Liberia House in Manassas, Virginia

Liberia House stands in the middle of a beautiful green pasture, a flower garden, a cemetery, a walking trail with a brook surrounded by woods and an apiary, with buzzing busy bees covered in pollen. The locust trees are just blooming and greening.

The Weir cemetery at the bottom of the hill is shaded by a lugubrious tree in the corner, leaning at a 45-degree angle and exposing its roots like a trailing mantle, delivering the nutrients of plant life. Not even sunshine can make this tree look inviting in this symphony of early spring colors.

If Liberia House could talk, it would enumerate an endless list of famous and ordinary Americans who have walked through its doors: Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Gen. Irvin McDowell, and countless unknown soldiers who were wounded in the Civil War and sought refuge and care in Liberia.

The house was built in 1925 by W. J. Weir on land formerly owned by “King” Carter. It was Gen. Beauregard’s headquarters from May 1861 until after the First Battle of Manassas, July 21, 1861.

According to archives, Jefferson Davis “watched the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, and then came here to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard’s headquarters to meet with him and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston before returning to Richmond on July 23. Lincoln came here with his Secretary of War on June 19, 1862, to visit Gen. Irvin McDowell, who was recovering after his horse fell on him.”

During restoration of Liberia, numerous signatures were found on the walls on the second floor, written by Union soldiers stationed here. They wanted to be remembered; that they were alive in that moment in time. A graffiti from March or August 1862, written by Pvt. Adam McKelvey, Co. G. 12^th Pennsylvania Infantry Reserve Regiment, can be found among others who signed their names for posterity, knowing that death was stalking them.

Liberia was the place where the Weir family raised their children and grandchildren. The plantation was so vast, it encompassed most of the land of Manassas today. There were slaves in bondage here, and “a beer baron from Alexandria operated a dairy farm on the property.”

An archive photograph from 1862 shows Liberia with an intact kitchen wing on the right. The museum curators believe that it was probably destroyed during the war and never rebuilt.

Liberia’s owners, William James Weir, and Harriet had planted daffodils alongside the front walk of the house. A photograph from March 1862 shows the yellow blooms when the house was occupied by Union troops. The daffodils somehow survived the encampment of two armies amid the Civil War.

The Turberville Memorial Garden today is planted with common plants in Virginia that are supporting pollinators of the current apiary.

William J. Weir complained to Confederate soldiers early in the war about the loss of his fruit trees. In 1863, an edition of Harpers New Monthly Magazine reported that Weir was said to have been ‘shut up in the guardhouse for saying, as he witnessed his fruit trees being made into firewood, that he didn’t know as he would be used any worse by the Yankees than he had been by those who professed to be his friends’.

Private George Bagby of Virginia’s 11^th Infantry wrote in 1861 during his time in Liberia: “At night I would walk out in the garden and brood over the possible result of this slow way of making war. The garden looked toward the battlefield. At times I thought I detected the odor of the carcasses, lightly buried there; at others I fancied I heard weird and doleful cries borne on the night wind.” (Museum Archives)

The Weir family owned 2,000 acres of farmland and forest so far from settled areas that it required barns, a dairy, a gristmill, a laundry, a kitchen, slave quarters, a school, a general store, and a post office. The labor to maintain such a vast plantation was provided by “enslaved and white laborers and skilled craftsmen, alongside members of the Weir family.” They lived here for thirty-six years.

During the Civil War, the family was divided. William did not want secession, but his three sons served in the Confederate Army. The family moved to Fluvanna County. Walter inherited the property after his father’s death in 1867 but the farm never returned to its pre-war wealth.

Before the City of Manassas acquired the property in 1986, records show that:

1.      The property owned by William Weir encompassed most of modern-day Manassas (1825-1888) – Library of Congress

2.      Liberia was a dairy farm when owned by Alexandria businessman Robert Portner (1888-1947); the Portners never lived on the property  – Manassas Museum Collection

3.      Liberia was owned by the Breeden family (1947-1986) – Manassas Museum Collection

There is evidence from an ad placed in 1847 in the Alexandria Gazette that William Weir operated the Liberia Mathematical and Classical School on the premises.  A donation to the museum of a math exam with the words at the top of the page, ‘Liberia School,’ became further evidence of the school’s existence.

