Meeting the Enemy - 16th Vermont in Fairfax, Virginia

The 2^nd Vermont brigade, composed of the 12^th, 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th Vermont regiments, was made up of soldiers who had signed up for a nine month enlistment in the Civil War, answering Lincoln's call for troops of August, 1862. There were men from the Upper Valley in the 12^th regiment, with companies from West Windsor, Woodstock, Tunbridge and Bradford, with Roswell Farnham from Bradford as their Lieutenant Colonel. The 15^th regiment had a company from West Fairlee, and the 16^th Vermont had a company from Barnard and a company from Bethel. Charles Aikens, from Bradford, was a member of the 16^th regiment, and Charles Cummings was the lieutenant colonel. The 2^nd Vermont headed south toward the battlefields in stages, with the 16^th being the last regiment to reach Washington, DC.

On Monday, November 3, 1862, the 16^th brigade was given an hour and a half to pack their gear in readiness for a march south. After a 10 mile march, they arrived at the site of what would be their winter camp in Alexandria, Virginia. They marched through some beautiful country. Charles Cummings wrote home to his wife, “We marched a somewhat circuitous route about ten miles, passing Fairfax Seminary, naturally one of the lovelies places I ever saw, now despoiled of much of its beauty by a year and a half occupation by our troops..........The buildings are in good order and consist of a large central edifice, finer than any building in Vermont except the capital.”

Charles Cummings was the editor of a Brattleboro newspaper, and would have had the opportunity to see Vermont's capitol. We can be pretty sure that Charles Aikens had not been to Montpelier, and at Fairfax Seminary he probably saw the most impressive architecture that he had ever seen. Charles Aikens was probably familiar with the courthouse in Woodstock, which was the pride and joy of Windsor County, having been built in 1854-55.

Fairfax Seminary was an Episcopal seminary. It was taken over by the Union Army, and was General McClellan's headquarters at the beginning of the war. When the Vermonters passed by the school, McClellan was no longer the Commander of the Union forces. Six days after the Vermonters passed Fairfax Seminary, Lincoln removed McClellan from his command of the Army of the Potomac, and replaced him with General Ambrose Burnside. After McClellan's exit, Fairfax Seminary became the site of a Union hospital, which served 1700 soldiers during the course of the war. Five hundred Union soldiers are buried on the grounds of the school. Fairfax Seminary exists today, as the Virginia Theological Seminary.

The 2^nd Vermont made its winter camp in Alexandria, Virginia, on the property of George Mason. George Mason was an avowed secessionist who nonetheless found his home invaded by a thousand soldiers from Vermont. Mr. Mason kept a white sheet hung out of an upstairs window to indicate surrender, but Colonel Blunt, Brigade Commander, made it clear that the landowner would not be treated well until he traded the white sheet for a Union flag, and took an oath of allegiance to the United States Government. Howard Coffin discusses George Mason at length in “Nine Months to Gettysburg”, and Charles Cummings mentions him in one of his letters home. Cummings says, “His barn is used for stabling horses, his farm is despoiled, and he is prevented from communicating to any considerable extent with the outer world, and yet some of our officers think and say that even his family, women and children should receive no protection because the head of their family is at heart a rebel. The colonel and I fight such inhuman notion. We cannot see why his larder should be robbed and defenseless women, children and niggers be left to starve and beg on account of the notions the head of the family may entertain.”

As the brigade went about constructing huts to spend the winter in, there was a great deal of political upheaval in the camp. Colonel Asa Blunt was the commander in charge in November, but Charles Cummings mentions to his wife that there was talk of Colonel (Wheelock) Veasey, commander of the 16^th regiment, taking command of the whole brigade. This would result in a promotion for Cummings, as he would become regiment commander. All of Cummings' speculation went for naught, however, because on December 7, Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton arrived to assume command of the 2^nd Vermont .

George Mason was about 65 in 1862, which was pretty elderly in the mid 19^th century, certainly really old to have your home invaded by a thousand enemy soldiers. He had been married three times. His first wife was Ann Louise Harrison, who died in 1822. She must have died in childbirth, as they had a daughter, Ann Louise, who was born in 1822 and lived less than a year. His next wife was his cousin, Virginia Mason. They were married in 1827, and Virginia died in 1838, never having had any children. George married his third wife, another cousin, Sally Eilbeck Mason, who was 24 years younger than he was. She had two children, Kora and George. Kora would have been 15 and George 14 in 1862. Kora married and lived until she was in her 40's but didn't have any children. George lived with his mother until he died in 1888, his mother dying that same year. Kora died the next year.

This picture is a picture of George Mason's home, called Spring Bank, just before it was demolished in 1972. The property changed hands many times over the years. The house was originally a 25 room mansion, but over the years it was gradually whittled away, with all of its window and door pediments taken off, and the portico removed. In its very last years, the house was an apartment house and the rest of the property was a trailer park, before the property was sold one last time and the house torn down to make way for a K-Mart.