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Rappahannock County had a population somewhere over 9,000; approximately 6000 whites, 3000 slaves, and 3-400 free blacks. Even then ours was a quiet rural community with an agrarian economy. But this was Virginia, Virginia had seceded from the Union, there was going to be a fight, one helluva fight, and despite its isolation, Rappahannock was drawn into the fray. When the war came over 1,000 of the white males of the county became part of the Southern army. Twenty or more joined the Union forces including at least one black man, Howard Campbell, who became a member of the 22nd United States Colored Troops. The rosters contain family names that resonate down the years to the present: Miller, Estes, Alther, Grimsley, Brown, Poe, Amiss, Swindler, Massie, Revercomb, and on and on.
Those who served would be become participants in some of the most memorable events and anecdotes in American history. Two brothers from the Anderson family became the first and (nearly) the last Confederate casualties of the war. County men stood at Manassas in the human ‘stone wall’ that gave Thomas Jonathan Jackson his immortal nickname. They and others. fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness and Spotsyslvania. A few made it all the way to Appomattox. A number made the fateful charge up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg with fellow Virginian George Pickett, many of them, in the words of Benet, “spilled from that deadly march as a cart spills meal on the road”. One of those who survived that pivotal July afternoon was James Mallory Brown who became renowned as the ‘marrying’ preacher after the war, so numerous were the couples he wed.
Two doctors, brothers named Amiss, performed a medical miracle, resurrecting a ‘mortally’ wounded artilleryman at Cedar Mountain. In our time, the Sperryville office of one of them would become a famous mail-order concern and later an art gallery.
Then as now, there was no shortage of horsemen in these parts. In an action at Cedarville, near today’s Dupont plant north of Front Royal, a company of Rappahannock riders was at the forefront of what Jackson
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