Buried at Ellwood is "Stonewall" Jackson left arm. On May 2, 1863, Jackson was wounded by the mistaken fire of his own troops at Chancellorsville. Surgeons removed the injured limb at nearby Wilderness tavern. The following day, Jackson's chaplain Beverley Tucker Lacy, carried the amputated arm across the fields and buried it in his brother's graveyard. It remains here to this day, the only marked grave in the cemetery.
After the Battle of Chancellorsville the house served as a field hospital. By battle's end, Ellwood's floors were stained with blood, its gardens trampled, its fences gone. Graves dotted the grounds. The house's caretakers had been arrested and sent to Old Capitol Prison in Washington. For the next eight years Ellwood would stand vacant used only by occasional squatters.