Sunday Scribblings: Fort Hell

The photograph of the left is of Fort Hell during wartime (1864-65). I lifted it off a history teacher resource site. By the time we lived nearby, the woods had returned. Today’s Sunday Scribbling prompt is “town and country” and I recall the three years of my youth in Petersburg, Virginia.
Walnut Hills was in town, but was still partly country when we moved there. I was in the first grade and Kennedy was just about to be shot that fall when my parents purchased the house on Bishop Street. Petersburg’s suburbs were expanding outward and it was then considered a nice neighborhood, not as rich as those who lived in the big homes along Sycamore Street, but a good place to be a kid. Behind our house was an alley; across it was another row of houses and the last street. Behind those houses were woods that stretched all the way back to Carter Road. On Saturdays, my friends and I would play Johnny Reb in these woods, covering the same terrain our ancestors fought over a hundred years earlier during that final bloody year of the Civil War. At the Crater Road turn off into our subdivision was a genuine civil war fort operated as a private museum. Folks who attended our church owned it but I don’t remember their name. However, I’ll never forget the name of the fort. Fort Hell it was called; although its real name was Fort Sedgwick. When my uncle Frank came to visit, he asked me why they called it Fort Hell and I said “‘cause they really gave the Yankees hell.” I only vaguely remember saying that, and maybe I don’t really remember saying it, instead just remember Frank reminding me of it as he did for the umpteenth time last summer at a family reunion. I later learned that it wasn’t a Southern fort after all, but a part of the Union siege line and at the time was the largest inland artillery battery in the country. In the summer of ’66, after three years of roaming those woods, we moved back to North Carolina. It was just the nick of time for they were cutting down trees and laying out roads through the woods and the people who owned Fort Hell had sold it earlier that spring to developers who immediately bulldozed the bombproof shelters that had been dug by hand a hundred years earlier. They built a strip mall. By the time we left, there was no more country in Walnut Hills.

Other Stuff: How did that 60s song go? “I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know what I’ll come back too…” We’ll maybe that’s not the exact lyrics, but I am leaving and ain’t exactly sure what I might come back to find. I’m heading down south to recharge my accent and am going to leave Nevada Jack in charge of a special birthday party that will start tomorrow morning and run all week. Do drop in!