Existing comment:
"From many of the larger trees rank vines hang down, cable-like, nearly touching the ground, suggestive of a halter."
-- Private GN Galloway, 95th Pennsylvania Infantry
For more than a century before the Civil War, local residents referred to the "poison fields" in this region -- lands exhausted by the intensive cultivation of tobacco here in the 1720s. Later, as trees reclaimed the land, vast tracts of timber were cut to fuel iron furnaces, build plank roads, or open fields for agriculture.
The result: a 70-square-mile region of second-growth forest, some of it tangled and emerging, some of it mature. Narrow roads cut through the cheerless thickets, connecting clearing worked by a few hardscrabble farmers. It was, said one man, "a dense, gloomy, and monotonous woods."
The Wilderness was many things -- depending on when a particular tract had been timbered. The area along the Orange Plank and Germanna Plank roads had been cut less than 20 years before the Civil War, and so was likely the most tangled. Other areas hadn't been timbered for decades and probably looked much like the Wilderness of today. |