Battle of the Wilderness • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The display is in the entrance to the Battle of the WIlderness Exhibit Shelter at Tour Stop Two. The Battlefield Becomes a Park is on the reverse side of the marker.
The Wilderness
Dark, Close Wood
The Wilderness of today looks little like the tangled landscape soldiers found here in 1864. For decades before the war, loggers had cut and recut these forests to fuel nearby iron furnaces, leaving behind an impenetrable mix of dead fall, brush and re-emerging growth. Only a few small farmers had dared to seek sustenance here. Their small clearings offered the only relief from what one soldier called “the dark, close wood.”
Military theorists who devised tactics of that era never envisioned waging war through such forbidding terrain. When the armies collided here, they had no time to change tactics. Instead, traditional battle ranks struggled through thickets, unable to see more than a few dozen feet. Lines of blue and gray collided without warning in horrific firefights. The woods burned – the wounded and dead, too. “It is,” one man wrote, “a region of gloom.”
Location of the marker
The marrker is inside the entrance to the Wilderness Battlefield Exhibit Shelter at Tour Stop Two. (38°19’02.8″N 77°45’23.9″W)
(go to the Stop 2 page)
(go to the Battlefield Auto Tour page)