlefields to the east, southeast and north of the city where local forces fought off Union soldiers as they pushed to take the capitol. Two of these battlefields, the “Cold Harbor” battlefield and the “Gaines’ Mill” battlefield are right next to each other, the sites of a series of battles in early June of 1864. We were in the mood for a short hike through the woods and decided “Hey, let’s go walk through some history today.” I packed by Rolleiflex TLR camera as well as a few rolls of Kodak Tri-X and some Ilford Delta and drove a few miles to see what kind of pictures might happen.
We started at the Cold Harbor battlefield, one of the most notoriously haunted in the area. We saw no ghosts, heard no ghostly gunfire, and for the most part it was just a walk through the woods with historical markers placed here and there, informing you of what happened in this place and that, and reminding you that should you find any battlefield artifacts they are not yours! Deliver them immediately to the proper authorities for preservation! We kept looking at the ground, wondering if we’d happen upon a musket ball, coat button or a broken piece of a bayonet, didn’t find anything of the sort, which is good, because it would be difficult to do the right thing in such an occasion! I mean who would miss one belt buckle, am I right? More than 18,000 soldiers were killed or wounded here in just over a week’s time, bit of a lopsided bloodbath as Union forces doubled that of defending Confederate, and the number of casualties also were about double, as General grant had a thing for positively throwing soldiers at the enemy haphazardly with little regard for his own casualties suffered. So if the place truly IS haunted I’d not be at all surprised. The Gaines’ Mill battlefield was the site of an earlier battle, on June 27th in 1862, and just over 15,000 were killed or wounded here.
Tromping through the woods where more than 5,000 people met a violent end, you would think it would have a certain dark sense of foreboding. Of woods thick with the metaphysical aura of great anguish and tragedy. I’d like to say that I could feel it in my gut that bad juju lived in these woods, but in reality it was just a walk in the woods with the occasional marker here and there. Nothing metaphysical to speak of, though perhaps in a sense there was, because the place still held the memories of war. Every several yards there was a marker pointing out an embankment where fighting took place, you can still see a great many rifle pits dug into the earth where infantrymen would take cover, and we walked along the remains of a very long trench dug into the earth where soldiers would spend days fighting off their adversaries. I can’t be sure if any restoration work had been done, any trenches re-dug over the past hundred years, as nothing seemed artificially preserved in any way. No barricades or fencing or any signs of archeological work being done, just a long ridge or earth covered in fallen leaves, trees now growing where soldiers were once entrenched. There were no crowds of tourists, like we encountered at the Fort Ticonderoga or the Fort Crown Point sites in Upstate New York, just a local or two coming for a walk, and a family of three running along the trail.
The Cold Harbor battlefield has a visitor center, which was closed because we went on a day they weren’t open, so I can’t tell you what it would offer. The Gaines’ Mill battlefield also had a structure, a historical something called the Watt House, and I couldn’t tell that it had any hours of operation, or what that operation might entail. Both had some groomed trails to follow, and both of the sites have preserved only a small fraction of the original battlefields: Gaines’ Mill has 60 acres preserved of a 2,000 acre battlefield, and Cold Harbor has only 300 acres preserved of the original 7,500 acre battlefield, and is considered one of the most endangered of its kind.
As for the walk itself, not bad. There’s not a lot of elevation around here for any real serious hiking, you need to drive an hour or so west toward the Appalachians for that, but it’s not a bad walk-in-the-woods destination. It was late fall, creeping toward winter when we went, which in this region translates to “wear a long sleeve shirt, jacket will be too much,” and all the empty tree branches recently shed of their foliage made for some nice backdrop for some B&W film photography.
