Vienna’s Ayr Hill in the Civil War: Photos & Context

The earliest photos of Vienna that I’m aware of are from the Civil War, and among those photos are four that stand out because they give us a view of a particular landscape, Ayr Hill Farm (Figures 1, 6, 7, and 8).  

The photo in Figure 1, from February 1864, shows us the encampment at Ayr Hill of the Union Army’s 2ndMassachusetts Cavalry Regiment as well as the headquarters of the brigade to which the regiment was subordinate. The brigade commander, Charles R. Lowell, used the house as his quarters. Charles Lowell was one of the Boston Lowells and a friend and brother-in-law of Robert Gould Shaw, familiar in popular culture as the Matthew Broderick character in the 1989 film, “Glory.” The house belonged to Josiah B. Bowman, the owner of the Ayr Hill tract (see Figure 2). Note that Josiah Bowman’s house is different from the William H. Bowman House that now sits near the Vienna police station. (My article about a particular house on Beulah Road in Vienna includes a biographical sketch of Josiah Bowman and a history of the Ayr Hill tract into the early 20th century).

Figure 1: The Bowman house and the encampment of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment of Lowell’s Cavalry Brigade in February, 1864, viewed from what I estimate to be the south looking north.
Figure 2 shows the approximate location and orientation of the Josiah Bowman house in Vienna as well as the extent of his Ayr Hill tract as of 1860, superimposed on a 1980s-era Fairfax County real property map. The boundaries and map–sans the Bowman house notation–are from Beth Mitchell’s project to map out the property lines in Fairfax County as of 1860.

— Josiah Bowman’s house sat near the northeast corner of today’s Ayr Hill Avenue and Park Street, according to Connie and Mayo Stuntz in their This Was Vienna, Virginia. The house faced to the southeast, according to the Stuntzes, a judgment substantiated in the plat for a late 19th century deed (see Figure 3). 

— We, the viewer, are looking to the north in Figure 1, given the orientation of the Bowman house in the photo and our understanding that it faced to the southeast.  

Figure 3 shows the location and orientation of the Josiah Bowman house on a segment of O.E. Hine’s plat for the Ayr Hill subdivision. Vienna historians Connie and Mayo Stuntz used Hine’s plat as evidence for their judgment that the house faced to the southeast, a key datapoint for assessing the geographic context of the Civil War photographs of Ayr Hill.

I suspect that the photo in Figure 1 was most likely taken from the upper reaches of what we now know as the Freeman Store and Museum. Perhaps the photographer took the photo from the two-story, two-bay section that at the time was on the northeast side of the house (see Figure 4). The rationale for this judgment:

–In Figure 1, we appear to be looking from a position that is: 

a. higher in elevation than the stables and tents in the mid-ground and 

b. elevated in relation to the base of the bushes and tree in the right foreground. 

Figure 4: In 1859, Abram Lydecker built his combined store and house at the intersection of the main road through Vienna and the Alexandria, Loudon & Hampshire Railroad, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The two-bay section was removed in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The building in view at the left almost certainly is Lydecker’s grist and saw mill.

An elevated position inside or on the Freeman House or perhaps in the mill that was immediately northeast of the Freeman House would seem to make most sense.  

–Less likely: that the photographer took the photo from a position south of where Maple Avenue (not in existence in the 1860s) runs today and where the ground again begins to rise (see Figure 5). I think this is unlikely, however, because it seems too far away and the angle doesn’t seem quite right, considering the position of the hill south of Maple Avenue. Also, a photo from that distance and direction would seem to have to capture within its view the mill and perhaps the Freeman House.  

–What do you think? Was the photographer taking the picture in Figure 1 from the vicinity of the Freeman House, from somewhere across today’s Maple Avenue, or from some other location?

Figure 5: This map helps to get a sense of the contours of Ayr Hill and its surrounding terrain, even though the map is from 50 years after the Civil War, because it predates the much greater development that followed in the 20th century. Southeast of Ayr Hill is another piece of high-ground, with a lower stretch of ground running between the two, where Maple Avenue was built in the 1870s. Low ground with Piney Branch and the northwest-to-southeast railroad runs to the west-southwest of Ayr Hill. To the west of this low ground are two spurs that extend off the high ground at Lawyers Road. The rail line that runs from the southern edge of the map is the trolley line built through Vienna in the early 20th century.

