Manassas National Battlefield Park- African American Presence

Generations of enslaved people trod and tilled the soil now preserved in Manassas National Battlefield Park, and a free black man owned a farm there during the Civil War. Parts of six slaveholding plantations—Brownsville, Hazel Plain, Peach Grove, Pittsylvania, Portici, and Rosefield—once occupied the parkland. By 1860, however, eighteen percent of African Americans in Prince William County were free. James Robinson, freeborn in 1799 and relatively prosperous, bought a 170-acre parcel of land along Warrenton Turnpike by 1840. He and his family lived there in July 1861 as troops gathered for the First Battle of Manassas. James’s grown son Tasco escorted his mother, wife, and children to the neighboring Van Pelt house where they hoped to find shelter in its cellar. Tasco Robinson later recalled, “Our house was like between the lines and the shells were falling all around it.” James Robinson, separated from his family, took cover under the bridge spanning Young’s Branch.

The Robinson house in March 1862. (Courtesy Manassas National Battlefield Park)

During Second Manassas, in August 1862, the Robinson’s home became a Union Army field hospital, with about 100 soldiers “packed in the room and yard as thick as sardines,” according to a Confederate reporter. Robinson and other local farmers saw their crops ruined, their fences destroyed, their livestock and household goods gone. The battle lingered in the soil and air; Oswald Robinson’s great-aunts smoked long-stemmed clay pipes to “smother the stench of bodies.” In his application for reimbursement from the federal government, James Robinson detailed $2,608 of loss. By the 1880s, the family added substantially to their home. They removed the original 1840s portion during a major renovation in 1926. An arson fire in 1993 severely damaged the remaining structure. The foundation remains. Another African American family, that of Philip Nash, lived nearby during the 1870s and 1880s. Archaeologists have studied both sites.

Resources

• Manassas National Battlefield Park. African-American Households from Manassas National Battlefield Park.
• Matthew B. Reeves. “Reinterpreting Manassas: The Nineteenth-Century African American Community at Manassas National Battlefield Park.” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 3 (2003): 124-137.
• Linda Sargent Wood. “Coming to Manassas: Peace, War, and the Making of a Virginia Community.” Historic resource study of Manassas National Battlefield Park, Manassas, Virginia. National Park Service, 2005. Quotations on page 91 and 108.

Interest-African American, Prince William County, >African-American, >AF Prince Willaim County