University of Virginia Library

I

THE traveller to-day who takes a run
through Virginia on one of the roads
which cut across her from Washington to the
south or southwest gets a very inadequate idea
of that which is in fact the Old Dominion, for in
localities throughout this section, poor as it appears,
lie some of the best farming-lands in the
State—the lands, in fact, which once made her
wealthy; and much besides her lands enters into
that which is the Old Dominion.

Virginia is, in the speech of her people,
divided geographically into sections.

Of these sections the richest, and by far the
most beautiful, are "the Valley" and "the
Southwest," whilst the oldest and the best known

are "the Tidewater" (including "the South
Side") and "the Piedmont."

The mountains, once inaccessible to the outer
world, are rich enough in iron and coal to attract
the attention of Northern investors and to draw
capital almost unlimited, and sundry railway lines
recognizing their future, have penetrated them,
placing alike their ore-filled ranges and their fertile
valleys in direct communication with the outer
world, and opening the way for enterprise and
capital to make this long-closed portion of the
Old Dominion one of the great manufacturing
centres of the country. A trip down the Valley
of Virginia or across the rolling Piedmont will,
especially in the summer, well repay the trouble,
though one should never leave his car; for there
are few more beautiful sections of this country
than that from the Potomac to the Cumberland
Mountains.

The idea, however, which one gets from his
car-window in passing through eastern Virginia
will be very incorrect.

From Washington to Petersburg the railway
passes along the former army-track; from Petersburg
to the southern border it is in what was
known years ago as the "Black Belt," and
neither section has yet fully recovered.

This region, now so largely grown up in forest

or left as "old fields," was, before the war, filled
with comfortable homesteads and well-cultivated
farms. It was here that much of the early
history of "Old Virginia" was enacted. From
this region sprang that wonderful body of great
men who during the Revolutionary period and
for long afterwards gave the Old Dominion the
title of Mother of States and Statesmen. A
single county produced George Washington and
all the Lees. In one room of the Lee mansion,
Stratford, were born two Signers of the Declaration
of Independence and Robert E. Lee.
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Marshall
were from the Piedmont, a little nearer the Blue
Ridge; Patrick Henry and Henry Clay came
from the same county, lower down. Even now
the region through which the road passes conveys,
with its leagues of forest, but an inadequate idea
of the life within it. To know this one must leave
the train and strike out into the country. There
he shall find Virginia. It is true he will frequently
find the lands poorly cultivated, if not
poor; he will find old homesteads dishevelled
and worn, and he will find the old houses, the
home of charming hospitality and refinement,
sadly dilapidated and unfurnished. He will be
struck by the apparent want of things to which he
is accustomed elsewhere, and for the possession
of which ready money is needed; but in a little
time he will forget this; he will be in an atmosphere
which will soothe his senses and lull him
into a state of rare content, and he will become
aware that there is something even amid this simplicity
which he had not before discovered, a certain
restful feeling with which the external is in
harmony, and in which it is well with the spirit.

Assuming that he was not in a Pullman—for
all Pullmans and all their passengers are alike—or
is not simply passing over like a bird of passage,
he has discovered that he is in a new region, or,
more accurately, a new environment, from the
time he crossed the Potomac. The low, soft,
slow speech, with its languid, long vowels and
neglected final endings, has caught his ear, and
he listens to it as music without trying to follow
the words. There is a difference not only in the
manner, but in the matter. There is a difference,
too, not very marked at first, but still perceptible,
in the dress. The people all seem to know each
other, and they talk with easy familiarity of personal
concerns as members of one family. The
conversation is more personal for that reason,
the tones less repressed. The women will appear
less expensively dressed. A man will
probably not notice this; for they will be generally
prettier than those he left the other side

