Connecting the Family Tree in Civil War Country

A family reunion as a great vacation?

Compared to Maui or Mazatlan?

Compared to three nights in Oxnard?

Typically, a family reunion means a trip back to the old hometown, to see uncles and cousins you haven’t seen since last year--while the spouse is complaining: “Why do we have to spend our vacations visiting your relatives? Why can’t we go someplace interesting for a change?”

But this was not an ordinary family reunion. Instead, as our dynamic organizer--a retired Kentucky high school English teacher--explained at the reunion dinner, this was a national convention, bringing together various long-reaching limbs of the family tree from around the nation, all returning to the homeland of a single ancestor who settled in Virginia in 1774.

Visit to Lexington

For me, it provided an opportunity to visit Lexington, a red-brick, live-in monument to the 1850s, and the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, an occasion that might otherwise not have arisen. And I could walk for the first time on the soil of the birthplace of my great-grandfather and join 300 relatives--292 of whom I had never met--in the reuniting of a family divided by the Civil War.

Even without a reunion Lexington has a lot to offer. In a city of scarcely more than 7,000 residents, there are two major schools, Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute.

The city was home to both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and both are buried here. Just down the road, Cyrus H. McCormick invented the reaper that revolutionized American agriculture.

Our family gathering was brought about by our indefatigable leader, our premier genealogist, Nellie Teaford Wood of Ashland, Ky., working in accordance with the popular American penchant to go digging for ancestral roots.

We have found documentation showing that our first immigrant arrived in Philadelphia from Rotterdam in October, 1764. After a 10-year gap in official records, he emerges in Virginia as a purchaser of farm land.

Ten years later he has sold that property for a profit and moved farther up the Shenandoah, buying a new farm where land was less expensive, thus acquiring cash to buy livestock and farming supplies--and slaves, as was the Virginia custom of the time.

It was on the latter farm that a grandson, my great-grandfather, was born in 1808. (In nearby Staunton, Woodrow Wilson was born 48 years later, but that is someone else’s family tree.)

Now Livestock Ranch

On a recent Sunday morning our reunion caravan turned in at the gate of the land of our forefathers, to be met by a chaps-wearing cowboy astride a sorrel horse. The farm, which has not been in family hands for many years, is now a livestock ranch operated in association with the King Ranch of Texas. Santa Gertrudis cattle scrambled to get out of the way as our cars rolled down the entry lane.

We found a chimney apparently surviving from the 18th Century and an outbuilding believed to be the remnants of the original farmhouse. Touching base with history, looking out across the verdant countryside to Sugar Loaf Mountain, there was the question: Why would anyone ever want to leave?

The answer, of course, is well documented in history courses on America’s great migration westward in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was the lure of adventure and free or inexpensive land on the frontier, plus the population pressures at home, with too many sons to share the father’s land.

Thus, about the year 1830, my great-grandfather--and other brothers and cousins--headed west across the mountains, down the Ohio River. My own grandfather was born in Indiana the year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Two of his elder brothers served in the Union army while their cousins fought in Confederate ranks. On both sides, family members died.

Now that was forgotten as descendants of one man gathered in his homeland. And the first conflict of cultures was not North versus South but rather East versus West. Dressing to go out for dinner, it was pointed out, holds dissimilar meanings in California and Virginia.

Coat and Tie for Dinner

Being from out of town, we inquired as to the proper attire for our first major event, the reunion dinner.

“Robert E. Lee,” the answer came back, “always wore a coat and tie to dinner. Son, this is Robert E. Lee country, and we are going to wear a coat and tie.”

That issue resolved, we sat down to dinner in a banquet room crowded with more Teafords than anticipated and began socializing with our newly assembled relatives. One was a retired official of the Los Angeles School Board; another, from “Carter country” in Americus, Ga., was a look-alike--and talk-alike--for Miss Lillian (and, in fact, a cousin of Rosalynn Carter). All sections of the country were represented.

The next day there was a family picnic at a park near Lexington, with tables laden with the customary fried chicken, baked beans and potato salad. Despite a heavy afternoon thundershower, festivities continued unabated, secure under a covered pavilion, and the family’s country band from Eagle Rock (Virginia, not California) played on mightily into the evening.

