This week’s travel dream: A road trip into Civil War history

“Seven score and 10 years ago,” the Civil War split the nation, said Zofia Smardz in The Washington Post. Today, U.S. Route 15 is a “ribbon of memory that connects blue state to gray,” offering a short road journey rich with American history. I chose to explore a 150-mile stretch, officially known as the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. Stretching from Gettysburg, Pa., to Orange, Va., the trail weaves through quaint towns, “bucolic farms and fields,” and a “beehive of sites” associated with the epic confrontation between North and South.

My first stop, naturally, was the town of Gettysburg, where you can find “walls everywhere pockmarked still with shockingly large bullet holes.” There’s much to see: the national cemetery dedicated by Abraham Lincoln; the David Wills House, where the president polished his famous address. I also couldn’t resist the Jennie Wade House, the town’s first Civil War museum, opened in 1900—as “sad a war monument as any ever erected.” Wade was the only civilian killed at Gettysburg—she was just 20 when a stray bullet pierced two doors and struck her in the back while she was making bread. I got goose bumps just listening to a story about her last morning: “She reportedly prayed that if anyone in the house had to die that day, please Lord, let her be the one.”

Farther south, in Leesburg, Va., I stopped at Ball’s Bluff, the site of a limited but consequential defeat for the Union and “home to one of the smallest national cemeteries.” Of its 54 white gravestones, 53 are marked “Unknown.” In Brandy Station, Va., site of the largest cavalry conflict of the war, I visited the so-called Graffiti House, where the signatures of soldiers “run floor to ceiling” across the walls. For my last stop, I chose St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in Orange. The “pretty, white-spired brick building” was where Gen. Robert E. Lee worshipped during the winter of 1863–64 while regrouping after Gettysburg. As I sat in his wooden pew, I tried to imagine Lee “listening to the sermons, thinking about the war, his men, the future.” The first shots of the Civil War were fired 150 years ago, but “those who lived and died in it will haunt us forever.” They were sure haunting me.

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