Battle of Chancellorsville • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
This orientation marker is beside the parking lot in front of the Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center. It shows a map of the several battlefields and Civil War points of interest administered by the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. It is next to the Battle of Chancellorsville Orientation Marker.
The marker is one of three next to the parking lot at the Chancellorsville Visitor Center
From the marker:
Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania – this is the bloodiest landscape in North America. No place more vividly reflects the Civil War’s tragic cost in all its forms. A city bombarded, bloodied, and looted. Farms large and small ruined. Refugees by the thousands forced into the countryside. More than 85,000 men wounded; 15,000 killed – most now in graves unknown.
The fading scars of battle, the home places of bygone families, and the granite tributes to those who fought still mark these lands. These places reveal the trials of a community and nation at war – a virtuous tragedy that freed four million Americans and reunited a nation. To visit the battlefields, begin your tour at either the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center or the Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center.
From the photo captions at the bottom:
For two days Union and Confederate soldiers grapples with one another in the woods 15 miles west of Fredericksburg. James Horace Lacy’s house, “Ellwood,” was a headquarters during the battle.
Two weeks of gruesome combat culminated in hand-to-hand fighting at this turn in the Confederate line, known as the Bloody Angle.
This colonial plantation is the only private home in America to have played host to both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, it served as a Union headquarters and hospital.
Protected by a stone wall, Confederate defenders turned back wave after wave of brave but futile Unon assaults at the Sunken Road.
After his mortal wounding at Chancellorsville, “Stonewall” Jackson was taken to a Caroline County plantation, where he died eight days later. His final words were, “let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
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(go to the main Chancellorsville Battlefield Auto Tour page)