Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104050218
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EX1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Mary Terry began her recollections of Civil War life in Roanoke County with that simple statement in 1890, 29 years after the war. Terry wrote eloquently of the impact the conflict had on her family in a memoir for her daughters, who were children during the struggle that divided a nation.
Though Roanoke County was spared much of the destruction that ripped the rest of the state, it still felt the hard fist of war on the home front and on the battlefield.
"A lot of men came out of Roanoke County," says Virginia Tech Professor James Robertson, who wrote the recently published "Civil War Virginia: Battleground for a Nation."
According to Robertson, "nowhere in the nation was the full fury of the Civil War felt as it was in Virginia."
The fury of the war that ended at Appomattox 136 years ago Tuesday took the lives of Roanoke County men, brought a marauding Union army through Big Lick and Salem and over Catawba Mountain, and took food from the mouths of those left behind.
It also created the kind of human drama that riveted viewers to Ken Burns' public television documentary "The Civil War" last year. The series is scheduled for rebroadcast in July.
Robertson is one of Burns' critics, but he also gives "The Civil War" credit for generating a groundswell of interest in the war. What fascinated many viewers were the personal touches, the reminiscences, details of home and camp life and the poignancy and humor of first-hand observation.
Gary Walker, a Roanoke writer, is collecting those kinds of stories passed down through families for his third book on the Civil War. One story he recently heard tells about a Salem infantryman at Pickett's charge:
"The flag bearer out front went down. Then the second flag bearer got hit. The Salem man was the third flag bearer. He looked around, saw he was surrounded by Yankees and ran."
Later, the fleet-footed flag bearer was asked by an arm-chair warrior why he ran from the Yankees.
"Because I couldn't fly, you damned fool," he replied.
At the time of the Civil War, the city of Roanoke was not in existence. Big Lick was the name of the small farm town that would later become Roanoke.
Mary Terry lived in Elmwood, a house built in 1830 that stood where the Roanoke City Library on Jefferson Street stands today. Her husband, Henry, left Roanoke College to join Gen. George Edward Pickett's division, leaving his 21-year-old wife and two young children behind.
"Those who did not pass through the war can have no idea how plainly we lived," Terry wrote in a journal that is now part of the collection at the Roanoke Library's Virginia Room.
"Our coffee soon gave out, or was hoarded for the very old and the sick and for special occasions. It seems almost impossible to realize now the different drinks we used; rye, wheat, chestnuts, sweet potatoes were all used for making coffee. Chestnuts and sweet potatoes, parboiled and baked, made a preparation somewhat like coffee. We used herb and root teas, camomile, boneset, balm, sage, raspberry leaf, sassafras, etc., but all these, being known for their medicinal qualities, savored too much of medicine to be popular as a drink for the table.
"We had difficulty in obtaining wheat and rye at all times, so we cultivated temperance principles, and appreciated pure, fresh water as a healthful and convenient table beverage."
Citizens learned to improvise. For a cousin's wedding, Terry helped make the bridal wreath of hairs taken from the tails of different colored horses "and for white, used the long, fluffy hair of her little dog's tail."
But such improvisations quickly lost their charm.
"The most discouraging time I experienced was the Christmas [of 1864] before the surrender, we felt our cause well nigh hopeless, we were discouraged, despondent, heartsick, almost destitute of clothing, and provisions.
"For our Christmas dinner we had sorghum cakes, pumpkin custards made with sorghum, without eggs and a small piece of spare rib. I had filled my children's stockings with apples, walnuts, hickory nuts, sweet potatoes and sorghum candy. I did what I could to make them happy, for I dreaded what another Christmas might bring forth.
"Let no one think we complained of our deprivations, it was the growing conviction of the helplessness of our cause that was destroying our courage."
The taint of slavery
While slavery wasn't as prevalent in Roanoke County as in the plantation country farther east, it was still an obvious and odious presence. There were more than 2,500 slaves in Roanoke County in 1860.
Martha Showvely of Roanoke was 100 years old when she was interviewed about her life as a slave by the Federal Writers Project in 1937. She had been sold in the Richmond slave market to a Ben Tinsley, who then brought her to his house in the Franklin and Roanoke County farm country surrounding Big Lick.
Showvely was 9 when she was separated from her mother and cousins.
"When he bought me and started to take me off, I axe him if he was goina take all of us. He said no. De trader said he was goina carry dem down in Georgia. I started cryin'. Massa Tinsley asked what I was cryin' for. I said I didn't want to leave my cousins. He said he didn't want dem an' den he carried me on off. I never did see my cousins again."