Walter Weir 

The Weir Cemetery appears too close to the house; that is because it was moved here in 1989 from its original site, Point of Woods East/Lakeside. With the family’s permission, 24 graves and headstones were moved by specialists at the Smithsonian Institution according to the original burial plans and plots. The exhumation revealed that only Walter’s remains were well preserved because he was buried in a cast iron coffin with a glass viewing pane. Walter’s body was so well preserved that forensic analysis revealed that “he died from an infection, likely caused by an abscessed tooth.”

Note:  Museum archive photos are black and white, color photographs: Ileana Johnson April 2023

 

 

160 Years Since the Second Battle of Manassas

Today marks 160 years since the second battle of Manassas on August 28, 1862, at 6 p.m. It is a beautiful sunny day, with fields of green, wildflowers, butterflies, and fragrant hay being harvested by nearby farmers on a hot and humid 90-degree F summer day.

Nearly as many lives were lost in the Civil War (April 12, 1861-May 9, 1865) as there were lost in all other wars combined, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War. The tally of the dead in the Civil War was 622,000; all other wars, 638,000 soldiers have lost their lives.

The first battle of Manassas took place on July 21, 1861, on these pastures adjacent to farms, teeming with fauna and flora. Butterflies surrounded us as we walked through paths surrounded by wildflowers or through freshly mowed parcels.

Brothers fought against brothers across the fertile agricultural fields and in the woods nearby. Their blood soaked the fragrant ground. One of the casualties was Captain James B. Ricketts of Company I, First U.S. Artillery. He was shot in the thigh while commanding his battery, captured by the Confederates, and recuperated at the nearby Portici plantation before his imprisonment in Richmond.

The soldiers who survived the Civil War erected the Bull Run monument on Henry Hill which took three weeks to build and was finished and dedicated on June 11, 1865. It is one of the oldest extant monuments on any Civil War battlefield. The soldiers also honored those who fell in the Second Battle of Manassas and built a similar monument near the Deep Cut.

According to park archives, one of the nearby farms, Spring Hill farm, now simply known as Henry Hill, was overgrown and abandoned in the summer of 1861 because its owner was 84-year-old Judith Henry. She had a small vegetable garden and orchard around the old frame house.  She was bedridden, too old to work the land owned by her family for over a century. Her daughter Ellen lived with her and with a hired teenage slave, Lucy Griffith, who helped with domestic chores.

Sadly, the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run, named after the nearby creek) descended on her property. Federal artillery fired on Confederate sharpshooters, unaware that civilians were inside the home. Cannon fire hit the house and mortally wounded the elderly widow, the only known civilian casualty. At the end of that fateful day, July 21, 1861, the matriarch was dead, and her house ruined. By March 1862 there was very little left standing from the Henry House.

The 7th Georgia Infantry lost its leader, Colonel Francis S. Bartow, killed at First Manassas; he was a Georgia politician who defended slavery and states’ rights. According to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, Bartow “was rendered one of the South’s earliest military martyrs.” His original monument, a stone shaft erected where he fell, disappeared and the current marker dates to 1936.

A white monument is dedicated to General Bernard Elliott Bee of South Carolina, commander of the 3^rd Brigade Army of the Shenandoah who was also killed on July 21, 1861. He is said to have rallied his scattered troops by giving the command, “Form, form, there stands Jackson like a stone wall, rally behind the Virginians.”

The three-day battle of Second Manassas began on August 28, 1862, as a twilight battle near the Brawner farm. Brigadier General Rufus King’s division was looking for the “elusive” Stonewall” Jackson in the direction of Centreville. Jackson was behind the Union line with half of the Confederate Army. As Gen. King’s columns passed the village of Groveton, the Confederate artillery emerged from the woods and surprised the Federals. Union troops responded and a fierce battle ensued.

