The resourceful women of the Neck invented substitutes for lost luxuries. Tea was brewed from sassafras, wheat, sage or mullein; coffee was concocted from sweet potatoes and other things. Sorghum and honey served for sugar. They got out the discarded spinning-wheels and looms and revived those skills. They carded, spun and wove the wool from their sheep. Polk berries and walnut hulls were used as dyes, and a special mixture of plants produced a shade that would pass as Confederate gray. The latter was used to dye garments made of the homespun so that there was always a new suit ready for the soldier when he came home on furlough. Thorns were used for pins, and seeds such as persimmon had holes bored in them and were used for buttons.
In spite of these and other ingenious substitutes the supplies of food and clothing had been very nearly exhausted by 1862. Thus, the natives of the Northern Neck were driven to running the blockade.
At that time Hampton Roads was blockaded by Union naval forces, and the rivers were patrolled by them. Maryland, just across the Potomac from the Neck, was divided territory. Leonardtown, in southern Maryland, was a trading center for the blockade runners from the Neck.
On the Virginia side of the Potomac, Kinsale in Westmoreland County, situated on an estuary called Yeocomico River, was one point of departure and arrival. This village had become quite cosmopolitan, for the country people were not the only ones who ran the blockade. Strangers from the North and South—merchants, speculators, adventurers, Northern draft dodgers, Southern sympathizers from the North, pro-Unionists trying to reach the North, even ladies, usually married women traveling with their husbands—all rubbed elbows in Kinsale. And there was at least one blockade-runner among them who dodged the tugs on the Potomac and blistered his hands on the muffled oars for no more serious reason than romance.
A steady stream of canoes from Maryland sneaked through to the Neck bringing quinine and other drugs, food, and Southern sympathizers. They landed anywhere in the Northern Neck.
The rivers were probably dark, for by the latter part of April, 1861, practically all lights in the lighthouses and lightships had been extinguished, removed or destroyed, from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande by the Southerners.
THE HOME GUARD
Though no major battles were fought in Northumberland County during the Civil War, it was the scene of a number of skirmishes which were never recorded in history.
The geographical position of this county in the tip end of the Neck and surrounded on three sides by water isolated it from the main stream of the war, but made it vulnerable to enemy naval raiders. Also, small groups of Union cavalry rode through the Neck from time to time looking for deserters from their own army and for Confederate soldiers who might be at home on furlough. Homes were looted.
A Federal flotilla was stationed across the Potomac at Piney Point, Maryland, and although this river was not formally blockaded during the war, it was patrolled, and the smaller rivers were patrolled from time to time. Many of the homes adjacent to the shoreline were shelled by these boats. The crew often landed and raided farms and houses.