
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 9, 1990                   TAG: 9004090125
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium

LEE FIELD OFFICE CENTER OF BATTLE

For a century, the Bryan family has been as interwoven as the newspapers they own in the fabric of Virginia and its capital city.

The great-great-grandfather of J. Stewart Bryan III, current publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Richmond News Leader, owned the Franklin Street house where Robert E. Lee's wife and daughters - and occasionally the general himself - lived during the final year of the Civil War. Bryan's great-grandmother fought to preserve Jamestown Island as a public site. And his father, D. Tennant Bryan, is president emeritus of the Virginia Historical Society.

So it is ironic and, to some, perplexing that the Bryan family now finds itself at loggerheads with an assortment of historical groups over the preservation of a house that once was a field headquarters for Lee and stands at the site of a multimillion-dollar headquarters and production plant planned by the newspapers.

Media General, parent firm of the editorially conservative papers, has offered to pay up to $50,000 to help a purchaser relocate Lockwood House.

"Historically and architecturally, it would be devastating to move it," said Linda Marks, president of the Hanover County Historical Society.

At the center of the dispute is substantial disagreement between Stewart Bryan and the preservationists over the historic value of Lockwood House, a two-story, white frame plantation home about six miles north of Richmond. What the historians see as a unique site, the only intact home in the greater Richmond area used by Lee as a field headquarters, Bryan sees as a rather typical 19th century farmhouse in which the general happened to spend a few nights.

Civil War reference books list Lockwood House as the spot where Lee spent the nights of May 28-30, 1864, just prior to the critical battle of Cold Harbor. That battle, in which about 15,000 soldiers died, blocked the Union's advance on Richmond and may have kept the Confederacy alive.

It was in an upstairs bedroom at Lockwood House that Lee planned his interception of the Union forces, according to the preservationists.

by CNB