THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503110056
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
DATELINE: LEXINGTON, VA. LENGTH: Long : 296 lines
SCENIC BYWAY only begins to describe the visual sensations one experiences along Virginia Route 39 that in this part of Rockbridge County is called the Maury River Road.
Emerging from Goshen Pass, where it follows the rushing, rock-strewn Maury River through little mountain ridges on the eastern edge of the Allegheny Range, the winding, two-lane blacktop track leaves the watercourse and climbs the gently rolling hills of Virginia's Great Valley.
And suddenly, at the crest of one of those rises, there is a view so bucolic, so sublime as to defy description. But I will try.
To the west, the afternoon sun beaming down on it, is a local natural landmark called House Mountain, a great flat-top monolith looking like a giant mansard roof. To the east, through the haze, the Blue Ridge Mountains appear as a great swatch of rumpled blue-gray velvet tossed casually across the landscape.
And in between, nestled cozily in the valley, just beyond the huge barns of the Virginia Horse Center, are the steeples of Lexington's churches, the dusty-yellow, crenelated bastions of Virginia Military Institute and the white-columned facades of Washington and Lee University's red brick buildings.
In town, the setting is equally idyllic: rank upon rank of VMI cadets on dress parade Friday afternoons, W&L students strolling shady green lawns, townspeople chatting outside shops along hilly streets.
Postcard pretty and refreshingly rural, Lexington is a very special place.
Five years away from the 21st century, if the calendar is to be believed, Lexington remains in many ways a 19th century college and market town. By choice. This town of less than 10,000 is not exactly what you'd call quaint. And it's not an almost-too-perfect museum piece like Williamsburg.
It's much more like the hundreds of little market towns and villages that dot the English countryside. Like them, Lexington has been there for years, has done quite well for itself, has been a wonderful hometown to its proud residents and . . . well, why change a thing?
Maybe endearing is the word. Or comfortable. And it wears its history well.
Lexington's history is the everyday-life sort of history that enables you to visualize, to feel, what life was really like back when . . .
Well, back in the decade before the Civil War when Maj. Thomas J. Jackson, late of Mexican War fame, taught natural philosophy (badly, according to most of his students) and artillery tactics (quite well, if his pupils' performance in the ensuing war is the test).
``I have reported at Lexington and am delighted with my duties, the place and the people,'' Jackson wrote to his sister. ``Of all the places that have come under my observation in the United States, this little village is the most beautiful.''
Lexington hasn't changed. Only collected more stories to tell.
Like during the five years that followed the Civil War when Robert E. Lee served as president of Washington College and revived the proud old school. His desk in his basement office in Lee Chapel remains much as he left it when he walked back home one evening in September 1870 to suffer what today we would call a stroke. Death did not come immediately. The general lingered, bedfast, until Oct. 12.
Or back at the turn of this century to the little gingerbread Victorian house on the edge of the grounds of VMI where cadet first captain George Catlett Marshall, class of '01, courted and eventually married his first wife. Today, it serves as the VMI admissions office.
It's a wonderful place for a weekend getaway, or longer than that if you really want to unwind.
I've been passing through Lexington with some regularity ever since I can remember - for nearly half a century, come to think of it - not stopping often enough to absorb its unique ambiance. Because it remains one of my favorite places, I returned for a weekend recently.
On the way in on I-81 and I-64 (the two roads are one from Staunton to Lexington), near the north end of Rockbridge County, I took a couple of detours I'd strongly recommend.
Leave the interstate at exit 251 and go west on Virginia 606 about four miles to Wade's Mill and the adjacent Buffalo Springs Herb Farm. Both have their origins in the 18th century, and it is a lovely setting. Then backtrack on 606 past the interstate to Cyrus McCormick's Farm, where a teenage boy with no formal education invented the mechanical reaper.
If you follow U.S. 11, the old Valley Pike, on into Lexington, you'll pass the birthplace of Sam Houston, father of Texas independence, and the beautiful old stone Timber Ridge Church, where Scotch-Irish Presbyterians have worshipped since 1756.
What Lexingtonians have done over the past several decades is to sort of ``antique'' the whole downtown, burying power lines and sprucing up those wonderfully sturdy and simple 19th century buildings and homes that line the town's principal streets.
They seem to function quite well today as shops and boutiques, restaurants and B&Bs, laundries and lawyers' offices. ``Modern'' really doesn't work well here . . . except, of course, in academic thought and artistic pursuit.
I stayed at the Alexander-Withrow House, one of three area B&Bs owned by Norfolkians Peter and Susan Meredith, at the corner of Main and Washington streets, diagonally across from the courthouse. Built about 1789, it must have been particularly distinctive at the time, with its elaborate diamond design of Flemish bond brick and four interior corner chimneys, in the midst of a frontier valley town.
There's only a single neon sign in town, and it remains something of a bone of esthetic contention. The Southern Inn, a Main Street restaurant, insists that its sign, which informs potential customers that there's parking in the rear, has been there so long it's historic, too.
