A Forgotten Grave Marker Is Finally Identified

By Eugene Scheel

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Driving along U.S. Route 50, the John Mosby Highway, one might notice a lone upright stone by a gnarled and spreading tree. The site is on the south side of the highway, a few hundred yards east of the Atoka Road corner.

Until recently, the origins of the eminently visible marker were lost, even to the past generation. But sleuthing on the part of Middleburg's Childs Burden explains why the stone is at that location.

Burden told me he had been trying to decipher the stone's origins for about 30 years. He had questioned old-timers but gotten no answers. A decade ago, he asked Deborah Fitts, a Loudoun Times-Mirror journalist, to photograph the stone. Accompanying the newspaper photo was this question: "Does anyone know anything about this grave marker?" No one replied.

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Childs Burden beside the gravemarker of John Edmundson, near Atoka.

In an essay about the marker's identity that Burden recently mailed to me, he mentioned how he felt then: "Sadly, someone had died and had been buried along the road, and I would never learn who that person was and why that person would be put to rest in such an odd place."

In the fall, Burden began reading "Memories of the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion." In it were the diaries of Lt. Lewis Tune Nunnelee of Capt. Marcellus Moorman's artillery, a Confederate battery assigned to Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's Army of Northern Virginia.

Gen. Robert E. Lee had ordered Stuart's 3,000 men to keep about 7,000 Union troops from reaching the Blue Ridge. For at its crest, in the dry spring of 1863, scouts could observe dust clouds of Lee's 55,000-man army moving north to an encounter, which would be at Gettsyburg.

The major actions of this campaign, often termed Aldie, Middleburg and Upperville, took place from June 17 to 21, within two miles of the Ashby's Gap Turnpike, today's Route 50, though with some changes in alignment.

After reading Nunnelee's entries for June 21 through 24, 1863, Burden called out to his wife: "Oh, Elaine! Eureka! I have found it!" — the story of the marker. An artillery round had hit a Confederate soldier, who was immediately killed.

Hill after hill, Union forces had pushed the Confederates west from Aldie toward the Blue Ridge. At dawn, 146 years ago today, the artillery duel that took the soldier's life shook the heights by the Ashby's Gap Turnpike. The forces were on opposite crests, with Moorman's artillery east of the village of Atoka, then called Rector's Crossroads.

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Close-up of brass gravemarker for John Edmundson.

Nunnelee wrote that "after a heavy fire on both sides, we were ordered to fall back. In taking our pieces [artillery] out of position and into the Pike a shot struck John Edmundson and literally tore him in pieces and at the same time took off the leg of Charles D. Saunders just above the knee. . . . "

On June 22, a Monday, Nunnelee wrote that Saunders had been tended to at the home of the Rev. George W. Harris and "was shown every kindness possible by that gentleman till his death, had his body nicely prepared for burial and his remains were finally sent to his home in Lynchburg Va. His faithful slave, John, remained with him, passing himself as free to prevent the enemy from forcing him away with them. We also found that the mangled remains of poor John T. Edmundson had been interred by the side of the rock wall where he fell."

Nunnelee, also of Lynchburg, later wrote, "a gloom was cast on the whole company. They were two noble youths and good soldiers."

Tuesday prompted an "All quiet during the day" entry by Nunnelee, while Union scouts achieved their objective, the Blue Ridge crest. There, the Federal commander, Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, reported that they could see Lee's massive armies moving northward.

On Wednesday, June 24, Nunnelee wrote: "I visited the grave of John T. Edmundson, and learned from Misses Gibson that the enemy had buried him on Sunday as they passed, but that their father, Mr. Nelson Gibson, had had him disinterred and a neat pine coffin made into which he put the mangled remains and had him reinterred a short distance from where he was first interred. Here was true disinterestedness of heart, and never did I see so much interest taken in a stranger, as did these four sweet young Gibson girls. They testified their sympathy by placing at the head of the grave a bouquet of beautiful flowers, and may their path through life ever be strewn with these."

The full identities of the Gibson girls are unknown because the relevant U.S. Census records are blurry. How soon did they forget? The Gibson family and its several strains were prominent in the Upperville area for more than a century after the war's end in 1865. Did no one from Lynchburg ever return to the site? Are there other unidentified possible grave markers along country roads? Burden thought of two, near the corner of Zulla and Young roads, a few miles away.

We talked about such matters as Burden, Atoka resident John Zugschwert and I walked the few hundred yards from the village to the weathered granite gravestone. The rock wall mentioned by Nunnelee was now a four-board fence. The property's owner, Mary Beach Schwab, had set a brass plaque by the stone noting Edmundson's name and date of death. Zugsch8wert said a Confederate flag flew by the stone a few days before.

Burden remarked that the gnarled tree, its immense roots disgorging stones from the old wall, was a horse chestnut. He added, "How appropriate for the Stuart Horse Artillery."

I observed the stone and said, "Look, on both sides you can make out the letters 'J T E,' " — etched there by Nunnelee, 146 years ago.

For more on the military campaign, read Robert J. Trout's "Galloping Thunder: The Story of Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion" (Stackpole Books, 2002); "Memoirs of the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion" (University of Tennessee Press, 2008), which Trout edited; and his article "Cavalier Gunner" in the Civil War Times issue of June 2008.

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford.

Tagged: civil war, history, Middleburg, Route 50

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