The Wilderness
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The Battlefield Becomes a Park

The Wilderness, also, The Battlefield Becomes a Park. . , The Wilderness , Dark, Close Wood , The Wilderness of today looks little like the tangled landscape soldiers found here in 1864. For decades before the war, loggers had cut and recut these forests to fuel nearby iron furnaces, leaving behind an impenetrable mix of dead fall, brush and re-emerging growth. Only a few small farmers had dared to seek sustenance here. Their small clearings offered only relief from what one soldier called “the dark, close wood.”, Military theorists who devised tactics of that era never envisioned waging war through such forbidding terrain. When the armies collided here, they had no time to change tactics. Instead, traditional battle ranks struggled through thickets, unable to see more than a few dozen feet. Lines of blue and gray collided without warning in horrific firefights. The woods burned – the wounded and dead, too. “It is,” one man wrote, “a region of gloom.”, The Battlefield Becomes a Park , The four battlefields located in Fredericksburg and neighboring counties comprise the bloodiest ground in all of North America. Yet early efforts to create a national military park at Fredericksburg went down to defeat in Congress. That changed in 1921 when General Smedley D. Butler brought 4,200 Marines to the Wilderness Battlefield. For five days the soldiers took part in what one newspaper called “the most gigantic mimic and maneuvers ever staged by the U.S. Marine Corps.”, President Warren G. Harding attended the exercise and spent two days visiting with the troops. The event attracted national attention and renewed cries for the creation of a national military park. This time Congress responded favorably. On February 13, 1927, it established Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Today this is one of the largest military parks in the world, encompassing four battlefields where more than 100,000 Americans fell.