Blenheim's Civil War Graffiti

This is Blenheim, an 1859 house in Fairfax City, Virginia. A pretty standard plantation house for that time and place.

I visited on a lovely Fall day.

The remarkable thing about Blenheim is that in 1862 to 1864 it served as a hospital for Union soldiers from the Army of the Potomac. And those soldiers, bored and lonely, covered the inside of the house with graffiti. 

More than 150 different signatures have been identified. Several are from soldiers of the 83rd Pennsylvania, which lost more than 400 men fighting in every battle from the Peninsula to Appomattox Court House, including prominent parts at Gettysburg and Saylor's Creek.

Two of the more interesting drawings.

This one was actually preserved by the owners after the war rather than painted over because they took it to be a drawing of Confederate raider John Mosby, a local hero. Which is funny, because Mosby had a swashbuckling reputation but looked nothing like this, and this drawing was almost certainly done by Union soldiers like all the rest.

Some of the drawings are quite visible, while some are not and had to be revealed with multispectral imaging. Most remarkable is a barely visible series written vertically next to a door jamb on the second floor. The first line has a tiny sketch of a man in civilian clothes and says, 

Enlisting, patriotic

Then comes a sketch of a man in uniform:

First month, patriotic

Then a soldier pondering something in his hand:

Second month, hard to be patriotic on hard bread

Then

Third month, payday! can't walk but patriotic again

 Then

Fourth month
No money
No whiskey
No friends
No rations
No peas
No beans
No pants
No patriotism