of the bridge, and they will have something
about them—an air, a manner, a something—
which will be more attractive. Among the
older persons, men and women, he will note a
gentler air than he has seen on the other side.
They will in a way be more individual, too; there
will be individualities of dress. He will see more
men offer seats to ladies, and more as a matter
of course. He will be surprised to see how many
get off at Alexandria. Should he, however,
stop there, and be so fortunate as to know some
of his fellow-travellers who have got off, he will
discover that the view of the town which he has
had from the car-window gives but an indifferent
idea of the place itself. He will find it old, it is
true, and bearing unmistakable marks of the absence
of the wealth which has made the glittering
Capital on the other side of the Potomac;
but the want of money is not poverty, and the old
age is not decrepitude. The streets until just
now were paved in the old-fashioned way with
cobble-stones, which looked strange to one who
had been rolling through the asphalt avenues of
Washington; the houses are often antiquated,
and sometimes out of repair, but there is something
impressive in it all. There are no marble
palaces on the street corners, but the old square
houses with their classic porticos, on the streets,
or set back in the yards amid the old trees, are
homes, not mere monuments of wealth and
pride; the stain on them is that of time and of
the elements, not a chemist's concoction; and
they have sheltered through generations a pure,
kindly, and home-loving people. The splendid
marble shaft that towers to the memory of Washington
is on the other side of the river in the city
which bears his venerated name, and which is even
a more splendid monument than this to the great
Virginian; but the old church where he met his
neighbors and worshipped God and the civilization
from which he sprang are in Alexandria.
It was on this side of the river that he learned
the sublime lessons which have made him the
foremost American and the greatest citizen that
the world has known. Down the broad river only
a short distance is the home where he lived as a
Virginia gentleman, and the simplicity of which
he adorned with the elegance of a noble life.

As soon as we reach the old town we are on
historical ground. The house where Braddock
rested when the young Virginian who was to be
known as the Father of his Country was his
volunteer aide is still shown, and the road that
leads away towards the west is still called
"Braddock's Road," after the brave but ill-fated
British general. Here, too, British troops

landed to ravage when the city across the river
was but a village; and here in the civil war came
the first army which invaded Virginia to march
on Richmond and end the war during a summer
holiday. Away to the westward, only a little
distance, is Bull Run, where the summer-encampment
idea was so terribly destroyed, and
here the shattered army returned to prepare
for war in earnest. From here to Culpeper and
to Petersburg lies the way that the armies took in
campaign after campaign, and this explains in
part the appearance that the country still presents.
This region was, to use the old phrase,
"swept by the besom of war," and the besom of
war sweeps clean. Time not only repairs the ravages
of war and heals its physical wounds, but it
heals the wounds of the spirit as well. It takes
time to do so, however, and the length of time required
is proportioned to the severity of the injuries.
Thus, the country here has not yet recovered.
In the lapse of years men forget the conditions
that once existed. When the war had been going
on three years there was not a fence and scarcely
a tree left standing from Alexandria to Fredericksburg.
When the war closed, from Alexandria
to Danville, almost on the North Carolina
border, was little more than a waste. In
portions of the counties of Culpeper, Fauquier
and Prince William there was hardly a house
left standing within five miles of the railway on
either side, and a bill was introduced in the
Legislature empowering the railway company to
buy the lands within five miles on either side.

As the road turns south it shortly reaches
again the noble Potomac, and for many miles
follows its winding marge, with the bluffs of
Maryland rising bold and blue on the other side
of the broad stream. When it touches the river,
however, it has left in the angle it has made,
Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington,
and Gunston Hall, the home of George
Mason, who drew the Virginia Constitution and
the Virginia Bill of Rights, among the noblest
papers ever drawn by man. Then, after a run
across the same poor-looking country, the train
suddenly crosses a high bridge over a small river,
with a hamlet on the near side and a town on
the other, in a plain between the river-bank and
a line of semi-circular hills. The little village
is Falmouth, where George Washington went to
school. The town on the other side is Fredericksburg,
and the heights which bend around
it are the far-famed Marye's Heights (pronounced
Maree, from the old Virginia family
whose residence crowned them). It was up
these heights that Meagher's brigade charged

time after time, to be swept back by Lee's line
with a loss of seventeen hundred in fifteen minutes,
and on the plain below men were mowed
down like grass. The country all around here
has been a battle-ground, for this is Spottsylvania,
where much of the war was fought. To
the westward a dozen miles lies Chancellorsville,
where Stonewall Jackson, after one of the most
brilliant military movements ever conceived,
which only genius could have planned and only
genius could have executed, fell at the age of
thirty-nine with his fame established. Not a hundred
yards from the railway a half score miles
below Fredericksburg, in a garden, stands the
little quaint house in which he died one Sunday
morning, alternately giving orders to forward his
infantry to the front, and whispering of passing
over the river to rest under the shade of the
trees.

A singular circumstance has recently come
to light. On a part of the battlefield of Chancellorsville
have been discovered the site and
remains of Governor Spotswoods' furnace, the
first iron furnace ever established in America.
The old race has been traced, the foundation of
the old stack uncovered, and the beginning of
that industry which is now said to control general
commerce has been laid open to the sight.

Only a short distance to the south lies the
country not inaptly called the Wilderness, but
back a little along the rivers are many fine farms
and pleasant sections.

The valley of the Rappahannock was in the
old times a famous grain-region, and some of
the finest plantations in Virginia still lie there
around the old colonial mansions which sheltered
in the past the great Virginians.

