1998 Trip to the United States
Virginia and Points South
It was now time for us to sample the joys of Amtrak! This mode of travel I have to report is no worse and indeed no better than any other form of rail travel we have yet been acquainted with. The train left Philadelphia's imposing station about ten minutes late. It travelled past some really grotty worn out industrial areas, which could have been the third world and also some lovely riversides.
We arrived at Union Station, Washington DC to find that the carriages were no where near a platform and consequently as we had quite a bit of luggage there was nothing to do but grab a porter. When we arrived up at street level we waited ten minutes for him to appear and then discovered that despite putting our bags on his truck ourselves one of them was missing. He fortunately knew where he had "dropped it off" and it was another ten minutes or so before he turned up again with it. We took a cab to Arlington and our hotel for the night.
We had visited Washington DC on a previous occasion and seen the "sights" and done the tours then. It is a truly great city. One of the parts which impressed us most then was Arlington Cemetery. On this occasion we were merely staying in Arlington because it was as near as we could get to what used to be Washington National Airport, where we had booked a car to be collected the next morning. Did you know the airport has been renamed - Ronald Reagan Airport!
Having picked up the car the next morning we headed out of DC and into Virginia for the short drive south along the Ptomac River to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. This is the most visited historic estate in the US.
It is an imposing home which
has extensive gardens and views of the river and surrounding
countryside. A much smaller house on the site had belonged to George
Washington's father. The property was acquired by Washington in 1754
and he enlarged it considerably and developed the gardens and land as
a working plantation.
The gardens
were very pleasing.
This chap was evidently way ahead of his time in gardening, farming
and animal husbandry etc. The house itself was the first one we had
been in with a separate kitchen.
This
being an indication that we
had moved far enough south for the wish to become important that fires
and ovens which would overheat the house in summertime should be kept
apart from living accommodation.
The absence of any room which could have been used for personal hygiene purposes was a bit of a mystery.........chamber pots and bowls of hot water provided by slaves as required I suppose sufficed. On being asked about the story of Washington's famous wooden false teeth our guide corrected the facts and told us that they were in fact made from bone. In the grounds there is a rather splendid tomb which houses the remains of George and Martha.
This was built to his specification some
years after their deaths. An interim burial place is also close by. We
visited both.The
gardens
were very pleasing.
It was time to move on, historically too. Enough of all this kicking out of the Brits and Independence etc. For the next part of our travels it was the Civil War which was of paramount historical interest in this neck of the woods. We drove westwards to the Manassas National Battlefield Park. I shall gloss over the fact that the journey between Mount Vernon and there was not as straight forward as it appeared on the map and we did get a "teensy bit" lost - wasn't the navigators fault you understand.
There were two Confederate victories hereabouts. The First Battle of Bull Run, in 1861 was the first major battle of the war. A second took place over the same ground a year later. The Visitors Centre has an exhibition of uniforms and battle models and memorabilia.. They also have an informative video presentation which we watched.
At the time of the first battle the ranks of soldiers on both sides were filled with enthusiastic volunteers ready to see off the opposition and quite sure that they would do it speedily and put an end to the war. Sadly at the end of the day they were much disillusioned and some 900 of their number lay dead. In August 1862 the plains of Manassas once again saw the convergence of the two sides. The forces now well knew the horrors of war . This battle lasted three days and 3,300 were killed. It was the height of the Confederacies power. The one outstanding soldier in both battles whose name has been associated with the Battles of Bull Run was the Confederate General, Thomas J. Jackson. It was here that his nick-name of Stonewall Jackson was coined. A rather splendid mounted statue of him stands vigil on Henry Hill, close to the visitor's centre.
Having stayed overnight at Front Royal we next day made the
acquaintance of the Blue Ridge mountains and the magnificent Skyline
Drive. The Blue Ridge Parkway, a leisure route, not open to commercial
vehicles extends for some 470 miles from Front Royal to near Cherokee
in North Carolina. It crests the southern Appalachians, linking the
Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Parks. 
Started in 1935 it was some 52 years before it was completed. All
the way there are superb views. This being early October we had hoped
to see lots of lovely autumn leaves but most of them were still green.
The views over a somewhat rainy Shenandoah Valley were remarkable.
For this our first visit to the Parkway we contented ourselves with
the short drive as far as Swift Run Gap, some 65miles or so
southwards, before leaving it and heading east to Fredericksburg.
On the banks of the wide Rappahannock River, Fredericksburg is an
interesting old town, trading very largely on it's Civil War
connections. In December of 1861 a major battle was fought here and
more than 12,000 Union soldiers were killed, injured or went missing.
Confederate losses numbered between four and five thousand. They
were "dug in" behind walls and in trenches when the Union attack took
place. A number of small shops in the town sell uniforms and
memorabilia from the war, including spent bullets. The tree lined
streets are picturesque. 
An almost English
looking
pub called the Rising Sun Tavern is on Caroline Street There is an
Apothecary Shop and just out of the town is the Battlefield visitors
centre, which we did not visit.
The Town Visitor Centre, also on Caroline Street, gave us a general overview of the place and had a free slide show which helped get us orientated. One place they seem particularly proud of is the Masonic Lodge on Princess Street which is where George Washington was made a Mason in 1752. He bought a house in the town for his mother Mary, who lived there with his sister
We found it rather a pleasant backwater but were running short of twentieth century cash so looked for a bank. We popped into the National Bank, and as there wasn't an automatic teller machine obvious we asked at the counter for cash. We were escorted through to the manager's office, a Mr. John Hancock, where with considerable old world charm, he dealt personally with our request and afterwards ushered us through an inside door into the adjacent bank museum for our own personal view of the exhibition which contained an interesting collection of money and seals from the Confederate days.
