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CIVIL WAR TRENCHES ARE PART OF LANDSCAPE AT VA

HOSPITAL -- Earthworks abound at Fayetteville

veterans' facility.

 

 

Story here... http://www.fayobserver.com/
article?id=253967

Story below:

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Civil War trenches are part of the landscape

Roy Parker

This time of year, historians around here always look back to the first weeks of 1865, when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s federal bluebellies were marching hard toward Fayetteville.

The federal army swept through South Carolina and tramped inexorably on toward its goal of squeezing the life out of the fast-fading Confederacy.

The end of the Civil War was only weeks away.

This is a report on one aspect of Fayetteville’s response as Sherman’s hard-bitten veterans loomed over the horizon.

A customary response to an invading army was to dig — that is, to shovel out trenches and to throw up earthworks.

By the fifth year of the Civil War, digging was as much a part of fighting as shooting. Given a few hours, most armies could and would shovel elaborate trenches and artillery gun positions.

Today you can see the remains of three military digging projects in and near Fayetteville.

Only one has a historical marker and is in a public place. So start with it.

Go out Ramsey Street where the Veterans Affairs Medical Center is on the east side of the highway and Lafayette Memorial Gardens is across the road to the west.

On the grounds of the hospital, a state historical marker tells of the Confederate breastworks dug in 1865 in direct response to the threat of Sherman’s invasion. The remnants of the lines are carefully preserved by personnel and patients of the hospital.

The trenches were dug in a few days, probably by slave labor, under the direction of officers from the garrison of the Fayetteville Arsenal.

The Confederates weren’t sure which way the federal army would come.

In early 1865, the thinking was that the Union juggernaut would go west of Fayetteville, aiming at Charlotte.

And Sherman didn’t disabuse that notion. Right up until his army marched into Fayetteville on March 11, 1865, he sent scouting parties out west to confuse Confederate outposts.

Of course, Sherman’s army rolled into Fayetteville from the southwest and south, and the Raleigh Road lines in a sense were sited the wrong direction.

The line of earthworks across Ramsey Street, then known as Raleigh Road, would stretch from the high river bluff just east of the veterans’ hospital to the swampy lowlands of Cross Creek a half mile to the west. The line was just north of the grounds of present-day Lafayette Memorial Gardens. Some remnants of the line are still visible on the west side of Ramsey Street.

Two other military digging sites in and around Fayetteville date to earlier years of the Civil War. And like the Raleigh Road trenches, they apparently were never used.

The earliest is at the mouth of Rockfish Creek, just off N.C. 87 south of Fayetteville, now on the grounds of the Public Works Commission’s waterworks.

The well-defined “fort” commands a high bluff overlooking a stretch of the Cape Fear River.

The little earthwork was created in the early months of 1862 by soldiers of the arsenal garrison. It was built as an artillery emplacement, and was meant as a defense against any federal gunboats that might get past the Wilmington waterfront and make their way up the river.

I have never found evidence that any guns were ever placed in the little earthwork, which at times was grandly called “Fort Booth,” after an early commandant of the arsenal who died in September 1862.

The third well-preserved Civil War earthwork is tucked back in the woods on the east side of the Cape Fear just north of where Sol Rose is completing his new Lord’s Mill Restaurant at the east end of the Person Street bridge.

The earthwork was sited to command approaches to the bridge that spanned the river there in 1865: the 45-year-old covered bridge known as the Clarendon Bridge.

The story of the earthwork goes back to the summer of 1863 when new alarms of a Union invasion of the Carolina coast followed the great battle of Gettysburg far off in Pennsylvania.

Two weeks after that battle, the commandant of the Fayetteville Arsenal called for major new military initiatives in Fayetteville.

On July 16, he announced that he was recruiting 100 additional men for the garrison.

Meanwhile, Fayetteville Mayor Archibald McLean published a notice under the head: “Laborers for the Defenses” appealing for 50 to 75 laborers “so Major Childs can complete the defenses of the Clarendon Bridge.”

The appeal urged slave owners to donate the labor of their slaves to dig large earthworks to guard the bridge and the arsenal. The mayor said the number of workers sought could complete the fortifications in three days.

But the appeal evidently was not totally successful.

In early August, the arsenal commander, newly promoted Lt. Col. Fred Childs, called on the general commanding Confederate forces in North Carolina to supply engineers with authority to hire 75 to 100 workers at $20 a month to “fortify the town.”

The alarm subsided, however, and three weeks later, Childs reported that workers were “still needed to work on fortifications.”

Sixty workers had been furnished, he said, but 100 were needed. If workers were not provided voluntarily, he warned that he would use military authority to impress them into shovel service.

Once again, fortifications never saw action.

When Sherman’s army arrived, Confederates burned the Clarendon Bridge and retreated north into the Cumberland County countryside.

Sherman’s pontoniers — military engineers who build pontoon bridges — took only a couple of hours to throw a bridge across the Cape Fear next to the smoldering ruins of the Clarendon. The earthworks overlooking the bridge were largely forgotten. Obscurity has helped preserve them. Sol Rose has owned the site for many year and has lovingly guarded it.

 

Roy Parker can receive messages at roypark2@aol.com.

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Larry Scott  --