Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1909 — CHANCELLORSVILLE NOW. [ARTICLE]

CHANCELLORSVILLE NOW.

Chancellorsvllle is a dreary place today. Not a man lives there. Right here is a good place to correct a current popular misunderstanding of what the word Chancellorsvllle means. Chancellors“ville” never was a village. It was a road house in the wilderness, kppt by a man whose name was Chance/lor. There was only his dwelling, stable, barn and some frame outbuildings. It was a great stopping place for the stages and for travelers over the plank roail from Fredericksburg to Lynchburg and the west and over the Orange turnpike,j for these roads formed a junction near the Chancellor house. The owner of the place had cleared several hundred acres around the house and this was the only open country in that neighborhood. Hooker made his headquarters in the Chancellor house and it was destroyed by artillery fire A cannon ball smashed a stone column of the portico against which Hooker was leaning and the shock rendered the general unconscious, and gave rise to the report that spread through the lines that he had been killed. After the war the debris of the house was cleared away and a smaller structure reared on a part of the old foundation. This was used as a summer boarding house, but with the horrible memories of the war haunting the house and fields and woods about it, the patronage was small and the structure is now in a ruinous state. Part of the war time fence line along the plank road through the Chancellor fields is standing, though very decrepit and hundreds of bullet holes are visible in the chestnut rails.

In the library of congress at Washington are reproductions from photographs made after the close of th« war showing the fields and woods strewn with white skulls and skeletons of the federal soldiers killed there. It was not until afterward that the United States government sent funeral parties into this territory and gathered up the bones which later were buried in the national cemetery at Fredericksburg. There 10,000 men are buried and the word “Unknown” is inscribed on 12,000 of the headstones. All the bones of the fields of Fredericksburg, Salem Church and Chancellorsvllle have not been recovered. Men in repairing roads, cutting new streets and digging house foundations are bringing these grim relics of the horror days of the civil war to light. Most of the southern dead were recovered and thousands were sent back to their homes whence they came. These brave men sleep in big ind little graveyards and churchards throughout the south. There are, however, about 2,000 southern soldiers’ graves in the Fredericksburg cemetery. » A mile farther into the Wilderness than the Chancellor house is the spot where Stonewall Jackson fell. With his staff he had gone outside the confederate lines and, falling in with the enemy, dashed back into the southern lines at a different point along the front. The horse nen were mistaken for Union cavalry by the outposts of Lane’s brigade and were fired on. One musket ball shattered Jackson’s left arm below the shoulder, another ball pierced the same arm below the elbow and a third passed through his right hand. He fell from his horse and the pursuing federals drove back the confederates and passed over the ground where J ickson lay. The federals in turn were beaten back and Jackson taken in charge by his own men. The fighting was sharp and one of the bearers of Jackson’s litter was killed. Jackson was removed to Guinea Station, 12 miles southeast of Chancellorsville, where, on May 10, he died of pneumonia, being weakened by the wounds and the amputation of his left arm. For many years the spot where Jackson fell was marked by a bowlder, but a few years ago a monument was erected a few yards west of this bowlder. These two markers stand on the right side of the old plank road and in the midst of dark pines. The Jackson monument is the only southern memorial in all that bloody land. There are but two northern memorials. —New Orleans Times-Dem-ocrat.