MAPS
The Lenoirs’ North Carolina in 1860.
North Carolina in the 1850s.
Prior to the Civil War, western North Carolina
remained isolated from the rest of the state.
Walter’s journey to Ox Hill.
Walter’s mountain world.
After his move to Haywood, Walter rarely left
the North Carolina mountains. From his homes
at Crab Orchard and then Shulls Mill, he traveled
extensively visiting the large landholdings he
acquired after the war.
The railroads come to western Carolina.
Especially by the 1880s, new rail lines
opened up the mountain counties to tourists and
businessmen.
Fort Defiance testified to the elite status of the
Lenoir family.
The bucolic setting of Fort Defiance overlooking
the Yadkin River was suggestive of the estate of an
English country gentleman.
As depicted in this 1830 drawing with the family
coat of arms, General Lenoir was the
personification of patriarchal authority.
Smartly dressed for this 1840 photo, Tom Lenoir
faced the world with a boyish openness that
left him in a quandary as to the adult role he
wanted to assume.
There’s no doubting Walter’s seriousness and intensity
of purpose in this photo taken at the time of his
graduation from the University of North Carolina.
William’s body was discovered in the front yard
of Oak Lawn, the Norwoods’ home in Lenoir.
This was the scene confronting a burial detail of
Union soldiers after the battle of Fair Oaks
during the Peninsula Campaign. The crotched
sticks had been used to support tents at
a Union campsite.
Cedar Mountain looms in the background as Union
troops prepare to move against the Confederate lines.
Comparable to Walter’s haunting memory of the
dead William Weaver is this image of a soldier killed
in the Petersburg trenches in the last days of the war.
On the morning of August 31, the day Walter was
wounded, Pope’s army regrouped in Centreville.
Walter was wounded while resting behind the
fence in the foreground of this 1907 view of
the field where he and his men fought at Ox Hill.
Like Walter after the battle at Ox Hill, these
wounded Union soldiers in Virginia had to wait
their turn for medical treatment.
This Confederate field hospital at Antietam
was typical of the emergency medical services
provided for the wounded after a battle.
This was the wooden leg Walter favored.
Increasing numbers of deserters hid out in
the mountains of North Carolina.
Whether raiding government supplies or
helping feed deserters among their kinfolk,
women in the mountains increasingly turned
against the Confederate war effort.
These African Americans registering to vote in
Asheville in 1867 eagerly took part in a political
revolution that stamped Reconstruction as
unacceptably radical for most Southern whites.
By the 1880s railroads were carrying tourists to
new resort hotels in the mountains of western
North Carolina.
Golfers prepare to tee off on the course of the Hot
Springs Hotel northwest of Asheville.
Shown here in 1904, Rufus outlived all his Lenoir
siblings.