Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones who also shelter in place. Old friends pass away, people we loved and admired. Immobilized for the time being, we can revisit destinations, near and far. join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel, the hope that these diversions might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
I relocated from Philadelphia to Richmond Virginia in January of 1991, with the intention of painting Civil War battlefields which then, as now were under threat from real-estate development and the invasion of big-box commerce. The subject seems to me a piquant metaphor for how the American landscape has always been a quarrel between civic responsibility and property-rights; economic priorities versus environmental sustainability. Suddenly with our nation divided again, all that work I did almost thirty years ago seems more apt than ever.
Under the present quarantine, I have reconfigured my 1990-1994 journals to unpack my travels and artworks into a prose narrative. After two months of work, I am a bit astonished to behold a three-hundred-page first draft for a memoir of the American landscape.
One of the durable friendships I formed was with noted Virginia artist Willie Anne Wright; a painter whose path had led her from the easel into photography. When I first met Willie Anne she was traveling to reenactments to make pinhole photographs of the participants. Other photographers had figured out wet-plate processes, catering to the hobby by producing 19th-century style tintypes and ambrotypes. The pinhole camera made more sense because of its mobility, and compatibility with readily-available film-stock. Period photographers were encumbered with complicated tentage, dangerous chemicals and persnickety clients.
On July 1, I had driven the route of J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry circumvallation around McClellan’s Army of the Potomac with local author Ben Carlos “Chuck” Cleary. One of the stops we made was at the grave of William D. Latane, the only fatality on Stuart’s ride. Nether the death of an obscure cavalry-officer, nor his unorthodox burial seemed worthy of legend.
The Burial of Latane, engraving after William Washington’s 1864 painting. The print in the collection of Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. (reproduced under fair use, etc.)
As reports of how Latane had perished in equestrian single combat like a chivalric knight of old, an epic poem was composed in his honor. The poem inspired a painting, which was reproduced in engravings that hung in Southern parlors as patriotic icons—celebrating both a martyr to The Lost Cause, and the forbearance of women on the home-front.
Latane’s grave seemed like a perfect subject for Willie Anne, who had shifted her focus from reenactors to historic sites, years before Sally Mann. And so the story unfolds.
“With a shout and a roar, the leading squadron, that of Capt. William Latane, dashed forward and threw itself squarely against the Federals. For a few minutes, there was a mad melee, sword against pistol; then the Federals made off. A brief second stand, a short distance to the rear, ended in the same manner. When the clash was over, Captain Latane was dead, pierced by five bullets. The Federal Captain who had met him in combat was said to have been wounded badly by a blow from Latane’s saber.”
–Douglas Southall Freeman–Lee’s Lieutenants. Chapter XX
Sunday. July 26, 1992. Willie Anne brings her lensless photography setup to the living history encampment at Fort Brady. The day before had been beastly hot, which was unfortunate because the program for the day was the back-breaking task of making fascines. Early in the morning we had cut vines and briars alongside the dump behind the National Park Service utility shed at Fort Harrison-Burnham. Wearing heavy knee-boots I was less likely to being bitten by a copperhead lurking in the weeds. I did sustain several stings from yellow-jackets, which my comrades declared must have been confederate bees. Heaps of vines, briars and brush were dumped in the back of a pickup truck and carted down the road. Fort Brady is an earthen enclosure with a large bombproof. Built in 1864, it was armed with massive 15-inch Rodman guns to answer rebel Columbiads across the river at Mill Rock.
Sappers building fascines and gabions. Harper’s weekly. Civil War period image
Fabricating fascines involves several steps. First, stout timbers are driven into the ground at a 60-degree angle, with care taken to ensure equal inclinations. These are then lashed or bolted together. A row of three of four of these cross-bars are set in an alignment at three-foot/one-meter intervals. To prevent them from shifting a straight narrow board or sapling may be secured to the underside of the cross-bars. Into the V-shaped embrace of this cradle are placed vines, briars, branches, along its length. A stout chain five to six feet in length is secured at opposite ends to the middle of a pair of hand-spikes, aka trailspikes–tapering wooden staffs used to maneuver the trail of a cannon-carriage. Two men face one another at opposite sides of the cradled brush-pile. One man hold both spikes. He passes one under the brush-pile to his partner. Holding the spikes upward with the chain below the brush, each man passes his spike to the other, catching the brush against the edge of the spike. Both men then push their spikes downward, so that their tips pass each other below the brush-pile. This action compresses the brush into a tight bundle, which is then secured with stout twine, hemp or sisal rope. This process generally starts and one end, moving down the line from cradle to cradle until the fascine has been completed. End are trimmed with a saw. In this way, lumber can be fabricated quickly to build shelters, fortification revetments or even road-surfaces. The work was exhausting. Producing two or three lumpy specimens gave us a grudging admiration for those who mastered these seemingly simple tasks. Recovering from our toils, we spent a tranquil morning in camp on Sunday morning. Willie Anne appeared in the afternoon to pinhole the scene. She poses Alex Johnson, Howard Bartholf and me in a pastiche after a wartime photo by Matthew Brady. I mention to her that I had recently visited the grave of William Latane, suggesting that we might take a ride up to Hanover County later in the week.
