driving alone

I left North Carolina Thursday morning with ample time to get up to DC for the IHM conference,my suitcase packed full of clothing more modest than I typically wear and my tote bag filled with lists of Landmark books, catalogues, and my completed enrollment packet. Seton offers a $30 discount per child if you sign up at a conference, so with 3 kids in school next year that pays for 1 night in the hotel. About 2 hours into the trip I realized, barring huge delays, that I would be arriving before check-in so I decided to stop at Petersburg's National Battlefield.

While taking a class in Virginia History at college I wrote a research paper on my great-great-grandfather, John C. Ashton, a Civil War veteran who fought in Petersburg at the Battle of the Crater and was captured and taken to Maryland. According to family lore, his mother traveled up to Washington, DC to plead with President Johnson to release all the boys from Portsmouth, including her son. Soon afterwards he returned home via the Eastern Shore where he was forced to cut off the CSA buttons off his jacket so he wouldn't be harassed by the occupying Union forces on the ferryboat.

I drove along the 4 mile road, stopping a few times to look at cabins and the massive earthworks that both sides erected during the 18 month campaign. Finally I arrived at stop 8 and walked to the modest crater that the Union forces created when they blew up the Confederate battery with explosives packed into a 300 yard long tunnel. It was a peaceful place with even a sight of a white-tailed deer grazing on the old battlefield, a far cry from the smoking and bloody scene on a hot July day almost 150 year ago. My last opportunity to take the children to see this battlefield will be after our packout while driving to our next duty station so I expect that over the next few weeks I will be conducting a short lesson on the Civil War and their ancestor's part in the conflict. One day we will live in the most Yankee state there is, home of towns created in the 1860's with names like Union and Unity. They may have slight Maine accents, but I will insist they were Virginians first.