The Passing of an Old Park (Soldiers Home Grounds - Confederate Memorial Park) CLIFFORD DOWDEY, EDITOR VIRGINIA RECORD The PARK OF THE OLD SOLDIERS’ HOME in Richmond belonged in the earliest memories of life, and also the most formative because this home for Confederate soldiers provided a tangible link with the past of our people. In those long-ago days wooden barracks formed an open-ended quadrangle, with the double balconies on the fronts facing the enclosed, shaded lawn. At all hours of the day, the veterans could be seen lounging on the balconies, strolling through the park and sitting on the benches. They were all neatly dressed in the cadet-gray cloth of the “regulation” Confederate uniform, which few wore for any length of time during the war and some never before they became “veterans.” Despite the numbers of them, the old men were lonely for companionship from the “outside” and hungry for attention. When we visited them, they entertained us with tall tales of the war, and each one had a tendency to say that all the others were liars. Yet, I heard there a story-which seemed the wildest of all---about a group of armed quartermasters firing between the spokes of their wagon-wheels against a mass of Yankee cavalry, while protecting the wagon-train until they were saved by Jeb Stuart. Years later, in researching, I came across records of this incident which occurred at the crossing of the Potomac on Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg. Because of the memories of “color” provided by the nameless veteran, I wrote the incident into a story which was my first sale to a “name” magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. When a veteran died, a bell would toll, heard through the neighborhoods in the vicinity of the park. When I returned to Richmond, the last bell had long since tolled. The barracks were gone, and all that remained of the buildings were the white frame chapel at the Grove Avenue end and the old brick administration building (which had housed Stonewall Jackson’s “Little Sorrel,” mangily preserved and saddled) at the end of the park adjoining the beautiful grounds of the Virginia Historical Society. On the western side of the park ran the low wide white building which served as a home for Ladies of the Confederacy, and on the eastern side, fronting on the Boulevard, rose the handsome building of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. These two new buildings, set off by the background of lawns, shrubbery and old trees, seemed a perfect example of blending the past and the present—the park as a memorial to our heritage and the Museum in its contributions to cultural aspects of the present. Later the austerely white building of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erected on the same side as the Museum, also fronting on the Boulevard and flanked on either side by two guns of the Civil War. The old Administration building was put to various uses until it was refurbished as an adjunct to the Museum. The old white frame chapel was also refurbished, and the new and old buildings blended into a loose quadrangle enclosing one of the most reposeful sanctuaries to be found in any city. An editor from Boston and a literary agent from New York, strolling with me through the park after visiting the Historical Society, each said there was nothing in their cities to compare with the preserved Park of the Old Soldiers’ Home as a quiet refuge. In a continuity across time from the day when I had been taken by my parents to visit with old veterans, I took my daughters when they were little children to feed the squirrels. A wizened old man then in charge of the park in the daytime, fed the squirrels around five o’clock, and I had a speaking acquaintance with him. When the children asked me his name, I invented a name on the spot, and said, “Leon O’Squirrel.” During their early years, Leon O’Squirrel and his squirrel charges were figures in the children’s world. After they ceased going to the park, or seldom, the memory of squirrel feeding under the old trees provided a link with their childhood, with an evocation of tranquility extending from the past. At about the time when they were getting too old for the simple pleasures of squirrel-feeding, the squirrels’ gathering place was destroyed when the old trees and lawn gave way to additional parking space needed by the Museum of the nights of special events. Leon O’Squirrel vanished at the same time and the five o’clock ritual joined the memories of other things that have given way to modern needs. Though I was personally saddened at the passing of the landmark (with its associations with my daughters’ childhood), this minor inroad of parking spaces --unobtrusively blending in with the landscaping—left untouched the main quadrangle of shaded and shrubberied lawn something over two hundred yards long, the length of two football fields. The crisscrossing narrow footpaths of cement and the green benches seemed the same as when the gray-clad old veterans strolled and sat in the sun. Their places were taken by young mothers, whose children played in little groups, and by a variety of men and women of all ages enjoying the repose of the restful sanctuary. Sometimes students studied there, older women read, and on Sundays men and women brought there their out-of-town appears to read. Young couples in romantic mood strolled through, though they rarely lingered on the benches, as the atmosphere was not conducive to the cultivation of romance. The people sunning themselves from April through October were usually quiet and, in good weather, an air of traditional decorum was brought by charmingly dressed older ladies from the Confederate Home taking walks along the paths. Tourists going from the Museum to the Historical Society, paused in the park, looked at the guns, and occasionally asked informed questions of sunners who were obviously natives. They always expressed interest in the former use of the park, and the ghosts of the Confederate veterans seemed to evoke to them a sense of the continuing past. In all ways the park appeared to be one vestige of the continuing past which, by its usefulness in the present, seemed safe in a modernizing city. During