Chatham Manor

So, you cross the Rappahannock River bridge (remembering that it certainly wasn't THIS high back in 1862!) beside the Old Stone Warehouse, and look to your left for Chatham Manor.

This enormous home (even by today's standards) was built by William Fitzhugh in the same time frame as the Stone Warehouse - started in 1768 and finished in 1771.

William and Ann Randolph Fitzhugh

(This is free: At about the same time, Austrian Marie Antoinette married the guy who was to become King Louis XVI.  The resulting French Revolution followed the American Revolution.)

The home is something like 180 feet long, containing only ten rooms, possibly because it is only one room deep (all the better to circulate air on a hot summers evening.)

After the American Revolution, Major Churchill Jones, a former officer in the Continental Army, purchased the plantation in 1806 for $20,000.  By the time the Civil War came to Chatham Manor this structure was almost 100 years old.  It was now owned by the Lacy's:

Interesting how the Fitzhugh's portraits are in color and the Lacy's are black and white.  That's because the Fitzhughs' was painted and the Lacys' was photographed!  (I figured that out all by myself!)


No battle was fought here in 1862, but it served as Union headquarters for Burnside and as a hospital for his troops during Union attempts to capture Fredericksburg.  The Lacy family was turned out and the home used in whatever manner the Union army wanted - up to and including using some of the rooms as stables for officer's horses.  Between the blood of soldiers and the poo of horses I would say some SERIOUS damage was done to the floors of this home!

I wonder if they knew that one of those rooms was used by George Washington himself as a bedroom?! and later Thomas Jefferson.  Oh, yeah.  Abraham Lincoln slept here, too.  No, really!  It is the only home in which three United States presidents slept (excluding the White House - but not even George Washington slept there.)

It stands to reason that Washington was a visitor here because he grew up just down the road on Ferry Farm.  Let's see if you can follow this:  Washington's step-grandson and adopted heir, George Washington Parke Custis, married Fitzhugh's daughter, Molly.  THEIR daughter married Robert E. Lee!  Seems it was a very small world back then.

Do you know who Clara Barton is?  The founder of the American Red Cross.  She worked and slept here during the Union occupation, as did a "Dr. Quinn" kinda woman, and American poet laureate Walt Whitman whose brother was wounded at Fredericksburg.  I'm thinkin' I remember Lafayette was here also, which is believable since he and Washington were good buddies.

The trees around the home today are enormously tall and one has to wonder if any were around during the Civil War.  A lot of them are oak trees, and they do live a long, long time.  I was surprised to find, however, this sign:

Catalpa trees here during the Civil War

Poor feller LOOKS like he's been there since the Civil War!  But I truly, truly did not know that Catalpa trees lived that long.  I love Catalpa trees; they grow really fast (nearly a foot a year), have HUGE heart-shaped leaves and almost hydrangea-size flowers in the spring, and they get worms in the summer that make the BEST fish-bait!  But live 150 years?  Now, THAT is cool to know!