Nor her mother. Showvely said she was treated well, and she later married Moses Showvely, a free man who worked on the railroad.
But slavery lost Showvely her mother forever.
"Some years after de war, one of my daughters carried me back down to Powhatan County on de James to see if I could find my mother. After we got dere, dey tol' me my mother had been dead three years."
Call to arms
Roanoke County, chartered in 1838, supported the Confederacy on all levels. The Catawba Iron Works at Cloverdale supplied plate for the ironclad, C.S.S. Virginia, better known as the Merrimack. The Bonsack Woolen Mill made uniforms for the army. Through the Roanoke and Salem depots of the Virginia and Tennessee Railway came the foods grown locally that helped feed the troops.
More than 1,000 Roanoke County men answered the call to arms.
Four complete companies were mustered in the area - The Salem Flying Artillery, the Dixie Grays, the Roanoke Guard and the Roanoke Grays. Out of the approximately 100 soldiers in the Roanoke Grays, only one was present for the roll call at Appomattox on the weekend of April 9, 1865, a testament to the action the unit saw.
There were home guard units as well. One was formed at Roanoke College of teen-age students. Another was named the Cradle to the Grave militia because the members were very young or very old; the men in between had joined active units.
Taxes to support the war effort were levied in the county, and Confederate currency was printed in Salem to equip the volunteers and to aid their families. The Roanoke County courthouse was turned into a hospital for the sick and wounded.
Patrollers were appointed in Salem to look for deserters. James E. Stover shot and killed a patroller in 1863 and earned the distinction of being the last man to be publicly hanged in Roanoke County. He rode sitting on his coffin to a make-shift gallows on the eastern part of Salem near Main Street. Crowds lined the streets as Stover passed by.
At the beginning of the war, Hollins College, then Hollins Institute, and Roanoke College were each only 20 years old. The war had more of an effect on Roanoke College because the teen-age male students were called into a home guard to protect the town and impede any union troops that might pass through.
However, the women at Hollins were not unaffected.
"We have had peas, beans and beets, and I have learned to eat lettuce," wrote Betty Jane Miller to her niece in 1863.
"I think the fare is very good, but we have every reason to believe that it will not be so good after a while. I forgot to tell you that we had such a splendid serenade a week ago by the band from Salem. I do wish you could have heard it. The three prettiest pieces were `The Bonnie Blue Flag,' `Dixie' and `The Voluntur.' The words of the latter piece commenced `Weep not dearest.'
"We heard yesterday that our army has gone to Maryland. Do hope it is so. I tell you I felt rather gloomy when I heard the Yankees were advancing, for I do not know what would become of me if they got to `Culp' [Culpeper] and cut off the communications from here."
Though the letters and journals in the Hollins archives reveal concern about the war, they reflect more the daily details of college life: prayer meetings, primping for the daguerreotypist, memorizing Moliere, passing gossip.
This tidbit also came from Betty Jane Miller:
"Tell sister Louise I heard the other day that Foly Kemper and somebody in Lynchburg came very near having a duel about some girl. They both backed out like cowards. I think both of them ought to be sent to the army."
Seeing combat
County citizens met the enemy eye-to-eye twice during the war.
In December 1863, Union Brigadier Gen. William W. Averell invaded Salem. He freed the prisoners in the county jail, looted the stores, destroyed food supplies and burned the depot.
According to Norwood C. Middleton's "Salem: A Virginia Chronicle," the advance guard came down Main Street "four abreast and pistols in hand, cocked, ready to fire."
A Lynchburg war correspondent wrote that "everyone in the street took to their heels, and wagons, horses and every living thing joined in the general stampede, except the ladies, whose curiosity exceeded their fear, and a few gentlemen who were in their houses."
One Salemite was killed, Thomas J. Chapman, 26. He was on a scouting expedition when confronted by the Union forces. The reporter for the Lynchburg Daily Virginian wrote: "Mr. Thomas Chapman was ordered to surrender and not dismounting as quickly as they wished was shot dead on the spot."
Averell rounded up some Roanoke College students who had pledged to help the Confederacy in exchange for being allowed to stay in school.
He asked them what they thought of the Confederacy and an emboldened student said: "We think it is doing very well."
Averell responded, "O, now boys, you know it is most played out. You all go to your books and study your best." Averell then ordered his young prisoners released.
Battle for Hanging Rock
The only Roanoke Valley site listed in Robertson's "Civil War Sites in Virginia" is the triangular stone marker at Hanging Rock. It commemorates the spot where Gen. Jubal Early's Confederate cavalry met and skirmished with Gen. David Hunter's fleeing Federal forces in the first week of summer, 1864.
