The Wilderness Dark-Close Wood - Locust Grove VA
Posted by: 
Don.Morfe
N 38° 19.051 W 077° 45.386
18S E 259018 N 4244640
The Wilderness of today looks little like the tangled landscape soldiers found here in 1864. For decades before the war, loggers had cut and recut these forests to fuel nearby iron furnaces.
Waymark Code: WM134AV
Location: Virginia, United States
Date Posted: 09/12/2020
Views: 1
The Wilderness-Dark, Close Wood-The Wilderness of today looks little like the tangled landscape soldiers found here in 1864. For decades before the war, loggers had cut and recut these forests to fuel nearby iron furnaces, leaving behind an impenetrable mix of dead fall, brush and re-emerging growth. Only a few small farmers had dared to seek sustenance here. Their small clearings offered only relief from what one soldier called “the dark, close wood.”
Military theorists who devised tactics of that era never envisioned waging war through such forbidding terrain. When the armies collided here, they had no time to change tactics. Instead, traditional battle ranks struggled through thickets, unable to see more than a few dozen feet. Lines of blue and gray collided without warning in horrific firefights. The woods burned – the wounded and dead, too. “It is,” one man wrote, “a region of gloom.”
LOCATION: Marker is near Locust Grove, Virginia, in Orange County. Marker can be reached from Constitution Highway (Virginia Route 20) 1.7 miles
Wide view of the The Wilderness Marker image. Click for full size.
By Paul Crumlish, October 6, 2012
2. Wide view of the The Wilderness Marker
west of Germanna Highway (Virginia Route 3). Located at stop two of the driving tour of Wilderness Battlefield. Post office area: Locust Grove VA 22508
Visit Instructions:
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