No, this isn’t Abner Doubleday of baseball fame, or a previously unknown field commander fighting for the South, this is of all people, a grocer. His name is Wilmer McLean, and on the eve of hostilities 1861, he was perhaps just another American. Wilmer was a farmer, born in Manassas, Virginia in 1814, and stayed there to tend and farm a plantation. But the summer of ’61, his plantation, just to the southwest of Washington, sees General P.G.T. Beauregard turn the McLean’ farmhouse into Confederate Army Headquarters. It isn’t long before the Union Army comes calling, and soon General Irvin McDowell’s artillery plants a shell square in the McLean fireplace. Wilmer, already a grocer supplying sugar to the Confederate Army, fearing he and his family’s safety, and the viability of his business, packs up his family, and heads south, away from Washington.
So with First Manassas, the first major land battle of the war breaking out on the Yorkshire Plantation of Wilmer McLean, the family resettles on another farm about 200 miles south of Washington at a dusty crossroads in Appomattox County. It’s now the winter of ’65, Grant has burned much of the coastal plain from South Carolina to Georgia, Davis is still holding onto hopes the South can win the war, but Lee is slowly being surrounded, his supply lines at last have all been cut. In April of the same year, a young Confederate corporal, a staffer of General Lee’s calls on Wilmer looking for a place the General can surrender to Grant. Wilmer reluctantly agrees to let them use his home. The surrender effectively ended the American Civil War. Tables, chairs, anything in the home that wasn’t tied or nailed down was taken from the house.
Five long, bloody years of fighting had ended. The nation had been stripped of an entire generation of men. The McLean’s however had survived, Wilmer moved the family back to Manassas, he tended to the plantation for a time before moving on to Washington and working for the Internal Revenue Service. But between the end of the Civil War and the time of his passing in 1882, he always took the time to stop and tell his family and neighbors that, “the Civil war began in my front yard, and ended up in my front parlor.”
For more information about how you can see these wonderful sights from the American Civil War, visit Charleston National Tours. Whether it’s a class trip, a church retreat, or a corporate outing, let Charleston National Tours plan your experience.
The Thrifty Little Traveler 