Figure 6 is of the same Ayr Hill encampment but from a different direction. The overlapping features between the two photos make that clear, even though the brigade headquarters/Josiah Bowman house isn’t in view in Figure 6. I’ve annotated both photos in Figures 6a and 1a to show where they share features, e.g. a matching shack, tents, stables, bushes, and trees.

Figure 6: The opening stanza of Herman Mellville’s “The Scout toward Aldie” describes the encampment of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment at Ayr Hill and does so accurately, judging from this photo from February, 1864. I believe we are looking to the northeast from the southernmost of the two spurs extending from Lawyers Road. The Bowman house would be just out of view off the upper-left edge of the photo or is obscured by the trees at the upper left.
Figure 1a annotates the same image as in Figure 1 to show the features that overlap with Figure 6a (the same photo as Figure 6 but with annotations). The overlaps substantiate that the photos are covering the same scene but from different angles.
Figure 6a annotates the same image as in Figure 6 to show the features that overlap with Figure 1a (the same photo as Figure 1 but with annotations) and, in blue, Figure 8. Perhaps the horizontal dark smear extending from the center-left of the photo is the path of Piney Branch.

As with Figure 1, the photo in Figure 6 was taken in February, 1864. The timing of these photos is interesting in relation to two events that happened around that same time. First, on 7 February 1864, the cavalry brigade executed a soldier from the Massachusetts regiment who was a deserter and turncoat. Perhaps something to do with that execution was why the Ayr Hill encampment was photographed at the time. Then, in April 1864, Herman Melville traveled to Ayr Hill to visit a relative who was serving in the cavalry brigade. During his visit, Melville apparently learned of the recent execution and later used it as the model for the execution in his novella, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), according to Melville scholars. Melville also accompanied the cavalry unit on a reconnaissance from Ayr Hill to Loudon County in search of Confederate irregulars. He used the experience as the basis for his poem, The Scout toward Aldie, which begins with a description of the Ayr Hill encampment that is very true to what we see in Figure 6:

            The cavalry-camp lies on the slope

            Of what was late a vernal hill,

            But now like a pavement bare—….

Before the war stripped Ayr Hill bare, most of the tract was either wooded or under cultivation. The drawing of the Vienna area in Figure 7, from just after the mid-1861 skirmish at Vienna, underscores just how wooded the local terrain was at the start of the war. Ayr Hill owner Josiah Bowman testified to a postwar federal compensation commission that two-fifths of his roughly 200 acres had been wooded when the war started. Bowman in his testimony also agreed with a commissioner’s characterization of the pre-war Vienna area as “heavily timbered country.” 

Figure 7: Note the extensive woods on the far side of the 1861 encampment in the Vienna area. Note also the train in the center of the photo, operating along what would be the Alexandria, Loudon & Hampshire Railroad, later known as the W&OD.

The war changed that for Ayr Hill. A military survey at war’s end determined that the Union Army had cleared 75 acres of timber on the Bowman property. Bowman claimed that he was left with just five acres of small pines. His neighbor and the owner of the Freeman House, Abram Lydecker, testified that almost all the timber on Bowman’s land was cut during the war, leaving “a few scattering trees standing” by the early 1870s. The military had used the timber to build the cavalry encampment, a fortification, and nearby military obstacles. Among those obstacles was the line of wooden posts that stretch across much of the middle of Figure 6. Almost certainly in reference to this feature, the chaplain of the 2nd Massachusetts wrote, “Our camp…at Vienna…was surrounded with a heavy abatis of felled trees branching outwards to guard against sudden attacks of guerillas.” Such attacks were a real threat. In December 1863, the commander of a New York cavalry regiment encamped at another portion of Ayr Hill or nearby (accounts vary), wrote:

“[Confederate partisan commander John] Mosby still troubles us. While I write, my pickets, about a mile and a half distant, are attacked…. You see we occupy an extremely exposed position. I am at work building an abatis around my camp, expecting a rebel dash…. I lost two men last week, fine fellows they were too. In the dark the enemy crawled upon them when they were on post as pickets, and shot them through the body.”