July 31, 1992. I collect Willie Anne at her house in the Fan district. We drive to Hanover Court House, grab lunch at the HoundsTooth Café. En route I regale her with thrilling details of Stuart’s ride around McClellan, and how Style Weekly editor Ben Cleary and I had retraced the route at the beginning of the month. Following the same route, we come to Summer Hill plantation, where legend has it that George Armstrong Custer had gallantly delivered a supply of rations to the womenfolk during The Late Unpleasantness.
Mrs. Ruby Newton had just come in from the garden, gone in for a nap and none too eager for guests. As it was on her land, we sought permission to visit Latane’s grave. She said we were welcome to do so, and kindly gave us directions. I refrain from telling her of my visit one month prior. Cleary and I had stopped to call on her, but found no one at home.
Getting back in the car we drive back to River Road, which curves leftward in its descent to the floodplain. Flanked on both sides by farm-fields, the road comes to a T intersection. Straight ahead lies a band of trees along the Pamunkey River.
To the south, fields stretch into the distance. The ground rises gently, forming low bluffs on the right.
At the tree-line we make a ninety-degree left-hand turn, and then left again onto a grassy farm-road running between the fields. HNow heading west, the fields on either side are planted with corn, with stalks eight to nine feet high. I ask Willie if being in high corn was the same as being in high cotton. She couldn’t say.
We turn right onto another farm-road running north between the fields. Patches of the maize the size of city blocks had already been harvested, hewn to a stubble. Through one of these clearings I behold a cluster of trees. Following another bumpy farm-road, we come to a grassy lane, turn right and find ourselves at the edge of a small family graveyard. Willie is amazed at the remoteness of the site, comparing it to the spot where Stonewall Jackson’s arm is buried, on the Lacy farm near Wilderness Church. Getting out of the car, we walk around the little park. Planted with boxwood hedges, an ancient tree towers overheads, providing welcome shade.
Arrayed within the walls we find an orderly collection of eighteenth-century stone sepulchers, but no sign of Latane’s grave.
Nestled within a clump of shrubbery we find a cast-iron state historic marker set atop a stone altar. Its text unfolds the tale of Latane’s death, and his burial by the Brockenbrough women. Setting her homemade wooden box-camera on a tripod, Willie makes half a dozen exposures. Finally, I am ready for my closeup. She readjusts the camera. I lean on the marker.
With utmost gravity, Willie says, “Now. Hold still!”
“Don’t forget to get the ghost,” I shoot back.
“That’s not funny!” she replies with a pained look. “Hold still. Don’t talk.”
Thirty seconds elapse in silence. A dragonfly buzzes around my head.
As Willie covers the aperture with a strip of black tape, a mosquito bites her. Whatever enchantment had drawn us to this place, the spell had been broken. Hastily we pack up and return to the car.Taking the dedicated access road back to River Road, we head back to Richmond. On the return trip the car clutch starts to slip. Leaving it in third gear, I massage the gearbox. At full stops, I figure out how to get from first to third. Dropping Willie Anne back at her home, I swing by the video store and rent “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” a cautionary tale that in hindsight seems apt for the day.
August 4. Monday. Willie Anne calls to invite me to dinner with her and Jack, their daughter Anne, her husband Chuck Savage, and their daughter Audrey would be there. My contribution is a nice bottle of wine, a 1987 Seaview Semillon-Chardonnay from Australia. Once we all were assembled, we look through Chuck’s photos of the First New York Engineers at Fort Brady, some of which will be reproduced in the Yellow Pages of the new Richmond telephone directory. Willie gives me several versions of photos of her reprise of the three soldiers by Matthew Brady, for which Howard Bartholf, Alex Johnson and I had served as models.
Willie paused and says, “I don’t know if I ought to show you this one. It’s spooky.”
She pushes the glassine sleeve toward me. I slip out the photo. In it there is Latane’s Douglas Southall Freeman-era historical marker. Wearing an Amish straw hat I stand beside it, leaning on my right elbow. Over my shoulder, emerging from the foliage is what appears to be mustached face, and the brim of a hat. I look up at her. She stares back.
“It’s him. Once we got out there I had a really bad feeling.”
William Latane. Coll. Virginia Historical Society.
(Reproduced under fair use, etc.)
Thinking back to Friday, all had been well until we interrupted Ms. Newton’s nap. I remember driving out to the graveyard, posing for the photo, my wisecrack about ghosts, Willie’s mosquito bite, the nervous ride home, my failing clutch. Coincidence, perhaps, or just bad luck. Later in the week I went to Virginia Historical Society to locate a portrait of Latane. The primitive likeness I found in a newspaper at the time did not look unlike the features in the photo. On repeated occasions, I tried to get Willie to return, but she always refused, and to this day will not budge.
Revisit previous QT Dispatches: April is now Online.
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to
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