Gary Walker's most recently published book is "Hunter's Fiery Raid Through Virginia Valleys," and it details the Union general's activity in the Roanoke Valley.
"If Jubal Early had been in pursuit earlier, it would have been the end of Hunter's army," Walker says. "It would have been a major turning point in the war and relieved the pressure on the Southern forces in the Shenandoah Valley."
A breakdown in communications that slowed Early's advance prevented Salem from becoming the site of a major battle.
Hunter, a fiery abolitionist who burned and pillaged Virginia localities wherever he could, advanced on Lynchburg that spring to cut off supplies to Lee's army at Richmond. Lee sent the feisty, whiskey-drinking Early to intercept Hunter. It was a bold move because it severely weakened Lee's Richmond forces.
Early met Hunter near Lynchburg and "hung on by luck and the skin of his teeth," Walker says. Nicknamed "Black Dave" by his men, the dour Hunter and his forces of 35,000 fled toward Roanoke County destroying property as they went.
They forked into the Roanoke area along the roads that today are U.S. 11 and U.S. 460. Because Early was at their heels, they didn't do as much damage to the citizenry as they had to those in the Shenandoah Valley. But they burned the railroad depots and the Bonsack Woolen Mill, and they raided homes and businesses when they had the time.
"The Yankees made a raid through here about the middle of the war, burned the depot and carried off all the silver, firearms, horses and cattle they could find, killing off some of the hogs that were too fat to drive," Mary Terry wrote. "The next morning my little daughter saw them at a neighbor's on the opposite hill. I told her to look at the Yankees. She said `Are they Yankees, why they look like men.' "
The federal troops barely missed intercepting a supply train chugging out of the depot with supplies for Lee, and they were angry.
"Mr. Ferguson, who owned a large tobacco factory on the way, made the servants roll out two barrels of brandy, knock the heads out and let the brandy waste," Terry recalled. "He was afraid that after their failure at the depot, on their return they might search the factory, find the brandy and get drunk and do a great deal of harm. It hurt the factory hands so much to see the good brandy wasting on the ground."
The Union forces moved on into Salem, up what is now Craig Avenue in an attempt to slip through the gap, over Catawba Mountain and on into West Virginia and safety. However, they found that the home guard had felled trees across the road, and they stopped to remove them so the wagons and artillery pieces could pass.
It was there that about 1,000 Confederate forces under Gen. John McCausland caught the Federals and fired on them from the steep hillsides. McCausland ordered his men to kill the horses and mules first so the enemy troops couldn't escape with their artillery.
Mason's Creek ran red with the blood of the animals, an observer reported. Figures vary, but about 10 Union soldiers were killed, 40 to 50 wounded and 100 captured.
More important, says Walker, 18 pieces of artillery were captured or destroyed before the Union forces could escape over the mountain. However, the effect was minimal. Less than a year later, Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the tiny village of Appomattox Courthouse, 82 miles from the Battle of Hanging Rock.
The war, in essence, was over, but its effects and ramifications remained profound.
Hard times
Mary Terry wrote: "Money was so difficult to obtain, there was nothing to sell, and everything to buy, the cattle and hogs had been killed to feed the soldier, the horses had been taken away for the army, wearing apparel, bed and table linen almost worn out, table-ware broken, kitchen utensils worn and broken, all farming implements in the last stages of usefulness; it was more trying the year of the surrender than during the war."
In later years, Terry reflected on those years of hardship and the cause for which she and her family sacrificed their way of life.
"When passing through trying experiences of the war we never thought if defeat should come, that we would live to thank God for it; yet it is so. The South rejoices today over the downfall of the Confederacy, and realizes that our defeat was not only a national blessing, but a special blessing to the South. . . .
"The greatest blessing to us was the abolishment of slavery, we were raised believing the institution right, we thought it sanctioned by Divine law, as well as the laws of our state, and that the sad things resulting from it were great misfortunes, and not necessarily the results of the institution.
"One thing that we are proud of is that we were over-powered by our own people. Our war was a family affair and settled among ourselves. I do not feel that the lives of our soldiers were sacrificed in vain. Each true-hearted soldier slain in our war deserves a patriot's grave.
"But war is dreadful, especially civil war, where all the suffering falls on one people."
\ ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on April 9, 1991\ Correction
Because of a reporter's error, the story in Sunday's extra section about life in Roanoke during the Civil War contained some incorrect information about Mary Terry, the author of a journal on the Civil War.
Terry was married to Peyton Leftwich Terry and moved to Elmwood shortly after the war. She lived near the railroad tracks in Big Lick when the Federal forces came through.
\
Memo: Correction