Fairfield Office

The Fairfield plantation office was the last resting place of "Stonewall" Jackson.

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Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson died on May 10, 1863 in this small office building. This office served Thomas Chandler's 740-acre Fairfield plantation in the years leading up to the Civil War. The building is a one-and-a-half-story, square, frame structure clad in white weatherboard siding and with little ornamentation overall. During the early 1900s, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, & Potomac Railroad Company, led by a Confederate veteran, preserved the office building because of its association with Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

Though most famous because of its assiciation with Thomas Jackson, many other events took around this location during the Civil War. While Thomas Chandler's three oldest sons joined the Confederate Army and Chandler himself provided supplies to the Confederate army on a number of occasions, the people the Chandler's enslaved claimed freedom for themselves when the United States soldiers were nearby. During the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Guinea Station became the northernmost supply depot for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Over the winter after the Battle of Fredericksburg, a portion of Lee's army, under General Jackson's commmand, camped nearby.

After a long winter, in the spring of 1863, the US Army of the Potomac and Confederate Army of Northern Virginia fought once again, this time at Chancellorsville, roughly 30 miles northwest of here. During the second day of the battle on May 2, Jackson’s corps carried out an extensive flank attack, catching the US Army of the Potomac off guard. However, Jackson's attack failed to fully overrun the center of the Federal line and reconnect with the remainder of the Confederate army. When nightfall brought the Confederate attack to an end, Jackson conducted a reconnaissance of the Federal position to determine whether he should renew the attack. As Jackson and his staff rode out on horseback in front of the Confederate line in darkness, soldiers in the 18th North Carolina Regiment confused Jackson’s party for US cavalry and fired on them. General Jackson was wounded in the left arm and in the right hand. One of Jackson’s aide’s, Keith Boswell, was killed by the same volley, and others were wounded or captured.

The surviving members of Jackson’s staff evacuated him to a field hospital near Wilderness Tavern. There, they met with Jackson’s doctor, Hunter McGuire, who examined Jackson’s wounds and determined that his left arm needed to be amputated. McGuire put Jackson under anesthesia and removed his left arm in the early morning hours of May 3, 1863. The following day on May 4, Jackson traveled by wagon twenty-four miles to Guinea Station. Confederate surgeons hoped to transport Jackson by train to a more permanent hospital in Richmond. Earlier that day, however, the U.S. cavalry severed the RF&P. As a result, Jackson could not be moved until Confederates could repair the railroad. Under General Lee’s instructions, Jackson’s staff brought him to Fairfield and put him up in this office building. Members of the Chandler family as well as Jim Lewis, a man Jackson enslaved, prepared the building for his stay and helped make him comfortable.

On May 5-6, Jackson continued to rest at Fairfield and seemed to be doing well. However, his condition worsened on May 7. By then, the railroad was back in operation, but Jackson was too ill to move. Doctor McGuire diagnosed him with pneumonia. Desperate to find a solution, McGuire called in a pneumonia specialist, Doctor David Tucker, from Richmond. Mary Anna, Jackson’s wife, also traveled to Fairfield from Richmond to be with her husband. Mary Anna brought Julia, the Jacksons’ newborn baby, and Hetty, a woman the Jackson family enslaved, with her from Richmond.

At about 3:15 pm on May 10, 1863, Jackson died in the office building. News of his death quickly spread throughout the country. Mary Anna chose to have Jackson’s body buried in Lexington, Virginia. While Robert E. Lee’s army achieved victory at Chancellorsville, the battle came at an immense cost. Lee’s army suffered over 13,000 casualties, including General Jackson.

While Jackson was the most well-known Confederate soldier to come to Fairfield after the Battle of Chancellorsville, he was not the only one. In the aftermath of the battle, thousands of wounded soldiers crowded around the station waiting for transportation to hospitals in Richmond. Roughly six thousand U.S. soldiers captured at Chancellorsville also camped at the station until the Confederate Army could move them to prisons in Richmond. More chaos followed in May of 1864, when a cavalry skirmish took place at Guinea Station after the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. The Civil War, which the Chandlers had wholeheartedly supported, drastically altered their lives. In December of 1863, the Chandlers sold Fairfield Plantation, but continued to live there until March of 1865.

The Fairfield Office Becomes the Jackson Shrine

In the decades after the Civil War, former Confederates elevated Jackson's status to mythic proportions within the idealogy of the Lost Cause. Meanwhile, Fairfield Plantation fell into disrepair. The property traded hands multiple times and owners sold off land bit by bit.

In 1900, the Virginia General Assembly chartered the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Association. A group of former Confederates created the organization with the sole purpose of purchasing the building where Jackson died. At the time, the property was owned by another Confederate veteran, George Robert Collins, who rented out the property to a Black family. The family lived in this office building, while the main house was used as a storehouse. The Evening Star, a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, applauded the group’s effort to save the site from what the writer deemed “ruin’s ravages,” an unfair judgement made against the property’s Black tenants. In the late 1800s, White preservationists frequently took issue with the presence of Black people at sites associated with White historical figures. The Stonewall Jackson Memorial Association never realized their dream to purchase the building.

Soon, the president of the RF&P, William White, became interested in the site of Jackson’s death. White had served in the Confederate army during the war. In 1909, White purchased the 5-acre tract of land on which the office building sat. Around that time, White oversaw the demolition of the other buildings onsite. Two years later, White sold the property to the railroad. 

In 1926, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, with the help of a local ladies’ memorial organization, rehabilitated the Fairfield office building and furnished it with items related to Jackson’s career. A few notable changes were made to the building between 1927 and 1928. After two years of work, the RF&P opened the building to the public in 1928 as a “shrine” to Jackson. In commemoration of its opening, the Charlotte Chronicle in North Carolina reported that the site would become “the Mecca of Southern pilgrimage.”

In 1933, the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial National Military Park (FRSP) was transferred from the War Department to the National Park Service. The Lost Cause narrative guided the park’s interpretive aims from the very start. Stories surrounding Confederate Generals Lee and Jackson became focal points in both early preservation efforts and public programs. In 1937, the property on which the Fairfield office building stands today was donated to the park. The park named the site the Jackson Shrine.
 

The Fairfield Office Today

When this building opened to the public, the acting U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Charles West, gave a speech in which he promised the federal government’s “sacred trust” in promoting Jackson’s “valor and character.” The Jackson Shrine came into the National Park Service during a time when the federal government prioritized reconciliationist memories of the Civil War that focused on the shared valor of soldiers on both sides rather than the actual causes of the war. For decades, park rangers working at the Jackson Shrine focused solely on Jackson’s death, overlooking the broader story of this place.

Former NPS historian, Ralph Happel, wrote that in the Fairfield office, which he referred to as “that old house,” both the Confederacy and “a way of life” died with Jackson. By calling the office a house, Happel removed the building from its original setting. His usage of the phrase “way of life” sought to romanticize life on a plantation and ignore the horrors of slavery. With ideas like these placed at the forefront of the park’s interpretive goals, visitors to the Jackson Shrine encountered a one-sided version of the past.

Today, the National Park Service aims to represent this site in a more holistic way. In 2019, in the wake of public critique of its administration of the site, the National Park Service renamed the site the “Jackson Death Site.” In making this change, the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park embraced a new goal: to discuss all of the important events that took place here over time and recognize its role in perpetuating Lost Cause mythologies in the past. While the physical remnants of the many people who came through this place are gone, their stories remain.