Most of the trees on Bowman’s land had been oak and chestnut, according to Lewis Johnson, the owner of Ayr Hill before Bowman bought the property in the 1850s. Bowman had used chestnut to build the fencing that before the war had enclosed all but 30 acres of his property. (Whereas oak is of course still common to our area today, chestnut is “functionally extinct” after a 50-year scourge of blight in the 20th century). Bowman’s chestnut fences divided the tract into 17 fields, lots, pastures, and a yard, according to his postwar testimony. In Figure 1, just in front of the house, you can see one of the few portions of fencing that remained as of early 1864.  

Bowman and his wife, Fannie, had cultivated various crops on the Ayr Hill property. Bowman estimated that in 1861, wheat was growing on fifteen acres, ten of which he lost. Union forces “had driven right into the field and fed their horses and the soldiers used it for sleeping purposes, and it was scattered helter skelter and trampled over so that I never saved it.” In 1862, Fannie “had 10 or 12 acres of land broken up for buckwheat, and she came to Washington, and bought half a ton of guano and put on it and sowed the buckwheat, and it was looking fine when I left home, and when I returned, it was gone.” Bowman also claimed damages to pasture land—the farm had two or three “milch cows”—and for losing corn in 1861 and 1862. He also billed the government for 25 tons of hay. Bowman had drawn the hay from multiple properties, including his own. Union quartermasters had “taken [the hay] right out of my meadow” and used it for fodder during the first Union advance of the war, out to the First Battle of Bull Run.

Whereas in Figure 1 we are looking due north, in Figure 6 we seem to be looking to the northeast. In Figure 1, the rows of tents and stables appear to be arranged roughly parallel to the orientation of the house, and in Figure 6 we are looking straight down the rows. 

–Note the bush/tree combination, annotations 10 and 11, on the righthand sides of Figures 1 and 6. The photographer for Figure 1 was somewhere behind and to the left—that is, to the southwest—of that tree. In Figure 6, that position would presumably be somewhere off the photo’s right edge.    

–We, the viewer, are on high ground in Figure 6. From our position, the ground drops in elevation past the log obstacle until we reach the low ground just before the encampment, at which point the ground rises again up Ayr Hill.  

Figure 8 is helpful in determining our position in Figure 6; that is, the position of the photographer for Figure 6. Again, features that match those in Figures 1 and 6 make it clear that this photo is also showing the camp of the 2nd Massachusetts. The most obvious of those features are the Josiah Bowman house, and, on the righthand side of the photo, the shack, the adjacent set of tents, the stables, and a tree. 

Figure 8: We are looking from an elevated position across the low ground and the rail line towards the Bowman house on Ayr Hill. Piney Branch would be somewhere between the rail Regarding the barn, the cavalry regiment’s chaplain, Charles Alfred Humphries, later wrote about Sunday services, “…I resorted to a barn near the camp, the auditors sitting on the beams and floor, the band accompanying the singing, and the cattle filling in the pauses with their lowing. But even with the shelter of the barn it was often too cold for the band to play….”

–In Figure 8 we are looking at the Bowman house from a position to its southwest.  

–Unique to this particular Ayr Hill photo is the view of the railroad, which is key to positioning ourselves. We are looking across what was known at the time as the Alexandria, Loudon & Hampshire Railroad and which today is the Washington and Old Dominion bike trail. 

–If we are looking from the southwest to the northeast across the W&OD, then off-photo to the left should be the Vienna train station, built in 1859, and off-photo to the right should be the Freeman House.  

–Moreover, we are looking from a position that is higher than both the locomotive and—emerging from the photo’s bottom edge—a set of tree or bush branches. The 1915 contour map in Figure 5 gives us a sense of the elevation in the area in the pre-development era. From the map you can see that the ground descends from Lawyers Road down to the Piney Branch low ground on two spurs (today separated by Ayr Hill Avenue). Of these two spurs, the one south of today’s Ayr Hill Avenue and north of Church Street is the more plausible site for the photographer because it is south-southwest of the house. Thus I think the photos in Figures 6 and 8 were taken from the stretch of high ground that today is east of Center Street NE and behind the building that houses Evolution Fitness and behind the former Vienna Trust Company building at the corner of Church and Dominion.

–Note the row of logs immediately in front of the locomotive in Figure 8. Presumably those would be used to help build the log obstacle in Figure 6. Given the position of the logs in Figure 8 in relation to the rail line, in Figure 6 the rail line is probably immediately behind the fence and concealed from our view.

