Battle of Spotsylvania • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The Landram House and Farm to Killing Field wayside markers are on the walking trail to Landram House about 830 yards from the parking area of Stop 3.
The Landram House wayside marker
The photo looks northeast to the site of the Landrum House.
Text from the marker:
The Landram House
The rubble of two chimneys is all that remains of Willis Landram’s modest farmhouse, a building destroyed in the 1864 battle. The 65-year-old Landram, his wife Lucy, and five other family members chiseled a life of bare essentials from 170 acres. They raised wheat, corn, and potatoes. Five cows produced milk and 200 pounds of butter a year; two oxen plowed the fields; seven sheep gave the Landrams 20 pounds of wool each season; four pigs provided bacon and pork.
The unremarkable existence of the Landrams ended with the arrival of the armies in May 1864. Confederates ripped the staircase from the house to build nearby earthworks. Union generals used the building as a headquarters. When the family returned, only the walls and chimneys of their home remained. Earthworks scarred their fields, feathers from pillows and featherbeds covered the ground, and 28 Union soldiers lay buried in the yard. It would take the family years to reclaim a life shattered by just a few hours of combat.
Caption to the painting:
The Landrams lived a life typical of many Spotsylvanians – occupying a four-room house, producing their own food, and generating extra income with a few cash crops, as shown in this artist’s conception. Unlike many of their neighbors, the Landrams did not own slaves.
Farm to Killing Field wayside marker
The photo looks south from the Landram House trail toward the Confederate positions of the Muleshoe, which were in front of the treeline in the distance.
Text from the marker:
Farm to Killing Field
On May 12, 1864, the pastures, potato patches, and crop-lots of Willis Landram’s farm would become North America’s most notorious killing field. Just before dawn, 20,000 Union soldiers swarmed past the Landram house toward the main Confederate line on the ridge in front of you. The sudden Union attack triggered a day of carnage – a 22-hour struggle for control of the Muleshoe Salient.
Throughout the day, Union generals gathered near this spot to watch and direct the fighting. Union artillerymen built powerful earthworks that still stand in the woods to your right-rear and lobbed shells into the Confederate lines, 500 yards away. General Winfield Scot Hancock, commander of the Union Second Corps, made his headquarters in the Landram house. By day’s end, Willis Landram’s farm had been transformed. Wrote one soldier, “May God in his mercy never again permit us to behold such a field of carnage and death.”
Caption to the drawing:
Artist Alfred Waud sketched this view, used as the background of the marker, of the Bloody Angle fighting from a point near the Landram house. Generals Winfield Hancock and Horatio Wright confer near the center of the image. General Francis Barlow, whose division led the May 12 assault, is seated in a chair to their left.