Several years ago, when movie makers needed a town to stand in for post-Civil War Nashville, a place where they could try and hang Jack Sommersby, they chose Lexington. All they needed to do was spread dirt over the narrow streets, alter a few storefronts, hide the traffic-light poles, erect a gallows, and bring in the horses and wagons and period costumes.
Virtual instant history.
Lexington, indeed, is steeped in history, although nothing really momentous ever happened here as in, say, Lexington, Mass., for which this town was named. Legend has it that Thomas Jefferson suggested the new town's name in honor of that Revolutionary War battle three years earlier, suggesting at the same time that the newly formed county be called Rockbridge in honor of Natural Bridge, which he owned at the time.
Residents may dispute what I just said. There WAS one event that was momentous to those living here in 1864: the spiteful destruction and degradation heaped on the little town by the despised Virginia-born Union general, David Hunter.
Hunter had his troops burn most of the buildings at VMI as retribution for the cadets' participation in the Battle of New Market (in which 10 of those boy soldiers were killed and 47 wounded) and the home of Gov. John Letcher.
He probably would have had Washington College torched as well had it not been for persistent protests, according to legend, by a number of his subordinate officers, including Col. Rutherford B. Hayes and Capt. James A. Garfield.
Lexington takes pride in the fact that four American generals, known around the world, have played a major role in its history - interestingly, all in peacetime.
George Washington saved little Liberty Hall Academy, which traces its origins back to 1749, from bankruptcy in 1796 with a gift of $50,000 in stock of the James River Canal Co. bestowed on him by the state of Virginia. In his honor, the school was renamed Washington College.
Less than six months after the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox, Gen. Lee, visibly enfeebled and wearing a gray military coat from which the buttons and ornament of rank had been removed, rode into the little town of less than 3,000 on his beloved Traveller to assume the presidency of that school with its enrollment of 50 and its faculty of three.
Lee did not relish the job or the location; he had a quaint dream of becoming a yeoman farmer and told son Rooney he would look for ``some spot east of the mountains.'' But he was impoverished by the war, and the school offered a salary of $1,500 and a home.
But the general saw his work here as a duty to bind the wounds of war by preparing the younger generation to live as productive citizens, and he stayed.
The former superintendent of West Point saved the college from obscurity, and established the school of law and the nation's first journalism program. After his death - he is buried in a crypt along with many of his family in the Lee Chapel, Traveller just outside - the school was renamed Washington and Lee University.
The chapel also contains a fascinating museum that provides penetrating views into the lives of both Washington and Lee. There are two interesting paintings: one of Washington in the uniform of a British colonel by Charles Wilson Peale and one of Lee that helps one understand why, in the antebellum days, he was called ``the handsomest man in the army.''
In contrast, a series of photos shows how Lee, wracked by a heart condition that doctors of the time were unable to diagnose, aged so much in the final years of his life that ended at 63.
Major Jackson - the general's stars and the nickname ``Stonewall'' would come later - married twice while he lived here, both times to daughters of college presidents, and bought the only house he ever owned, a then 50-year-old modest stone and brick structure near the heart of town. It is open today as a museum at 8 E. Washington St., just a few steps from the Lexington Visitors Center - and a healthy quick-march to VMI.
Tales of Jackson's life here are perhaps the most interesting of all the Lexington lore.
The cadets first saw him in 1851 when he arrived during a parade in his blue U.S. Army uniform with big artillery boots on his enormous feet. Never a fastidious man, he would wear that old blue kit, later with appropriate CSA insignia, for more than a year into the Civil War - until May 5, 1862, when he changed to Confederate gray and began the Valley Campaign that remains a classic study for military students worldwide.
The VMI cadets laughed at him then, and they laughed often - behind his back, of course. They called him Tom Fool.
Henry Kyd Douglas, who served on Jackson's staff during the war, was a law student in Lexington before the war. He recalled asking classmate Bath Terrill, who had been a student at VMI, about Jackson.
``Old Jack is a character, genius or just a little crazy,'' Douglas recalled Terrill replying. ``He's as systematic as a multiplication table and as full of military as an arsenal. Stiff, you see, never laughs, but as kind hearted as a woman - and, by Jupiter, he teaches a Negro Sunday school. But, mind, if this John Brown business leads to war, he'll be heard from!''
Old Jack was just 37 when he marched off to war.
In the early war years, many cadets who had laughed at Major Jackson would cheer for General Jackson, would die for Stonewall. Others would weep openly when it came time for him to ``cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.'' He was not yet 40 when he was brought back here to be laid to rest, and, at the time, he was even more revered in the Confederacy than Lee.
In front of the VMI barracks on the edge of the parade grounds, a statue of Jackson stands eternal guard. At its base are the four cannon he used for artillery instruction, named by the pious major - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
In the VMI Museum, located in Jackson Memorial Hall, is the bullet-pierced rain slicker he wore when he was mortally wounded and the stuffed remains of his favorite warhorse ``Little Sorrel,'' along with mementos that trace the fabric of cadet life since the Institute's founding in 1839.
