People were visiting Civil War battlefields even before the Civil War was over. Almost before the smoke cleared at Manassas, people were walking around Henry House Hill and peeping in the window of the Stone House. It was the same at Gettysburg. Men and women came to walk the battlefield and see Little Round Top and Devil’s Den and the “little clump of trees” where Pickett’s Charge was thrown back. People are curious, but it is more than that. They want a sense of what it was like to be part of a great event, to be part of history.
Interest in the Civil War still grows. It is greater now than it was in the 1960s when we celebrated the centennial, greater than it was ten years ago, and it is a good bet it will be still greater in another ten years. The Civil War shaped the America we know today.
The war also greatly affected the people who fought in it. The great Supreme Court justice and Civil War captain Oliver Wendell Holmes put it best: “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top … in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” If a century after the fact, we can’t be touched by that fire, we can at least feel its warmth.
One way to enrich and intensify our Civil War experience is to stay at an inn that was connected to the war, an inn owned and operated by people who love their place and its link to the past. Staying in such a place can add a new dimension to your trip. For a moment you brush up against history. It’s a nice feeling.
This book brings together Civil War sites and the inns that are connected to them in some way. This will allow your experience of one to enhance your experience of the other. When you’re exploring the Shenandoah Valley, for instance, stay for a night at the house in Charles Town, West Virginia, where Grant and Sheridan met to plan Sheridan’s Valley campaign. At Antietam, stay at the farmhouse on the battlefield where Longstreet made his headquarters. Wouldn’t you know Jefferson Davis better if you stayed at the Mississippi plantation where he spent his youth? Wouldn’t a visit to a great plantation let you experience the life that has gone with the wind?
When I am traveling to gather information and take photographs for a book or an article on the Civil War, I make a point of staying at inns. Innkeepers are a great source of information. They know what’s around, how to get there, and whom I should talk to when I arrive. Furthermore, when traveling by yourself it’s a pleasure to chat with your hosts at the end of a long day.