Marye's Heights

Gen. Burnside's headquarters, after burning of the Phillips house, were at Little Whim, our first home in Stafford County, two miles from Fredericksburg. My pet carpenter shop in the cellar at Pine Grove had been used as a federal battery. And our neighbor and friend Hon. J. L. Marye's suburban home "Brompton" had passed into history as Marye's Heights -- a veritable Gibraltar when crowned with Longstreet's artillery, faced with rifle pits, and underpinned with his three double lines of infantry in the sunken road around its base. Shame on the infatuation that drove the New York troops, Meagher's "Irish Brigade", in repeated charges against that position till their dead and wounded covered the plateau of the old fair grounds in front so thickly that one could hardly walk or ride over it, and Mr. Wallace's old City Ice House pit was used as a grave for hundreds or possibly thousands of them.

The hill above now constitutes one of the largest National cemeteries containing the remains of all the Union dead from every battlefield in that county or vicinity. Their numbers too ghastly to tell.

Our old colonial manor house of "Salvington" was burned down that winter, too, and the brick used for chimneys to winterquarter tents and huts in the extensive Federal camps over towards the Potomac.