Pamplin Historical Park

Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier preserve a 422-acre campus with four award-winning museums, four historic homes, living history demonstrations, guided tours, and the Breakthrough Battlefield of April 2, 1865. The site explores the everyday world of Civil War soldiers, the Southern way of life in the 1860s, the divisive role of slavery in 1850s America, and the lives of free and enslaved antebellum Southerners in original homes and recreated 19th-century settings that later served as military headquarters. It also encompasses ground from the 292-day Petersburg Campaign of 1864 and 1865, including the attack by more than 14,000 Union troops on Confederate fortifications on the Banks, Hart, and Boisseau farms in the battle known as the Breakthrough, a Union victory that forced General Robert E. Lee to evacuate Richmond and Petersburg before his surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Court House one week later, signaling the virtual end of the Civil War. Recognized as a National Historic Landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the park also offers changing exhibits, special events, multi-day tours, historical symposia, educational camps, and an overnight Civil War Adventure Camp in which participants sleep in re-created soldier huts and barracks, eat a soldier’s meals, drill, learn tactics, camp skills, and music, and fire a reproduction Civil War rifle-musket.

Petersburg, Virginia · United States