Rediscovering America_ Exploring the Small Towns of Virginia & Maryland - Bill Burnham [58]
MOVIE TRIVIA: Christmas Every Day was a television movie filmed in Ashland in the fall of 1995. They picked the colorful leaves off the trees and sprayed the streets with a soapy fake snow. Scenes from the 1995 movie Major Payne, starring Damon Wayans, were filmed just outside the train station.
Appomattox
Around Town
Appomattox Court House exists largely intact from its heyday of 1865 thanks to a railroad, a fire, and benign neglect. Unlike every other battlefield in the south, this place where Robert E. Lee surrendered Confederate troops to the Union received no memorial or acclaim in the aftermath of the conflict. No monuments were built by either side. When the railroad came to Appomattox Station, a few miles to the south, commerce moved there as well. No longer was the Richmond-Lynchburg Turnpike, which ran through town, a main thoroughfare for commerce. Serving travelers on the road had been the reason for the town’s existence, which grew up around a tavern. The final straw came in 1892 when the courthouse burned. Rather than rebuild what had become a ghost town, town fathers moved the county seat to the now bustling railroad town.
But misfortunes had a silver lining for this historic spot. No fast food restaurants or gas stations ever paved over what, to many, remains hallowed ground. In the 1930s, the National Park Service began acquiring land and restoring buildings. In 1954 the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park opened as a recreation of a town looking much as it did in 1865.
Today costumed interpreters and park rangers bring to life the events that took place on the quiet gravel roads and rolling fields surrounding the tiny town of a half dozen buildings. Here, on April 12, 1865, Confederate soldiers lined the roads with their forfeited weapons. In exchange, a truly remarkable war-time agreement: The near-starving soldiers received food, paroles to go home and permission to take whatever they had brought to the war, even their own horses and rifles. Anything the Confederate Army had given them had to be surrendered, including their flags.
The Clover Hill Tavern is the oldest building in the park, built in 1819 to serve travelers on the turnpike. The visitor center is located in the reconstructed courthouse. There’s a law office, a jail and a store. The largest house in town, the McLean House, has been reconstructed to the way it looked when Lee and Grant worked out the surrender terms in the parlor of the local merchant.
The McLean House has an interesting chronology. The original brick building was dismantled in 1893 and packed up. The plan was to take it to Washington DC for a war museum. But the recession of 1893 came along and funding disappeared. The building materials were left there, and for decades passersby took souvenir bricks. Of 80,000 original bricks, only about 5,000 were used in the reconstruction.
To this day, the national park receives at least one or two bricks a year in the mail with a note, usually to the effect that a grandfather or great-grandfather had it for years and the current owner feels the park should have it back. Since the house has been rebuilt, the bricks are stacked in the basement of the visitor center. The park is open daily, 8:30 am-5 pm, year-round. Admission in the summer is $4 per person, with a $10 maximum per vehicle. The rest of the year, it’s $3 and $5, respectively. Pets are allowed on a leash throughout the park, but not in any of the buildings. (tel. 434-352-8987, www.nps.gov)
A few miles south of the battlefield stands modern Appomattox. The railroad station on Main Street has seen its last train passengers. Freight trains still