Ellwood
N 38° 19.160 W 077° 43.882
18S E 261215 N 4244777
The house and outbuildings were used as a field hospital by the Confederates during the Battle of Chancellorsville. In the family cemetery lies the arm of Stonewall Jackson. The house was later used as a Union headquarters.
Waymark Code: WM1VWX
Location: Virginia, United States
Date Posted: 07/16/2007
Views: 54
Until May 1864, Ellwood stood on the fringe of events. A minor skirmish erupted here in April, 1863, as the Confederates tried vainly to delay Union forces advancing towards Chancellorsville. Days later, General "Stonewall" Jackson's chaplain, Beverly Tucker Lacy (J. Horace's brother) chose the family cemetery at Ellwood as the final resting place for his chief's amputated arm.
For months after the Battle of Chancellorsville the house served as a field hospital. In the fall of 1863, Union troops on their way to the standoff at Mine Run, seven miles west, stopped at Ellwood and ransacked the fine Lacy library.
For three days in May, 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness, the eyes of he world focused on Ellwood and its surrounding fields and thickets. The grounds teemed with Union artillery and soldiers as they prepared for, or recovered from, intense fighting a mile to the west. General Ulysses S. Grant - recently appointed commander of all Union armies throughout the country - made his headquarters just a few hundred yards north of Ellwood. Generals Gouverneur K. Warren and Ambrose E. Burnside, two of the army's four corps commanders, moved into Ellwood itself. Orderlies and staff officers swarmed around the buildings, carrying orders to front-line troops.
By battle's end, Ellwood's floors were stained with blood, its gardens trampled, its fences gone. Graves dotted the grounds. The house's caretakers had been arrested and sent to Old Capitol Prison in Washington. For the next eight years Ellwood would stand vacant used only by occasional squatters.
(From the NPS)
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