During the Civil War, in addition to the services and losses of the cadet corps, the school gave to the Confederacy from its faculty and alumni: one lieutenant general (Jackson), three major generals, 18 brigadier generals, 160 colonels, 110 majors, 306 captains and 221 lieutenants.
Jackson lies buried under a tall granite shaft topped by his statue in the center of Lexington's old Presbyterian Cemetery on South Main Street, surrounded by many comrades in arms. There's a poignant painting in the Lee Chapel of Gen. Lee visiting the then simply marked grave of his chief lieutenant. It brings to mind the note Lee wrote to Jackson after the latter was shot at Chancellorsville: ``You have lost your left arm, but I have lost my right arm.''
I try to envision that day in 1891 when the present monument was dedicated. Kyd Douglas was there, and he recalled the final muster of ``Jackson's Foot Cavalry.''
``With trembling step the grey line moved on,'' he wrote, ``but when it reached the gate one old Confederate turned his face for one last look at the monument and, waving his old grey hat toward the figure of his beloved general, he cried out in a voice that choked itself with sobs, `Goodbye, old man, goodbye! We've done all we can for you!'
Now called the Stonewall Jackson cemetery, this tree-shrouded place with lichen-covered tilting stones is a Valhalla of Rockbridge warriors and leaders.
There's William Nelson Pendleton, doctor of divinity and brigadier general, Lee's chief of artillery; and his son, the immensely popular Lt. Col. Sandy Pendleton of Jackson's staff, cut down in the prime of life.
There's John White Brokenbrough, founder of W&L's law school; VMI professor John Mercer Brooke, designer of the ironclad Virginia (Merrimack); and Gov. John Letcher. There's George Junkin, president of Washington College and founder of Lafayette College and Miami of Ohio; and his daughter Elinor, Jackson's first wife.
There's Brig. Gen. E.F. ``Bull'' Paxton, who mournfully foresaw his own death, leading the Stonewall Brigade at Chancellorsville, the day after Jackson went down. There's John T.L. Preston, founder of VMI; Gen. Francis H. Smith, its superintendent for the first 50 years; and Gen. Scott Shipp, the second superintendent who led the cadets at New Market.
The fourth general in Lexington's firmament of stars is Marshall, born in Pennsylvania with strong Virginia bloodlines that reach back to the 17th century.
Much like Washington, Marshall was first in war and first in peace; however, because of his reticent personality and because wartime duties in Washington kept him from battlefield glory, he never achieved a place first in the hearts of his countrymen.
Sworn in as chief of staff of the Army on Sept. 1, 1939, the day World War II began, he would, from his desk in Washington, raise and equip the largest ground and air force in the U.S. history. Winston Churchill called him ``the organizer of victory.''
After this first of the five-star generals shed his uniform, President Truman called on him three times to fill posts normally held by civilians: head of a mission to China, secretary of state and secretary of defense.
As the nation's chief diplomat, he proposed a European recovery program that came to be known as the Marshall Plan, and he began initial discussions that led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For the former he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
The VMI we see today appears much as it did in Marshall's day, except that at the end of the parade grounds opposite the barracks there now stands the George C. Marshall Museum and Research Library. It contains numerous artifacts and memorabilia connected with the general-statesman's career including the gold medallion he received with the Nobel Prize.
Often overlooked in VMI's roll call of honor are others who made their mark of service.
Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, known as the ``Pathfinder of the Seas'' for his work in oceanography and memorialized on Richmond's Monument Avenue along with Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, taught for years at VMI. The Maury River, which flows through Lexington and on to the James, was named in his honor.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the polar explorer, was a member of the Class of '08.
Marine Gen. Lemuel C. Shephard, class of '17 and a Norfolk native, led the victory at Okinawa and was the first Corps commandant to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His successor as commandant was Gen. Randolph M. Pate, class of '21.
Some VMI literature also claims Gen. George S. Patton Jr. as one of its own, and technically that is true. A Californian, also with strong Virginia bloodlines, he enrolled with the class of '07 but stayed only through his ``Rat'' (first) year until there was an opening at West Point.
If I may depart from history for a moment and look into a crystal ball, I see the possibility of another VMI man becoming the Army's chief of staff later this year.
Riding the fast track with tickets punched at all the right stops is Gen. W.H. Binford Peay III, class of '62. The former artillery officer and Vietnam veteran from Richmond was commander of the 101st Airborne Division during Desert Storm, then filled a key billet on the joint chiefs of staff, served as Army vice chief of staff and now heads the Central Command, the critical, joint-service post that catapulted Norman Schwarzkopf to fame. ILLUSTRATION: STEPHEN HARRIMAN COLOR PHOTOS
Natural Bridge, agove, is about 18 miles south of Lexington.
Washington and Lee University, right, is one of the attractions of
this lovely valley town.
Photos
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
McCormick's Mill is on the Rockbridge County farm where a teenage
boy invented the reaper.
The Southern Inn boasts the town's only neon sign.
by CNB