Fredericksburg itself was formerly well-nigh
unique among the towns of Virginia. The
gentry generally lived in the country on their
plantations, but in Fredericksburg there were
many of that class who kept town-houses.
Washington's mother spent her declining years
here, and the little old house where she lived still
stands, with its quaint roof and its garden
stretching around it as when she received,
flower-pot in hand, the nation's benefactor,
Lafayette, "without the parade of changing her
dress." Fredericksburg gave to the country
three of the most noted men who have honored
our navy; for here lived, from the age of thirteen
Paul Jones, that "foreigner of the South" who,
with the Bonhomme Richard on fire and sinking,
replied to a demand to surrender that he was
just beginning to fight, lashed the Serapis to
her, and forced her to strike her colors; and

here were born Lewis Herndon and Matthew
F. Maury. Some of the old mansions still
stand embowered in trees, impressive as in
the old days when they were the homes of
wealth and ease as well as of elegance and
refinement.

A picture of the town recalled by memory rises
before the writer when it was very different from
its present placid condition. It is as it looked
forty-eight hours after the great battle when for
days and nights it had been in the focus of the
fire of two armies. It was whilst the heroic dead
were being buried under a flag of truce, and, once
seen, its appearance could never be forgotten
—the battered and riddled houses; the dug-up
and littered streets with raw earthworks thrown
across them, on which groups of children had
planted little Confederate flags, whilst they
played at levelling them with fire-shovels; the
torn gardens; the shattered fences, behind which
men had poured out their blood like water; the
long, red trench on the common where the Path
of Glory ended; the roadways filled with broken
vehicles and fleeing refugees. All combined to
leave on the memory the ineffaceable picture of
a bombarded town.

Some fifty miles further on, across an unending
battle-field, is Richmond, the capital of the

Old Dominion, and during the war the capital
of the Confederate States, about which the war
surged for four years.

As the train runs out on the high bridge
which crosses the James, and one sees the historical
river boiling beneath it over its granite
ledges, with the beautiful city spread out for
miles along its curving bank, and with Belle
Isle in the middle, and Manchester on its further
side, he must agree that it was a wise man who
selected the spot for a city, and that he had an
eye for the picturesque as well as for the material
advantages of a location. He was Colonel
William Byrd, one of the old Virginia grandees
—a wit, a humorist, a colonial Councillor, a man
of affairs, and the Virginia author of greatest
note during her colonial history. He wrote the
"Trip to the Mines," which contains in sidelights
the best picture of life in the Old Dominion
that illumines her colonial period. His descendants
in Virginia are numerous, and many
of the Virginia families trace back to the founder
of her capital.

He laid it off at the falls of the James, the
river on which his own beautiful home, Westover,
one of the handsomest types of colonial
architecture remaining, was situated, a score or
two of miles lower down; and, sorrowful to relate

in this advanced age of the world, he established
a lottery to dispose of his lots. The place
had already been long known. Christopher Newport,
Admiral of Virginia, and her good angel,
planted a cross on an island here as long ago as
Whitsunday, 1607, when he explored the James to
its falls. Here Nat Bacon, the Rebel, had a place,
and Bacon's Quarter Branch perpetuates the
memory of the spot where the young planter had
his plantation, little knowing of the fame that
should come to him when he struck the first
armed blow on American soil for constitutional
rights.

The Falls of the James stretch in a reverse
curve for about seven miles, boiling over granite
ledges and slipping between islands covered
with birch, sycamore, and willow, which,
although several railway lines occupy the banks,
are as wild and beautiful to-day as they were
when Indians hunted upon the wooded bluffs
which hem them in. All old travellers unite in
their praise. They might have extended their
eulogies to the whole river; for, from its source
among the blue Alleghanies to where it widens
into Hampton Roads, it is not only the most
historical river in this country, but is one of the
most beautiful.

