#83 Appomattox Courthouse National Park, VA 4-21-09

This is going to be your history lesson for today!  Do you know what happened at Appomattox?  Did you remember your history from school?  Here is where the Civil War ended.  Here is where General Lee surrendered to General Grant.  I didn’t know it happened on Palm Sunday.  The picture above gives a great history of the house and it’s owners.

This is the house where it happened.  The little white building you see in the lower right hand corner is the well. (No running water in 1865)

This is the parlor where the surrender papers were signed.  It isn’t a very big room and there were 16 men in the room during the negotiations.

  As you can see by the picture above the two generals sat at different tables to sign the documents.  Not pictured are the confederate men that were also in the room behind General Lee.

In the warming kitchen, which is right below the parlor the wood cook stove sits on the original hearth.

The Master bedroom is right across the entry hall from the Parlor on the main floor.  It is a large room with the bed on one side and a writing desk and sitting area on the opposite side pictured below.

In the upstairs are two more bedrooms.  The one pictured below is for the four girls.  It has two double beds which you can see in either side of the picture.  In the center is the play and work area in front of the fireplace for the girls.  Across the hall the only boy in the family has his own room.

The dining room is in the basement of the house, right across the hall from the warming kitchen.  The “rug” on the floor is actually linoleum.

Below is the back entrance to the main house.  On the right side of the picture is the kitchen.  Kitchens were usually away from the main house because of the fire danger.  All the cooking was done on wood stoves or open fireplaces.  This particular kitchen had a slave quarter built right in.  I’m sure it was for the cook and helpers.  They worked from dawn until the last dish was cleaned up.

Above is the outside of the slave quarters (I’m sure it’s been cleaned up for display)  And below is the left half of the building.  There was usually more than one family sharing the quarters.

Just down the road from the McLean house is the “New Jail”  The small windows on the 2nd and 3rd floor are the cells.  the bottom floor is the living quarters.

A cut away shows how the brick was reinforced with bars to keep the inmates inside the building.

We were fortunate enough to be at the Park while they were doing a re-enactment of the stacking of the arms.  There were 30,000 confederate soldiers that surrendered and stacked arms that day in history and it took over 8 hours.  Today there are only a handful of volunteers that take part in the display.

This is how the arms were stacked in the middle of Stage road.  Behind the men is the Tavern or Inn where the stage would stop and passengers and travelers could spend the night and eat a meal

After the arms were stacked, as part of the surrender terms each man was issued a parole pass.  This pass entitled him to rations from the Union Army, free pass on the trains and through any Union or Confederate forces.  It showed he was not a deserter and that he had surrendered and was going home.

The rations the men received after the stacking of the arms and the issuing of the paroles were bread, stacked in loaves above and below there are slabs of bacon (cured meat) and dried vegetables-to be reconstituted with water.  They were also issued some ground coffee to take with them on their march home.

Most of the troops were from North Carolina and so their march home was usually to the same general area.  Below is one soldier packing his food, getting ready to head home.  The re-enactment tried to be as historically correct as possible.  The uniforms are made from some of the same kinds of wool.  The shoes are made the same way as they were in the 1860’s and their shirts were replicas of the army shirts.

After we left the re-enactment we stopped at the cemetery.  The sign below tells most of the history of the soldiers who are buried here.

The grave markers and the monument below are all preserved.  Those soldiers that could be identified have markers on the head stones.

The battle that helped to win the war and force the surrender is explained above and below in these pictures.  If you double click on each picture it will make it full screen and easier to read.

Now you have had your history lesson!  We feel so fortunate to have been able to walk in the very town that was so much a part of the history of the Civil War. 

Last month we were in Fort Sumter, where the first shot of the Civil war between the states was fired.  This month we visited the historic house where the Union of the United States became one again.  How Awesome!