Brunswick County Courthouse

Late in the afternoon of May 15, 1864, Union Gen. August V. Kautz and his cavalry division rode into Lawrenceville, the Brunswick County seat, on the second leg of a two-part, two-week-long expedition to destroy railroad bridges and depots in the Southside and frustrate Confederate efforts to supply Petersburg and Richmond from the south. They were traveling from Black’s and White’s Station on the South Side Railroad to Belfield on the Petersburg (Weldon) Railroad. Just before the Federals arrived, county court clerk Edward R. Turnbull left his office in the courthouse after draping his Masonic apron over some county records on a table. Twenty minutes later, a Union guard brought the apron to his house. After the raiders departed, Turnbull returned to find his office a foot deep in scattered, ink-soaked papers, but the apparently vandalized records proved to be only blank forms and blank pages torn from birth and death registers, and no county records were damaged, probably because someone in the raiding party was a Mason. In his official report, Kautz wrote that at Lawrenceville his men captured forage and bacon for the command, took a few prisoners, encamped for the night, and showed among some of the men a disposition to pillage and plunder. The raiders left the next morning. Edward Randolph Turnbull, a Brunswick County native, served as Brunswick County court clerk from April 24, 1843, until his death in 1885, and his son Robert Turnbull, about 13 years old at the time of the raid, was with him and later wrote his recollections in 1915 at the request of Virginia State Archivist Morgan P. Robertson.

Lawrenceville, Virginia · United States