Battle of Chancellorsville • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The ruins of the Chancellor House are at Stop 3 on the Chancellorsville Battlefield Auto Tour.
George Chancellor had opened a tavern at this spot in 1816 after the completion of the Orange Turnpike. George died in the 1830’s and his widow in 1860, but Chancellorsville still dominated the intersection. It was a single large two and a half story brick building. A seventy acre clearing west of the Inn was the largest in the Wilderness.
Fannie Pound Chancellor, the widow of George’s brother, was living at Chancellorsville in 1863 with her young son and six unmarried daughters. This had made Chancellorsville a popular destination for the young beaus of Lee’s Army. But the Federals who occupied the house for General Hooker’s headquarters during the battle found the residents (and several local neighbors who had taken refuge there) to be “not at all abashed or intimidated, scolded audibly and reviled bitterly.”
The main entry steps to the Chancellorsville Inn
Not everyone scorned the Federals. The building caught fire from Confederate artillery in the fierce fighting of May 3. Union Colonel Joesph Dickinson, one of General Hooker’s staff, led the sixteen civilians from their shelter in the cellar and escorted them through the artillery barrage to safety. Colonel Dickinson shepherded his flock safely to United States Ford before wishing them godspeed and turning them over to a chaplain. Fourteen year old Sue Chancellor had seen her family piano used as an operating table. She walked past piles of amputated limbs in the yard outside before looking back one last time to see her home “completely enveloped in flames.” She had nothing but praise for Dickinson, writing, “A nobler, braver, kindlier gentleman never lived.”**
*Stephen Sears, Chancellorsville, p. 178
** Ibid. p. 360
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