Tour the Five Forks Battlefield

Five Forks • Tour the Battlefield • Battle Facts • The Armies • Battle Maps
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Visitor Center • Stop 1 • Stop 2 • Stop 3 • Stop 4 • Stop 5

Start your tour at the Visitor Contact Center. Following the tour stops in order roughly follows the timeline of the battle. Each tour stop has a paved parking area. Several are trailheads for walking trails throughout the park.

Five Forks battlefield tour map

Select any of the following to go to its page and view the monuments and markers at that location:

Visitor Contact Center
Tour Stop 1 – Union Cavalry Attacks
Tour Stop 2 – The Angle
Tour Stop 3 – Five Forks Intersection
Tour Stop 4 – Final Stand
Tour Stop 5 – Crawford’s Sweep

After the war the strategic Five Forks intersection returned to its relaxed rural nature. Only seventeen miles from where commercial development around Petersburg completely obliterated Fort Sedgwick and Fort Magruder, at Five Forks hardly a structure was erected on the battlefield in the century after the war.

The area was designated a Registered National Historic Landmark in 1961 and a small monument was placed at the intersection to let the world know. On the one hundredth anniversary of the battle in 1965 the Dinwiddie Civil War Centennial Commission erected a statue dedicated to all soldiers North and South who took park in the battle. Along with the wooden marker commemorating the death of William Pegram, these are the only monuments on the battlefield today.

In 1990 the area became part of the Petersburg National Battlefield Park. A handful of of wayside markers have been placed to help interpret the battlefield, but for the most part what the visitor sees today is little changed from what you might have seen just before Pickett’s men began throwing up defensive positions in 1865.