Figure 9 isn’t focused on the Ayr Hill tract but is taken from just inside its western boundary, which was along the W&OD right-of-way. The building in the center is the Vienna train station.  The trees behind and to the back-right of the train station in Figure 9 offer a stark contrast to the largely denuded landscapes of the cavalry camp and provide a photographic sense of the appearance of the pre-war landscape. 

Figure 9 is a Civil War photograph of the Vienna train depot, the center structure in the photo. Concealed by the train station is the dip in the ground along which Ayr Hill Avenue was later built from Lawyers Road toward the train station (see Figure 5 and the road between the two spurs circled in yellow). The rise in the ground behind the train station and to its left is more gentle than the rise today, a reflection of how the rear of the buildings along today’s Dominion Road have been cut into the high ground.

–Note the white-topped structure on the left edge of Figure 9 and to the immediate left/southeast of the train station. It is annotated with a “12.” This could be the white structure that is on the left edge of Figure 6a, partially concealed by the log obstacle in Figure 6a and also annotated with a “12.”

–Looking to the immediate left of the train station at the center of Figure 9, note how the ground rises behind the building. It would be somewhere along this high ground either in-view or off-photo to the left/southeast that the photo in Figure 6/6a was probably taken.  

— Based on the angle that the train station presents to us as the viewer, I suspect the photo in Figure 9 was taken from a location that today would correspond to somewhere between the southern half of the Harmonia/Machine building, on the one hand, and the parking lot next to new self-storage edifice on the other. The recent photo in Figure 10 is taken from about the same angle as Figure 9 but is too close to the station. I couldn’t get any further away and still capture the train station in the view; Figure 10 was taken with my back against the wall of the building that now sits on the block.  

Figure 10 shows the Vienna train station in 2023, with a post-Civil-War addition on its righthand side, photographed at an angle similar to that in Figure 9.

–What we don’t see in Figure 9: evidence of Piney Branch. Today, Piney Branch in this vicinity is underground. At the time of the photo, however, it ran at the surface diagonally across the block from the northeast towards the south-southeast and the Freeman House. In the other Ayr Hill photos, we don’t see clear evidence of the stream, presumably because of the distances and the photo resolution. In some of those photos, perhaps darker horizontal smears are a manifestation of the course of the stream. In Figure 9, however, we would be close enough to discern Piney Branch if it were within the view in the photo. Thus it is probably just out of view off the photo’s bottom edge or just behind us/the photographer. 

Figure 11 provides my estimates of where the four photos—Figures 1, 6, 8 , and 9 —were taken from, annotated on a modern-era satellite image.  Again, what do you think?   

Figure 11: I estimate that the photo in Figure 11 was taken from a position in the vicinity of the line in purple from either of the two buildings that were at this location during the Civil War, and the photos in Figures 6, 7, and 8 were taken from within the respective circled areas.
Figure 12: I suspect that Figure 1 was taken from a similar angle as in this photo, albeit from higher up in the Freeman Store or from the mill that was then next door.

Sources include: Ancestry.com, the records of the Southern Claims Commission; Stanton Garner, “Melville’s Scout Toward Aldie,” Melville Society EXTRACTS, Number 51 September 1982;  Charles Alfred Humphreys, Field, Camp, Hospital and Prison in the Civil War, 1863-1865; Fairfax County Circuit Court, Historic Records Center, select deeds; Library of Congress; Herman Melville, The Scout toward Aldie; MOLLUS-Mass Civil War Photograph Collection; The New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, “A Short History of the 13th New York Cavalry”; Connie and Mayo Stuntz, This Was Vienna, Virginia: Facts and Photos.

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5 Responses to Vienna’s Ayr Hill in the Civil War: Photos & Context

  1. Eric Freiwald says:

    Wonderful; a remarkably effective use of multiple and different types of sources to piece together a fascinating bit of Vienna’s history. All the more so for me because I often pass by these sites on my walks.

  2. John Baldinger says:

    this is awesome! I really appreciate you doing the research and pulling this together

  3. Pete Thiringer says:

    Another great article! I really enjoy reading about old Vienna… Some notes:

    1. I’ve seen the photo of the Josiah Bowman house in Figure 1 before, maybe in the exhibits in the Freeman House. I always figured the photo was taken from someone standing at the Freeman House, or maybe Vienna Presbyterian, which would have been facing roughly north, as you stated.

