Iconic Civil War site reclaimed by nature

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Where once bullets flew, men fell, cannon roared and army engineers toiled under great pressure, all is quiet now at Franklin’s Crossing.

It may be the most forgotten part of the Fredericksburg battlefield, reclaimed by nature, unvisited by those interested in the Civil War.

An adventuresome group of nearly 80 people recently braved poison ivy, bug bites and slippery slopes recently on the public’s first walking tour of a place that buzzed with activity, off and on, for 2 years of the war.

“As far as we know, you are the only people to look at this site since (Civil War) veterans did in the early 20th century,” John Hennessy, chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, told participants as they stood on a high bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River.

Hennessy helped Eric Mink, the park’s cultural resources manager, lead what the former called their first “slog,” out of many walks that they and other National Park Service historians have offered here over the years.

But the chance to see this spot in Spotsylvania County where the Union army crossed the river — in four different campaigns — was irresistible to many.

Site of the Yankees’ lower pontoon-bridge crossing during the Battle of Fredericksburg, the place is hidden by woods and the industrial landscape of the Bowman Center off routes 2 and 17 east of the city.

The bridge landings are tucked between a lumberyard on the west side of the river and Stafford County’s Washington Square Walmart on the east. On the Spotsylvania shore, they’re bounded by a sewage-treatment plant and Sylvania Heights subdivision.

You’d never know it was there.

Yet many thousands of people have seen this landscape in iconic wartime images published again and again since the 1890s, available today with a few mouse clicks.

One of the Civil War’s most famous photographs of troops in the field was taken here by Capt. Andrew J. Russell, a now-legendary photographer assigned to the U.S. Military Railroads.

It was misidentified with the title “Union Soldiers in trenches before Petersburg” and misdated to December 1864 before historians William Frassanito and Brian Pohanka analyzed the image in the early 1980s.

Recorded between April 29 and May 2, 1863, this moment frozen in time shows Union soldiers massed on the river’s west bank on the cusp of Gen. Joe Hooker’s Chancellorsville campaign.

In fact, Franklin’s Crossing is the most illustrated place on the area’s battlefields, Hennessy said.

As the Union army poured through this gap in the Rappahannock’s bluffs in 1862, 1863 and 1865, cameramen came with it.

Warfare is all about terrain, and that was certainly true here, Mink said. Despite decades of nearby development and some resulting erosion, the topography is still largely as it was during the war, Hennessy said.

Franklin’s Crossing was the farthest downstream site where the army could build pontoon bridges so troops could cross. Immediately below there, the river widens to 1,000 feet.

It’s named for William Buel Franklin, the general whom some blame for the Union army’s failure to capitalize on breaking through Confederate commander Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s defenses during the Battle of Fredericksburg. The defeat led to Franklin, who was tops in his West Point class of 1843, being purged from the army.

Franklin’s troops, the left wing of the Union army, crossed the Rappahannock here on Dec. 12, 1862, on their way into the battle.

As pontoons were swung into place, anchored and the span was planked between 7 and 11 a.m. that day, six Union soldiers were wounded by enemy fire from the Spotsylvania bank.

Completed before the now-more-famous middle crossing in Fredericksburg proper, it was the first U.S. Army pontoon bridge built under fire, the historians said.

In late April-early May 1863 and June 1863, Union soldiers again crossed here. And once more in May 1865, after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, as the victorious army headed back to Washington for its Grand Review. Within a week of that parade, the Union’s two main armies were disbanded.

In each of those crossings, soldiers on both sides left vivid accounts, which Mink and Hennessy shared with their audience.

In addition to the work by Frassanito and Pohanka, Franklin’s Crossing imagery has also been fruitfully scrutinized by photo historian John Kelley of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Hennnessy and park historian Noel Harrison.

After many years’ effort, Kelley discovered that one of the most detailed photos of the crossing, clearly showing landmarks that survive on today’s Spotsylvania shore, was taken in June 1863, not a month prior, as had long been thought.

That means the image shows the very start of what became the Gettysburg campaign, as Lee pulled his troops out of the area toward Culpeper for their invasion of the north. Hooker bridged the river and sent a raiding party across to capture Confederates and glean intelligence about what Lee was up to.

Kelley’s article on the discovery, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The First Photographs of the Gettysburg Campaign,” can be found on the Center for Civil War Photography’s website.

Participants in Saturday’s tour said they hope they may be able to return when leaves are off the trees and the views are better.

The tour was made possible by Spotsylvania County, which owns the crossing’s western shore, and businesses in Bowman Center, most notably the Jim Carpenter Co. and Lee’s Retreat brew-pub, which welcomed the hikers — and has an enlargement of one of the Franklin’s Crossing photos just inside its entrance.