On the third day there was the already-mentioned visit to the ancestral farm; still another picnic followed. This closing event was held at what remains as genuinely family headquarters, a country home that has been under the family banner since the 1840s.

Once it was an inn, a stagecoach stop beside Kerr’s Creek on the way to and from the Alleghenies, across the valley to the west. Now it proudly displays the legend “1848,” the year it was rebuilt, and we celebrated its survival on our final evening.

The reunion over, we discovered that we were by no means ready to leave--there was too much of Lexington that we had not seen.

The visitors’ center, in downtown Lexington, is a good place to start. There you will find the brochures and maps for a self-guided walking tour.

If you follow the tour to the end, you will have covered 3.2 miles. If you don’t feel like walking, horse-drawn carriage tours are available at $6 per person. These start near the visitors’ center and take you on a 50-minute circuit of the major points of interest but do not make stops.

Parking our car at the visitors’ center, we set out on foot and made our way around town without difficulty. Our first stop was the handsomely maintained Jackson home, where the general, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, lived between the Mexican War and the Civil War, teaching philosophy and artillery tactics at Virginia Military Institute.

On the Campus

Washington and Lee and VMI are a few blocks away, and we walked there, just as Jackson had done on his way to class.

Lee’s home is prominent on the Washington and Lee campus; however, it is in use today as the college president’s home and is not open to the public.

Lee became president of the university at the end of the Civil War, and his body and those of his family are buried at the Lee Chapel, which is also on the campus and is open to the public. His office, in the chapel basement, remains as he left it just before his death in 1870.

A marker next to the chapel designates the final resting place of Lee’s horse, Traveller.

Just past the white columns of Washington and Lee (the front campus is a national historic landmark) is VMI. Jackson’s horse, stuffed, is on display in the VMI Museum, and so is the dark raincoat that fellow Confederates mistook for a Yankee uniform, opening fire and fatally wounding the general.

World War II Museum

There is also the George C. Marshall Museum, in honor of the World War II general (VMI class of 1901) and later secretary of State. His 1953 Nobel Peace Prize is among the items on display. For those tiring of the Civil War there is an electronic map of the battles of World War II.

Still another museum, just off Interstate 81 at exit 54 about 20 miles north of Lexington, commemorates the invention of McCormick’s reaper. The family’s blacksmith shop and grist mill have been restored and designated as a national historic landmark. There is a park-like picnic area for visitors.

Lexington has two summer theaters, one in an outdoor arena emplaced in a former stone quarry. It was showing, appropriately, “Stonewall Country,” but it also was offering “NAT,” the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion. And there is a downtown theater, the Henry Street Playhouse.

Lexington accommodations include conventional motels (our three nights at the Best Western reunion headquarters cost $123 for four people (applying the reunion discount), and there are country inns where the standard single rate is $55 to $70, with $10 for an additional person.

There are also bed-and-breakfast accommodations where the rates range from around $20 per person up to $90 per room.

Scenery Outstanding

Lexington is an easy three-hour drive by interstate highway from Washington. Down I-81 from Front Royal, the scenery is outstanding, but it is considerably more spectacular from Skyline Drive atop the Blue Ridge Mountains.

While Skyline Drive is relatively easy to manage, without severe switchbacks or grades (it’s “the Mulholland Drive of the East,” one of our California relatives remarked), using it will make the journey from Washington noticeably longer.

Our solution was to drive only a section of the parkway, leaving near Charlottesville on our way to Monticello.

For an autumnal drive, the parkway also offers magnificent views. Fall colors in the Lexington area reach their peak with the arrival of crisp days in mid-October.

One of the area’s scenic highlights is Natural Bridge, 12 miles south of Lexington. It is a limestone arch carved by the centuries, extending 215 feet above Cedar Creek. It is also a bridge in daily use, carrying traffic on the Lee Highway (U.S. 11).

George Washington is said to have surveyed the bridge, and Thomas Jefferson later bought the premises and maintained a cabin for visitors. Now there is a resort on the site, where a room for four with a large balcony cost us about $65.