Our next port of call was Richmond, very much a capital city. We were in posession of a "Panoramic" map of Richmond and thought that we would walk along Monument Avenue and view the said monuments. On the map it looked as if it covered about a hundred yards. On the ground it was well more than a mile. It was a lovely sunny morning however so did us more good than harm. It is a wide, tree lined avenue with many houses of obvious importance, with varying types of architecture, including some quite attractive modern buildings as well as classical styles. The most impressive monument is the one to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate States President.
There are
monuments of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, both mounted on
splendid horses.
I must confess that we didn't walk as far as the
one nearest the town centre to J. E. B. Stuart who whilst commanding
Confederate troops and raiding Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, had the
dubious distinction of being pursued by his father-in-law, Philip St.
George Cooke, who was commanding Federal cavalry at the time.
Stuart and Jackson, both battlefield casualties face, north whereas Lee
faces his beloved south. Two further monuments complete the
collection. We did visit these, the two furthest from the town
centre. The first one to Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Confederate naval
man, who was an oceanographer of note and amongst other discoveries
found the significance of the gulf stream and other major ocean
currents and invented the torpedo.
The remaining
monument is a very attractive modern one with a group of children
around a representation of Arthur Ashe the tennis player, who came
from Richmond. There is something ironic in this last one in that
when he was a young man he had tremendous difficulty joining a tennis
club and being accepted by society in Richmond because of his colour.
Nice to know, however, that he was eventually acknowledged and
honoured in this way.
Having enjoyed our walk down the elegant Monument Avenue we went back
to the car and drove into the centre of Richmond where we visited the
magnificent Virginia State Capitol Building, a neo classical
masterpiece if ever there was one and admired the adjacent grandiose
statue of George Washington which is surrounded by a number of statues
of lesser beings, which anywhere else would be considered of merit on
their own. 
There is much more of note in Richmond including several interesting museums but we had to move on towards Williamsburg.
A few interesting facts about the Civil War:
- It is estimated to have cost about two million dollars a day,
compared to the second World War costs of 113 million dollars a day.
- There were more than 200,000 deaths in battle or as a result of
being wounded in battle.
- A number of firsts. The first land mines used. The first torpedoes and submarines. The first use of trains to move troops. The first use of battlefield telegraph communication. The first organised field hospitals. The first photographs taken in combat. You'll like this one......THE FIRST INCOME TAX ...levied to finance the war.
It is reckoned as being one of the most outstanding Georgian houses in the US. It was built in 1730 by William Byrd the second and a plaque there in honour of him celebrates his founding of Richmond in 1737. Another thing we noticed and hadn't done at Mount Vernon was the presence of a separate Necessary House! There is a magnificent wrought iron gateway, the gateposts of which are surmounted by two large lead eagles.
We felt that what Sturbridge lacked Williamsburg more than made up for as it seemed much less of a theme park and more of a living and functional village. From 1699-1780 it was the political and cultural capital of Great Britain's largest and most wealthy colony. Today it has been carefully and sensitively recreated, or more correctly preserved to it's 18th century condition and nearly three million people visit it annually.
Many of the colonial buildings had survived until the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller responded to the request of a local priest to support Williamsburg's restoration. He had apparently approached Henry Ford first, but been sent packing. Rockefeller spent some 90 million dollars restoring the place, which opened in it's present form in 1934. His idea of restoration was to make everything look spick and span and he had the entire place painted every year, but now the buildings are left to age and mature and have a more natural appearance.
There are stores and shops and
taverns and an open air market More than thirty colonial trades from
Apothecary to Wig maker are demonstrated by costume garbed operatives
and are both entertaining and true to life. 
The
Governor's Mansion was a superb residence for seven royal governors
and Virginia's first two state governors, Patrick Henry and Thomas
Jefferson. It is set in magnificently laid out gardens.
The governor in 1775 was Governor Dunwoody who suspecting that the natives were about to rise and attack the British ordered the removal of the colony's gunpowder by the British Marines. This was not, of course, appreciated by the colonists. There are regular re enactments of this debacle and VERY colourful they are too.
We paid a visit to the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts museum in the colony. This is jam-packed with fine furniture, porcelain, pictures, silver and artifacts all beautifully displayed and in our opinion was the highlight of our day there.
After leaving Williamsburg we travelled down the Virginia Peninsular
towards Newport News and Hampton Roads until we arrived at the
splendid James River Bridge which we took westwards towards Suffolk
and Norfolk. We were indebted to Lesley Miller who provided us with
an excellent map for this bit of our journey. We were heading towards
renewing our acquaintance with the Skyline drive. We arrived at the
North Carolina welcome centre and were delighted with the facilities
and the amount of "freeby" information we gathered and the courtesy
with which it was given. All most impressive. All day we saw
cotton fields and the roadsides were frequently edged with beautiful
cosmos in all shades of pink. 
We thought we
were
going to like North Carolina. That first night we stayed in Roanoake
Rapids. That evening the restaurant where we had our meal greeted us
with our first "Y'all" so we guessed we were in the south proper. A
rather less welcome sign was the small one which said "No weapons" to
be brought into the hotel. I have to say we had also noticed that
we were in the south by the usual increase in number of pick-up trucks
with gun cases on the back. Very alien to us Brits.