Bel Air

Bel Air. "When it will end God only knows". , During the Battle of Front Royal, teenage sisters Lucy and Nellie Buck sat on the porch of Bel Air, the stately home 500 feet in front of you, offering water to thirsty Confederate soldiers as cannon shells crashed to the ground nearby. Lucy witnessed "One shell whistling over the house ... another exploding in the barn, a third striking the mill," but wrote, "I did not feel the least fear.", Born in 1842, Lucy Buck kept a detailed diary of her wartime experiences at Bel Air, chronicling both tranquil periods of domestic life, music end games, reading and sewing, socializing and flirting, and the frequent times of occupation, battle, and crushing anxiety., Front Royal changed hands often during the war, and troops of both sides visited Bel Air and camped in the fields around the house. The ardently pro-Confederate Bucks welcomed southern visitors with open arms, and Federals with distrust and disgust., The most famous guest was Robert E. Lee, who visited on July 22, 1863, during his army's retreat after Gettysburg. Lee drank buttermilk, charmed the girls with his "warm, fatherly manner," and asked them to sing "a Rebel song.", Lucy paused writing from September 21, 1864, to February 13, 1865. "My diary was laid by," she wrote when she resumed. "Those sad autumn days my heart too sad... I had not the spirit to write... I'm a different being from what I was then... When it will end God only knows." Her wartime diary ended on April 15, 1865, shortly after Lee's surrender at Appomattox., "[I] spent the greater part of the day up at the window, reading, and spying." , Lucy Buck, May 8, 1862, (captions) , Lucy and Nellie Buck Courtesy Dr. William Pettus Buck , Bell Air just after the war. - Courtesy Warren Historical Society