the colder months, from November through mid-March, the visitors to the park were few, although strollers and/or sitters were there on all except bitter days, and one nurse brought out a brood of children regularly in all seasons. In the past winter, due to illness in the family, I did not visit my former haunt. Then, on a warm day in March, when I went out for a rest in the sun, I found that all the benches were gone and in the lower half of the park stakes were driven into the ground. With a feeling of premonition I made a quick stroll from end to end finding the familiar grounds bleakly deserted rather than reposeful. Fearing some approaching change that might impair the restful quality of the park, I stayed away for several weeks. On a beautiful day in April, I returned apprehensively to investigate the nature of the change. The whole lower half of the grounds was crowded with men in work clothes, who were laying out neat parking spaces where the stakes had been. No benches had been set out and the grass in the upper half, untended, had grown rankly like brush. With sinking heart I tried to reassure myself that after the work was completed in the lower part, at least the upper half would be returned to its former state and the benches placed out again. It was not to be. By mid-May, the spread of parking spaces in the lower half had been completed, except for stretches of upturned red-clay where driveways were under construction. Some of the trees had been preserved and the lay-out of parking spaces was a pleasant design—by the standard of parking lots. But the grass at the upper half was even wilder, the benches had not been returned, and stakes had been driven up to the former domain of Leon O’Squirrel. Except for the workmen, not a person was in the park, and the sounds of construction rang out where children’s voices had been heard. Until that moment, it had been hard for me to absorb the reality that I was observing the systematic destruction of a city park. It seemed incomprehensible that an urban sanctuary, at once historic and useful, would be thus unceremoniously transformed into a parking lot, regardless of how tastefully done. There was no question but that the Museum needed parking spaces for patrons coming to its night events. But, as even the present parking spaces are not occupied during the day, it would seem that the parking problems of a few hours on a few nights a month were solved at an unnecessary cost to the daily use of the park. On the day when I realized that the old park was destroyed, a story appeared in the newspaper about the first public hearing of the Virginia Metropolitan Areas Study Commission. One paragraph in referring to the parks, read: “There is a growing awareness that urban living often results in the loss of the amenities, pleasures and recreational values of the natural environment. The need for a place to play, to walk, and to enjoy undisturbed nature has recently received dramatic recognition by the work of the Virginia Outdoor Recreation Commission. This is a need most of the metropolitan areas are attempting to meet, but the efforts thus far appear to fall far short of what is required. The cost of land is high, the availability of open space is often limited, and rapid population spread and growth is decreasing the supply at an accelerating rate.” Then, referring to metropolitan core areas, the story reported, “Significant decline of metropolitan core areas, including the neglect of natural historical and cultural assets, is evident…”The decline of core regions of metropolitan areas represents serious loss not only for the core areas but also for the entire metropolitan areas and the commonwealth as a whole.” That the Virginia Metropolitan Areas Study Commission was reporting its findings precisely while an historic park in a core area was being destroyed indicates, to say the least, a lack of liaison between the State’s planners. The right hand knows not what the left hand is doing. Certainly and coordinated study could have found a solution for one problem which did not exacerbate and contribute to the basic problem of preserving attractive and essential features of life in the metropolitan core areas. There was space available in the park, where the veterans used to receive visitors and where children played, for the erection of multi-level parking decks enclosed by outer walls consistent in appearance with the existing buildings. In that way, the night parking problem would have been solved more efficiently and more permanently without transforming a beautiful, memory-haunted urban retreat into parking lots which spread unused and empty during the day—lost forever for the daily use of urban citizens. In heartless New York, Richard Rodgers, the song-composer, personally preserved Mount Morris Park as a landmark of the neighborhood of his childhood. In traditional Virginia “progress” has once more been achieved not only at the cost of a landmark but to the deprivation of men, women and children of families who are personally trying to support metropolitan cores in the face of the discouraging neglect of the State. For the unnoticed passing of one park, removing a haven for this summer and all summers to come, is merely a symptom of the State Government’s evasion of the confrontation of the total urban situation. Without some long-range interrelating plan, which coordinates all agencies in permanent solutions to those metropolitan problems which are also the State’s problems, commissions can come and go, and the metropolitan core areas will continue to deteriorate, daily offering families fewer reasons for staying in the city. Nothing can halt the erosion of metropolitan core areas until the State government inaugurates far-reaching action on the reality that Virginia is today as urban-centered community. As my daughters say to be on some of my old-fashioned stands, “They shot McKinley.” CLIFFORD DOWDEY 1967 Clifford Dowdey, famed author, was a member of Lee-Jackson Camp No. 1 SCV. This article was published in VHS Cavalier Magazine back in 1967, almost 50 years ago.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 01:28:11 +0000
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