    2. It’s always amazing to me how there are no trees in any of these old photos. I’ve since learned that most of Virginia was nearly 100% cleared of forest in the Civil War era. The land was mostly farm and pasture, and what few trees remained were used for fuel and fortifications in the war.

    3. Where is the railroad in Figures 1a and 6a? I think I agree about seeing Piney Branch in FIgure 6, but it isn’t really visible in Figure 1. Shouldn’t it be right there in the foreground, next to the horse?

    Now that I’ve read the entire post, you did a good job of answering most of my questions above, even before I asked them. I generally agree with your locations of the photo vantage points in Figure 11, and in fact was thinking along the same lines before I read your well-reasoned arguments. What a fantastic thing it is to find multiple photos of the same area, from different vantage points, taken some 150+ years ago!

    Final question: There is a civil war fortification very close to this area, on some high ground off Center Street, currently owned by the American Legion post. It would have been just off to the right of the photo in Figure 9. Given that it’s the only semi-permanent fortification in Vienna, I’m curious why it never seems to show up in any photos or historical accounts I’ve read of Vienna in during the Civil War. Do you have any information on it?

    • admin says:

      I haven’t found any direct/unambiguous reference to the fortification at the American Legion post in town. There’s nothing about it in the Stuntz book, and the deeds for the property before the American Legion acquired it don’t make any reference to it. In that last regard, we’re not helped by the relatively few times that the property changed hands after the Civil War. My best guess is that it was built by one of the New York cavalry regiments–the 13th and the 16th– that were part of Lowell’s brigade at Vienna from the fall of 1863 to the spring of 1864. If I could place the hill within the 13th’s encampment, I’d be more confident.

      Relevant datapoints: 1) We know that the 2nd Massachusetts and the 16th New York each had some sort of fortification at their camp. The Stuntz book and the post-Civil War deeds that they cite indicate the 16th New York had a fort at the Windover Heights portion of the Moses Commins property. In turn, Josiah Bowman in his postwar testimony to the Southern Claims Commission makes explicit reference to a fort on his property. It’s unclear to me if he is referring to a fortification like that of the 16th New York or the American Legion property, on the one hand, or if it is just a reference to the log fence/stockade that we can see in the photos, on the other. Regardless, Bowman’s reference to a fort on his property wouldn’t be the American Legion fortification. Bowman sold that property to Benjamin Thornton before the war, and in his postwar testimony he displays a good grasp of what his property boundaries were during the Civil War.

      2) By a process of elimination, one could infer that the other cavalry regiment, the 13th New York, had its own fort if the 16th New York and 2nd Massachusetts each had their own. However, I can’t place the 13th New York on the American Legion property. The article on Herman Melville’s visit to the brigade notes that “On the southeastern side of the [brigade’s] camp was the Massachusetts regiment; on the northwestern, another New York regiment [referring to the 16th]; and in the center was Gansevoort’s 13th New York.” That characterization—in the center, between the two other regiments—would fit the idea that the camp of the 13th New York could have included the heights with the American Legion Post.

      3) However, other, more specific references aren’t consistent with the idea. A history of the 16th New York notes that “The cavalry camp in Vienna was quite large, occupying two hills with the railroad station and general store in the low area between them. The 2nd Massachusetts and 13th New York occupied the area on and around Ayr Hill on the northeast….The 16th New York occupied the second hill, where COL Lazelle and his wife took over the Moses Commins house.” Given the description, the “second hill,” with the 16th New York, is clearly the high ground west of the railroad. And Bowman’s testimony is explicit about two cavalry regiments being on his property. Thus the American Legion fort would seem more likely to be a second fortification for the 16th New York than a fortification for the 13th New York.

      4) Could it have been the Confederates? Probably not. On the one hand, the Civil War Trails marker at the site (as of 2015) leaves it open as to whether it was Union or Confederate, and the location could make sense for the latter. In the Bowman case, when Joseph Follin testified that at one point the Confederates controlled the Ayr Hill area, a commissioner asked where they were encamped. Follin answered, “At Vienna, on the other side of the railroad.” However, Follin also noted that the Confederates only maintained their encampment for two weeks, which would seem too short to bother establishing a fortification like the American Legion fort: the marker refers to “the complexity of its design and time required to construct a star-shaped earthwork….” A press article from 2012 makes the case for a Union origination, and a couple weeks ago I asked a local historian, and she said she thought it was a Union installation.

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