Archeological digs at the Brawner Farm unearthed thousands of artifacts about those who lived and fought in this now quiet corner of the Manassas Battlefield. Artifacts from the August 1862 three-day battle included dropped bullets, military buttons, and the sabot and base from a 3-inch Dyer artillery shell.

The Brawner Farm sustained so much damage from the battle on August 28, 1862, that the family abandoned the property and the antebellum house that stood on the site.

The area was devastated when, for the second time in thirteen months, war came to the Manassas community. Civilians chose to flee the area in advance of the troop arrivals, but others decided to stay and hid in cellars and outbuildings.

The occupying soldiers confiscated grain, killed livestock, burned fence rails for firewood, and killed chickens for food. Homes were used for field hospitals. Photographs from that time show that the devastation of the area during the Second Battle of Manassas far surpassed the destruction during the First Battle of Manassas.

Ann Strobel wrote in her diary, “All who come down represent Prince William County as a perfectly desolated waste, without food in it for man or beast, and the few houses that are left standing as without occupants.”

The Battle of Second Manassas counted 23,000 casualties, with nearly 3,300 soldiers dead.  Makeshift shallow graves on the battlefield contained soldiers from both armies. They were not buried properly until the end of the Civil War.

The Federal government removed the Union dead to Arlington National Cemetery. The Manassas Ladies’ Memorial Association, founded in 1867, assisted in the interment of 500 Confederate dead in Groveton Cemetery. Only two fallen soldiers were actually identified and have individual headstone. Some soldiers may still remain buried in unmarked graves on the battlefield.

On August 30, 1862, the 5^th New York Volunteer Infantry, called “Duryee’s Zouaves,” sustained the heaviest loss, devastated by the massive Confederate counterattack.  New York volunteers suffered 330 casualties in less than 15 minutes, 120 soldiers killed or mortally wounded. Two wounded members, Charles Brehm and Eugene Geer, hid in the Stone House and carved their names in the wooden floor and baseboard.

Duryee’s Zouaves took their name from Abram Duryee, their first commander, and the “Zouave” style uniform modeled after the French colonial troops of North Africa.

Built around 1825, the Stone House at the intersection of the historical Warrenton Turnpike and Manassas-Sudley Road was a witness to history during the First and Second Manassas. Inside the now restored house, some soldiers, seeking temporary shelter, left their carved marks in the baseboards. The Buck Hill on the right of the Stone House gives a good vantage point to the historic crossroads. During times of peace, the Stone House was a tavern and traveler’s rest.

During the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in July 1861, the Stone House was at the center of fighting and the wounded were brought in for shelter. There were so many wounded at one point that one soldier said, “the rattle of musket balls against the walls of the building was almost incessant.”

During the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862, Union General John Pope chose Buck Hill by the Stone House as his headquarters. Wounded soldiers filled the Stone House again and two of them who were upstairs, carved their names in the wood. Federal surgeons, under truce, tended to the wounded here. Confederate soldiers used the Stone House as a parole station for prisoners of war.

Further down the road, the Stone Bridge became the scene of the opening shots of the First Battle of Manassas and the retreat of the Federals from the Second Battle of Manassas. The reconstructed Stone Bridge over Bull Run creek is historically accurate.

So much history in this part of Virginia is seldom visited by Americans who avoid their history, good or bad, and events that shaped their country. Perhaps it is because Virginia’s population is changing rapidly, with Democrat socialists in power, and new arrivals from other countries who do not really care about America’s history, its past, or the significance of the places they inhabit now. They do not realize how much sacrifice has been made and how much blood has been spilled in these two battles alone so that a strong union could be forged. For better or worse, it has shaped the country into what it is today, including the benefits they derive from living here.

Note: Color photos credit - Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, August 28, 2022

          Black and white photo - Manassas park archives