Battle of the Wilderness • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The markers are on the loop walking trail at Stop Eight, at the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road.
On to Richmond! wayside marker
Text from the marker:
On to Richmond!
Before the Wilderness, battlefield stalemate meant retreat by one side or the other – a return to the starting point to try again another day. But not here. Union General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant rendered stalemate in the Wilderness irrelevant. On the night of May 7, 1864 as the woods around you still smoldered, Grant ordered the Union army not backward, but forward – south toward Spotsylvania Court House and eventually Richmond.
As Union soldiers quietly left the earthworks in front of you, they realized a turning point had arrived. And when later that night Grant rode among them, they cheered. They cheered not because Grant had won, but because he refused to lose. For the Union army, eleven months of non-stop campaigning – and ultimately victory – lay ahead.
Wild cheers echoed through the forest, and glad shouts of triumph rent the air. Men swung their hats, tossed up their arms, and pressed forward to within touch of their chief, clapping their hands, and speaking to him with the familiarity of comrades ….The night march had become a triumphal procession for the new commander.
-Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter,
Union staff officer
No Turning Back wayside marker
Text from the marker:
No Turning Back
When the armies departed the Wilderness, they left behind a disfigured landscape. Trenches twisted like earthen snakes through the woods, and blackened leaves marked the paths of fires. Along the Brock Road, noted one soldier, trees “were scarred by bullets from their roots to their tops, and in great spaces the whole tops were mown down by bullets as with a scythe.”
Corpses, too, littered the landscape. “Thousands of men were dead and wounded,” wrote one officer, “and that vast wilderness was one great cemetery and hospital for both armies.” The Army of the Potomac suffered more than 17,600 casualties in the two-day fight; Confederate losses exceeded 11,000. Although some of the dead received hasty burials, many bodies remained untouched until the following year. A few would remain for years.
Location of the markers
The markers are along the half mile loop trail that begins on the south side of the parking area along Orange Plank Road. (38°18’03.8″N 77°42’32.3″W)