Dispatches From the Parks: Petersburg National Battlefield
No matter how much you travel (whether you do it for a living or once every few years) you will always eventually run into a hiccup. No matter what you do something will go wrong and most of the time it will be out of your control. My recent trip to Virginia with my father to check out some national park sites ran into a hiccup that I have never experienced before: a tornado warning. We were driving to a city southeast of the state’s capital, Richmond, called Petersburg. It’s in this city that Petersburg National Battlefield is located. The national park site preserves numerous locations that played pivotal roles in the closing stages in the American Civil War as Ulysses S. Grant tried to cut off Petersburg (which was then a major railroad hub for the Confederacy) from Richmond. For me it seemed like the perfect place to start our journey as it was the most southern site we were visiting from our home in Connecticut. The last portion of our drive to the site featured a couple of technical hiccups. First, we heard our Alert Now system on my phone go off but couldn’t pull up what the alert was for some reason. Second, the Apple Maps app sent us straight onto the park loop road instead of the visitor center adding on some time as we tried to turn around. Once we finally parked, though, we discovered that Petersburg National Battlefield was under a tornado watch and that Richmond (which we just drove through and would be our base of operations for a couple of days) was in an active tornado warning.
The weather outside at the battlefield was not actually that bad out. It was humid and the rain quickly picked up, but the wind was not bad at all. It certainly did not feel like we were going to get swept up in a tornado at any moment. That being said, it was hard not to think about the threat throughout our visit to the park. So, with some worry on my mind, we finally walked into the visitor center. The Petersburg National Battlefield visitor center is kind of small. It has an information desk and a small gift shop on the lower level and a small exhibit that encircles an even smaller auditorium that plays the park movie. There are numerous windows in the building that offer great views of the site of a former fortification.
The Confederate fortification outside of the visitor center is the first stop on the park’s main auto tour. We were planning to do a hike through the main stops rather than the auto tour, but the poor weather led us to doing a shortened version of the auto tour instead. There are eight stops on the main auto tour, but with the threat of tornadoes, we just did what looked like the highlights of the tour. This included Fort Stedman, a Union fortification, and the Crater, what’s left of an infamous attempt by the Union army to break the Confederate lines. It felt like a risk getting out of the car each time, but Fort Stedman looked like too interesting of a fortification not to explore some more (plus there were numerous birds hanging around including some eastern bluebirds that surely would have taken off if we were about to get swept up by high winds), and there is too much mention around the park of the Crater not to check it out. The amazing thing about the Civil War battlefields of the later years of the war is how much of the fortifications are still preserved. It was in these final years that the fighting dissolved into trench warfare, and you can see just how much of an impact this left on the area through the trenches and fortifications that are still visible centuries later. In the case of the Crater, you can still see the large impact the explosion has left on the landscape.
While I expected and wanted to explore more of the park there was just too much going on to prevent that (the tornado watch being the most obvious reason). The Five Forks battlefield is another subunit of the park that preserves one of the last major battles of the war, but the parking lot for the subunit was closed on the day we went making a journey there even riskier. So it was with disappointment that we concluded our time at the park. That being said, while we were at the park we got a very informative journey through history, and the park felt very much of a piece with Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (which preserves the events that took place before the battles at this site).
