When
Brigadier-General Herman Haupt was put in charge of all the railroads centering in
Washington in 1861 his first care was to safeguard them as far as possible from the destructive Confederate raiders.
He built a stockade around the machine shops and yard of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, with blockhouses at the points most vulnerable to raiders.
The citizens of
Alexandria, terrified by their exposed position across the
Potomac close to the battlefield of
Bull Run, entrenched themselves as best they could, before the great forts about them were completed.
The lower view is looking up
Duke Street from Pioneer Mill.
The heavy stockade, inside the city, suggests how acute were the apprehensions of its inhabitants.
The barrier is solid enough to stop a cavalry charge, with the big gates closed.
A couple of field pieces, however, could batter it down in short order.
Later in the war, such stockades as this would have been built with twenty-five feet of earth banked up in front of them.
After the hurried preparations shown in the photograph, the tide of war rolled away into
southern Virginia.
The stockade for a while remained as a memento of a passing fear.
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A stockade in the street |
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