Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 2.

[436] to Major-general Alfred H. Terry, then in command at Richmond, he kindly furnished us with every facility for an exploration of the battle-grounds in that vicinity. He placed his carriage and four horses at our disposal for several days; and we had competent guides as well as most genial companions in Colonels Martin, Graves, and Sullivan, of General Terry's Staff, who had participated in the stirring military events between Old Point Comfort and Richmond.

Our first trip was made on a wet day, which gave us a realizing sense of that “altogether abnormal” state of the season of which the commander of the Army of the Potomac wrote, four years before, when waiting for fairer

Mechanicsville.

skies and drier earth to permit him to take. Richmond. We rode out to Mechanicsville, passing through the lines of heavy fortifications constructed by the Confederates along the brow of a declivity, on the verge of a plain that overlooked the Chickahominy. We passed that stream and the swamps that border it (see picture on page 419) without difficulty, and were soon in Mechanicsville a hamlet of a few houses, seated around a group of magnificent oak trees, which bear many scars of battle. At Mechanisville we turned in the direction of Cool Arbor, passing and sketching Ellison's Mill, and the battle-ground around it. A little farther on we came to a beautiful open wood, mostly of hickory trees, in which was the Walnut Grove Church, a neat wooden structure, painted white, wherein the wounded of both parties in the strifes in that vicinity had found shelter from sun and storm.

Soon after passing the ruins of Gaines's Mills (see picture on page 424), a

Walnut Grove Church.

little farther eastward, we found the country nearly level, and almost denuded of the forests that covered a large portion of it before the war. Now it had the desolate appearance of a moorland. Not a fence was visible over a space of many miles. As we approached the site of the New Cool Arbor tavern, we came to the heavy works thrown up by the Confederates at a later period of the war, and saw between these and others, constructed by the Nationals, a mile farther on, in the scarred and broken