NPS To Build Facility At Five Forks
By Deborah Fitts

PETERSBURG, Va. — After years of planning and the dogged pursuit of funding, officials at Petersburg National Battlefield were scheduled to break ground on March 26 for a new visitor contact station at the Five Forks battlefield. The new facility will be located on Courthouse Road south of the present Five Forks visitor contact station.

Superintendent Bob Kirby predicted completion of the new building by next June.

The 2,400-square-foot structure is designed to resemble “a barn-type building,” but will be largely made of glass. It will provide visitors with an eye-filling view of the surrounding landscape, he said, adding that, “The battlefield tells the story.”

The project will include demolition of the current visitor contact station, a 480-square-foot cinder block former gas station that stands at the Five Forks intersection in the heart of the battlefield. The park staffs the building, which has no running water and offers only a port-a-potty for a bathroom. Visitors must cross busy Courthouse Road to view outdoor exhibit panels, a situation Kirby described as dangerous.

The new facility will be built in a large hayfield that Kirby said was used as a troop staging area but was not “blood-soaked ground.”

Features will include an information desk, small bookstore, restrooms and an indoor exhibit area nearly double the size of the present one. A 1,600-square-foot maintenance building will provide a three-car garage and office.

One park interpreter — and sometimes two — will staff the facility on a daily basis. Kirby hopes there may be more in the future, but he had to commit to running the building without additional staffing. There will be a short film, exhibits and a lighted panel to demonstrate troop movements. Adjoining the new station will be 7.2 miles of 10-foot-wide hiking and horseback trails.

A paved parking area will accommodate 20 cars and three buses or recreational vehicles. An overflow parking area will have 100-vehicle capacity. A total of 2.6 acres will be landscaped to help screen the buildings from the Five Forks intersection, three-quarters of a mile distant.

“We didn’t want to put an intrusion right in the middle of the battlefield,” Kirby explained. He noted that when he arrived at the park in 2001, the plan was to replace the current contact station with a “prefab trailer.”

“I put a stop to that,” he said. “I didn’t want an ugly trailer out there. We began a desperate effort to get funding.” The National Park Service eventually complied, supplying just over $3 million for the project.

The new contact station is part of a park plan to eventually expand to five stations. Currently the park has a visitor center at its main unit, the Five Forks station, and one at old Appomattox Manor at the park’s City Point unit. The park is attempting to acquire the 1854 Southside Railroad depot in downtown Petersburg for a contact station, and plans eventually to have a station at Poplar Grove National Cemetery.

Kirby said the Five Forks battlefield survives with its 1865 landscape of woods and fields largely unchanged from April 1, 1865, when Union troops attacked the Confederate defenders at Five Forks, a rural road intersection that protected the last Southern supply route to Petersburg.

The Federal victory at Five Forks encouraged Union Gen. U.S. Grant to launch attacks along all the defenses of Petersburg and Richmond, resulting in the fall of the Confederate capital and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army on April 9.

Kirby said the significance of the battle at Five Forks helped to make the case for funding the new contact station. “You can say this was the beginning of the end of the Civil War here,” he said.