Near this spot while yet primeval forest stood the church of the blind preacher James Waddel.
A devout man of God and a faithful minister of the Presbyterian Church.
Born 1739—died 1805.
Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ like a God.
From his sermon as narrated by William Wirt.
This country has just the charm that I should expect it to have from my reading about Virginia. Here are late-blooming honeysuckles in the hedges. Here are men drawing wagon loads of produce along the rather heavy clay highways to market. Sometimes they drive two horses tandem. The rear horse is saddled, and the driver rides him and so guides the team. Sometimes a heavy wagon is drawn by four horses, the driver astride the near horse in the rear. Sometimes we see farmers ploughing with three horses or mules, flocks of turkeys or chickens following in the wake of the plough and picking up the luscious morsels thrown up by the ploughshare. Sometimes we see fine Hereford cattle grazing in the fields. Then come the reddest of red pigs feeding contentedly in big fields of alfalfa. Once we pass a farmhouse with late-blooming yellow roses climbing over the stone posts at the farm entrance. Once we see a man ploughing in the fields with a mare, her mule baby running by her side as she plods along. Near Madison Mills we cross the Rapidan river, a rushing, yellow stream. As we near Culpeper the wooded country opens out into a beautiful grazing region, the land rising and falling in long undulations. Here and there in the great fields are clumps of trees giving a park-like effect to the country. All this is very beautiful, and one's joy would be undimmed were it not for the traces of the great conflict of fifty years ago. We are coming now to the region of Cedar Mountain which is locally known as Slaughter Mountain. Here is the site of a bloody battle. The Confederates were intrenched in a position of vantage on Cedar Mountain and the Unionists were advancing across the fields and through the forest into a sort of basin below the mountain. It is quite easy to understand the heavy slaughter of the Union troops; for on both sides of the road, here and there in the fields, are stones marking the spots where certain officers and certain groups of men fell. Here is a stone near the road marking the spot where Colonel Winder of the 72nd Pennsylvania fell as he was advancing.
As we see these stones the present peace and prosperity of these rolling grass lands is emphasized by the bloody background of the past.
We stay in Culpeper at the old railway hotel, "The Waverly." In the morning we drive about the rich country and are decided in our own minds that if we wished to come to Virginia for a great grazing establishment, this is the part of the country to which we should turn. We hear tales of one farm where the owner has made seven cuttings of alfalfa in the course of one year.
We make a hurried trip to the National Cemetery at Culpeper. 12,000 Union soldiers sleep in this cemetery; and Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania all have monuments to their dead. The granite pillar of Pennsylvania, with its bronze tablets, keystone shaped, is particularly fine. The noble inscription begins: "Pennsylvania remembers with solemn pride her heroic dead who here repose in known and unknown graves."
In leaving Culpeper we retrace our path as far as Gordonsville, and there turn toward Mechanicsville, on our way to Richmond. Again we come through alternations of open, rolling, exquisitely pastoral country and lush forest. Between Culpeper and Madison Mills we notice particularly a little old red brick church set in the forest trees by the roadside. A tablet on the building tells us that this is "Crooked Run Baptist Church. Organized 1777, rebuilt 1910." Crooked Run, a swift, clay-red creek, hurries along through the forest near the church.