The Wilderness / The Battlefield Becomes a Park

Before the war, loggers had cut and recut the Wilderness forests for decades to fuel nearby iron furnaces, leaving an impenetrable mix of dead fall, brush, and re-emerging growth broken only by a few small farmers’ clearings. In 1864, soldiers entered this tangled landscape, where traditional tactics failed in the dark, close woods; battle lines struggled through thickets with visibility of only a few dozen feet, blue and gray forces collided without warning in horrific firefights, and burning woods consumed the wounded and dead. The four battlefields in Fredericksburg and neighboring counties later came to be regarded as the bloodiest ground in North America, but early efforts to create a national military park failed in Congress until 1921, when General Smedley D. Butler brought 4,200 Marines to the Wilderness Battlefield for five days of large-scale maneuvers attended by President Warren G. Harding. The national attention from that event renewed calls for preservation, and Congress established Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on February 13, 1927; today it is one of the largest military parks in the world, encompassing four battlefields where more than 100,000 Americans fell.

Lake of the Woods, Virginia · United States