It may be that nativity in Virginia and many

years residence in Richmond have inclined
the mind of the writer to idealize the city's loveliness,
yet he knows no city in the United States
more beautiful. It is not that the houses generally
are handsome, but there are sections of
the city where the yards, filled with trees, look
like bowers, and the public squares are among
the most beautiful in the country. "The Capitol
Square," with its leafy slopes, its fine old
Capitol lifting itself on its eminence with the
simple grandeur of an old temple, and with its
broad walk, with the splendid Washington
Monument at one end, and the impressive old
"Governor's Mansion" at the other, is perhaps
the prettiest park of its size in the country.
It is certainly this to a Virginian; for many proud
or tender associations cling about the place.
For a hundred years and more the city has been
associated with all that Virginians are proud of.
In old St. John's Church assembled the great
Virginia convention which prepared for the public
defence and led the way to the Independence
of the Colonies. Here in Richmond sat the
great Convention for the ratification of the Constitution,
when Kentucky was a district of Virginia;
here have assembled her law-makers, her
jurists, and all that have contributed to make
the Old Dominion renowned and great. Here
met, year after year, the Old Virginians, with
their wives and daughters, to enjoy the gay life
of the capital of the Old Dominion, which they
adorned by their presence and made memorable
by their genius. Here sat and deliberated
the Secession Convention during the period
when Virginia stood as the peace-maker
between the two sections. Here, upon the
President's call for troops, she finally declared
her decision to secede from the Union. Here
Lee received the command of the Virginia
forces, and here he was appointed later to the
command of the armies of the Confederacy. Here
the Confederate Government passed its brief but
strenuous life, and from here the Southern side
of the war was fought. To seize Richmond the
armies and energies of the North were directed,
and for it they strove. Whilst it stood the Confederacy
stood, and it fell only when the South
was exhausted.

The country to the south of Richmond is like
that to the northward; for it went through the
same experience—if anything, worse. For not
only has war been here, but after the war it underwent
an evil from which the other section of the
State was exempt. This was the Black Belt, and
on it rested the heaviest burden any portion
of Virginia had to bear. Before the war this

section of Virginia, the South Side, was, perhaps,
the most "comfortably off" of any in the State;
there were more negroes here than elsewhere,
and though the lands were not so fertile as those
in the Valley, or generally even as those in the
Piedmont, they were readily susceptible of improvement,
and were in a state of good cultivation.
Negro emancipation meant necessarily a
change in this; but Negro domination meant its
destruction.

It was of this section in old times that George
W. Bagby used to write his charming sketches,
such as "My Uncle Flatback's Plantation,"[1] with
touches of delicious local color, and with a delicate
sentiment that made the reader homesick
to get out under the trees and roll on the grass.
Yet, some years back, I have oftener than once
gone from Richmond almost entirely across this
section, and outside of the towns never seen
a single farm-animal—this in a region once
filled with well-stocked and well-cultivated farms.
Even then there were good sections back from
the railways, and some of the most beautiful
plantations in the State lay along the rivers; but
these were at that time the exception. My Uncle
Flatback's sons were dead—one of camp-fever,

one at Gettysburg, and one in an unnamed skirmish;
he himself slept in the old garden, where
the roses and hollyhocks used to bloom; and his
sweet daughters used to walk with their lovers
in the old times; his plantation was let or deserted,
and the home with its cheer and charm
was gone. War and its followers had eaten
up the land.

As stated, the lands along the railways in
this part of Virginia give but an indifferently
true idea even of the soil and its culture; and
what is viewed from a car-window gives none
of the life which is the real Virginia. Poor as
the soil appears on the ridges, it is kindly. It
is easily susceptible of improvement, and produces
grain and tobacco of a peculiar quality. It
was in this eastern part of Virginia (in Hanover)
that the most famous race-horses of the country
were bred in old times, such as "Boston," "Nina,"
"Planet," "Fanny Washington," and many
others of the great plate-winners. Of late years
"Fanny Washington's" great son "Eolus" and
his wonderful progeny have justified the boast
of the old Virginians that this is the home of
the thoroughbred. Virginia colts have won
the great "Futurity," and in one year four
out of twelve Virginia entries stood the training
and ran in the race, a fine test of bone,

muscle, and bottom. Virginia hunters are so
highly esteemed that they are eagerly sought
after.

Perhaps, nowhere in the country has the
external and material been less indicative of
the internal or spiritual than in the Old Dominion.
The life has been so sequestered, so
self-contained, and the people have been so indifferent
to public opinion—at least, of all public
opinion outside of Virginia itself—and have cared
so little for show, that from the outward appearance
a wrong conception has often been drawn
of that which was within. Back from these
ridges along which the railways run, on the
rivers and little streams which empty into the
rivers, are peaceful valleys filled with sweet
homesteads, where the life flows on as calmly
and undisturbed as the limpid streams which
slip so silently between their mirrored willows.
This, after all, is Virginia—the Virginia which
is not seen any more than the air or the perfume
of the fields is visible to the eye, but which is
felt and known through its silent influence. In
those secluded homes, under their great oaks,
far from the bustle and din and strife of the world
grew and ripened the Virginians who made the
Old Dominion what she was: mother of States
and of Statesmen.