The three brick cabins standing here are tangible connections to the enslaved people of Rappahannock County before and during the Civil War. Many enslaved people escaped to Union lines here and elsewhere, and some former bondsmen later served in the U.S. Army as United States Colored Troops after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863. In July-August 1862, part of the Union Army of Virginia occupied Rappahannock County and camped on these grounds. Enslaved people on nearby farms fled especially to Gen. Robert H. Milroy's camp in Woodville, where Milroy, known as an abolitionist, put them to work as laborers, cooks, and teamsters, including William Payne of Amissville, and formed some of the men into a pioneer construction company. The 27th Indiana Infantry also organized former slaves into a mock military unit that drilled near Amissville. The next year, Eliza Brown, enslaved on a plantation one mile east of here, became a cook for Union Gen. George A. Custer. Federal soldiers later noted a marked decrease in the number of enslaved people from 1862, in part because the Confederate government had requisitioned 150 Rappahannock County slaves to labor for the Southern army. The Ben Venue slave cabins are among the most sophisticated examples of such quarters in Virginia, unlike the shacks or log cabins with stick-and-mud chimneys and little ventilation that housed most enslaved people. In the antebellum period, prosperous owners sometimes built more substantial quarters in prominent locations as visible expressions of wealth, and by the second decade of the 19th century enslaved people constituted the South's largest capital investment after land itself. Better housing did not alter the essential character of slavery, and many people still ran away when opportunities arose. The 1800 United States Slave Schedules for Rappahannock County listed 414 fugitives out of 3,120 enslaved people. African American soldiers with Rappahannock County connections included Howard Campbell of the 22nd U.S. Colored Troops, buried in Scrabble; Charles Davenport of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry; Lewis Dixon of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, a resident of Woodville; William Newby of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, mortally wounded at Petersburg in 1864 and brother of Dangerfield Newby, one of John Brown's Harpers Ferry raiders whose ancestral home was at Newby's Crossroads five miles south; James Arthur Payne of the 27th U.S. Colored Troops, born in Sandy Hook; and James Whip of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, who lived at Gaines Crossroads after the war.
