I gave an overview of Appomattox Court House and the importance of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, on April 9, 1865, in my previous post.
*Clicking on a photo will give you a closer look!
This post features Wilmer McLean’s reconstructed home. The original home was built in 1848. After the terms of surrender were signed in the best home in Appomattox Court House, much of what the McLean’s owned was taken as souvenirs. The McLean family moved and, in 1893, it was dismantled to be put on display in Washington, D.C. (that never happened).
The table where Robert E. Lee sat.
The table where Ulysses S. Grant sat.
Ely S. Parker was a Seneca Indian born in 1828 on the Tonawanda Indian Reservation in western New York. The Senecas were one of the tribes of the great Iroquois Confederation called the Six Nations.
He was present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia where he helped draft the surrender documents and render them in his own hand. At the time of the surrender, General Robert E. Lee is said to have mistaken Parker for a black man, but apologized saying, “I am glad to see one real American here,” to which Parker responded, “We are all Americans, sir.”
Parker was brevetted a brigadier general of volunteers on April 9, 1865 and continued to serve as Grant’s secretary until the general’s retirement from the army in 1869. Grant created a sensation in 1871 when he appointed Parker the nation’s first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Union officers tossed little 7-year old Lula McLean’s rag doll to one another. She was called the ‘Silent Witness’ by Colonel Horace Porter, an officer of Lieutenant General Grant’s staff.
The doll was carried to New York by Captain Thomas W. C. Moore of Major General Sheridan’s staff. The Moore family treasured the doll for 128 years.
The ‘Silent Witness’ is on display at the visitor’s center. She is not the doll on this parlor horsehair sofa at the McLean house (this is a representation)…she is under lock and key in a glass case.
The McLean house kitchen.
The ice house.
Slave quarters.
Appomattox Courthouse Village Part 1
See the world around you!
LC's Cottage 