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The Home of Widow Tapp
Lake Wilderness, Virginia
· The Battle of the Wilderness
Military
1
This was the site of Catherine Tapp's one-and-a-half-story log cabin, surrounded by a corn crib, orchard, and stable, as Union and Confederate forces swept past and at one point a Union shell passed through the house. Two years later, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman found the farm area still marked by battle, with trees scarred by as many as a dozen bullets, some cut in two by artillery shells, and canteens, cups, knapsacks, and cartridge boxes littering the ground. Mrs. Tapp and her children survived unharmed after fleeing west down the Orange Plank Road to a Confederate field hospital near Parker's Store when the fighting began. Phenie Tapp, who was four at the time, later remembered bullets kicking up dirt in the road as they fled, many men in blue, and the sound of battle like a big storm. Lyman wrote in 1866 that the family remained there in a miserable log cabin and told him they had seen A.P. Hill's men running up the road after being utterly routed on the morning of the 6th, and had watched Longstreet's Corps pass the hospital at the double quick as Longstreet rode by in hot haste to restore the fight.
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