The Battle of the Wilderness

In front of you is the site of Catherine Tapp's house, a 1.5-story log cabin surrounded by a corn crib, orchard, and stable. Union and Confederate forces swept past the dwelling, and at one point a Union shell passed through it. When Lt. Col, Theodore Lyman visited the Tapp farm area two years later, he found trees scarred by as many as a dozen bullets and some cut in two by artillery shells. Canteens, cups, knapsacks, and cartridge boxes littered the ground around you.

Mrs. Tapp and her children survived the battle unharmed. When the fighting started, they headed west down the orange Plank Road, taking refuge at a Confederate field hospital near Parker's Store. Phenie Tapp, who was a young girl at the time, remembered bullets kicking up dirt in the road as they fled.

"The Tapp family...is still extant, and old woman and three daughters, all in a miserable log cabin, with a grand daughter named 'Tripheney Bermudey Tapp!' From these poor folks i got lots of information, of how A.P. Hill was utterly routed on the morning of the 6th, and 'we see his men runnin' up the road,' and how Longstreet's Corps passed the rebel hospital (where they had taken refuge) at the double quick, and Longstreet himself rode past, in hot haste, to restore the fight." Theodore Lyman, 1866

(captions)
The Tapp



house just after the war.

A National Park Service historian interviews Eliza Frances "Phenie" Tapp in the 1930s. Phone was just four when the battle happened, she remembered "a lot of men in blue" and the sound of battle "like a big storm." "[We] hurried westward on the Plank Road to the rear and safety...Lare drops his the road and dust spurted up [like] it does when the first raindrops fall, before the ground gets wet."

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Show me all markers in:  Spotsylvania Courthouse, VA  |  Spotsylvania County  |  22551  |  Virginia  |  United States of America

The Widow Tapp House
Brink of Victory
Confederate Earthworks
In The Nick of Time
Lee-to-the-Rear
In the Nick of Time
The Texans Attack
Lee to the Rear!
Crisis in the Wilderness
Texas

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