Brandy Station Group Takes Charge of St. James Church

By Deborah Fitts

Feb/Mar 2006

BRANDY STATION, Va. — The site of St. James Church, a 2-acre parcel that was a focus of fighting in the war’s greatest cavalry battle, is now under the control of the Brandy Station Foundation (BSF).

The vestry members of Christ Episcopal Church, located nearby in the village of Brandy Station, signed a lease in December with the foundation, giving it responsibility for the property and the right to maintain and interpret the wooded plot.

The small brick church was completely dismantled by scavenging soldiers during the winter encampment of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station in 1863-64. Christ Episcopal, the successor church, owns the parcel but “the vestry is no longer able to take care of it,” said BSF President Bob Luddy. “We offered to help them out and they responded with the lease.”

BSF will pay $1 a year for five years, with the possibility of renewal. Luddy said plans include removing fallen trees, clearing brush and poison ivy, building trails and signage, and adding some fencing. There are more than 60 graves on the property.

“The church will be treated with all the respect it deserves, while visitors will be able to appreciate the panorama and all the drama of what happened there,” Luddy said.

On the morning of June 9, 1863, Confederate commander J.E.B. Stuart deployed several batteries of horse artillery, anchored on St. James Church, to stem a federal assault. A doomed, 800-yard charge by Union troopers into the teeth of the guns was viewed by some witnesses as among the most stirring events of the war.

The church property lies in the middle of battlefield land preserved by the Civil War Preservation Trust, which has a visitor parking lot near the right flank of the horse artillery line.

“If you consider,” said Luddy, “that the church anchored the left of Jeb Stuart’s artillery, holding back the full onslaught that morning, and the Trust parking lot is at the right, I think we have the possibility of offering visitors the best perspective of that portion of the battlefield we’ve ever had.”

He said the notion of the lease was born out of a ceremony at the church site last summer, when descendants of a Confederate cavalryman gathered on the parcel.

The name of Sgt. Allen Bowman of the 12th Virginia Cavalry had been deciphered on a wall in BSF’s Graffiti House. An AP story mentioning the name reached descendants of Bowman in North Carolina, who have since made repeated visits to Brandy Station.

Bowman They said their ancestor returned home from the war to the Shenandoah Valley with a bayonet that he beat into a hoe blade and used to till his garden.

Eventually a member of the family turned up the hoe “in the back of one of their garages,” Luddy said. They presented it to BSF officials in a ceremony at the St. James Church property that attracted about 45 people.

The church members “were impressed with the entire atmosphere” of the event, Luddy recalled. With the compelling combination of church property, burial ground and battlefield, “We recognized that it truly was hallowed ground. It is an area that needs to be treated with certain respect.”