A little story of the Civil War

My greatgrandmother was a young girl during the civil war. She and her family livied in a farmhouse in Loudun Country Virginia, up against the Blue Ridge. Years later she would tell her children stories about growing up then. Two of them, my grandmother Virginia and her sister Maidie, would tell me the stories as they drove me all over the county when I was a child. Loudun was the first county you come to if you cross over the Potomac from Harper's Ferry, or the last county you pass through on your way north - which Lee and the army of Northern Virginia did several times during the war. The Union usually controlled the northern half, Confederate partisans the southern. Sometimes it was called 'Mosby's Confederacy.'

Not far from the old farmhouse, which still existed back then, was an odd little bend in the road that grandmother told me was called 'Dead Man's Corner.' It was called that because after one particularly bad battle in the neighborhood a number of Union dead were buried there in a hurry. My greatgrandmother would go down the lane after a heavy rain and find parts of bodies sticking up through the mud. She would pat fresh dirt into place to cover them up.

There was one evening when she could watch the shells from dueling artillary firing from one mountain ridge across to another blazing across the sky over her house. At one point Union cavalry raided the area and burnt so many barns and hay ricks that the chickens went to roost thinking it was night from all the smoke.

At some point her father went across the Potomac into Maryland and was supposedly interned as a dangerous alien. I always heard that he died from illness in the prison, but my brother claims he pops up on a census in Virginia after the war. Maidie always claimed her granddad probably "just went over there to get away from his children." Also heard that he was a member of Mosby's raiders, but we cannot find his name for sure among the troops listed. There were, however, several of Mosby's men who were from the same familly as his.

Back in those days the conflict was simply called 'the war.' I like that. No false causes, no grand statements. Just a never ending misery that worked its way out in their fields over four years.