Battle of the Wilderness • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The monument to Union General James Wadsworth is on the north side of Orange Plank Road about 450 feet east of the intersection with Hill-Ewell Drive. It is between Stops 6 and 7 on the Auto Tour, and has its own small pull-off on the north side of busy Orange Plank Road.
James Samuel Wadsworth was a wealthy landowner from Geneseo, New York who devoted his life to public service. A Free Soil Republican, at the start of the Civil War he offered himself to the Union cause.
Wadsworth served as a volunteer aid at the First Battle of Bull Run and worked his way up to division command. At Gettysburg he commanded the First Division of the First Corps in its stand nothwest of the town on the first day. When the First Corps was consolidated to a division and made part of the Fifth Corps in March of 1864 Wadsworth was kept as division commander in spite of not having a West Point background.
General Wadsworth is also honored by a monument and statue on the Gettysburg battlefield, where he commanded a division of the First Corps in a heroic stand northwest of town on the first day of the battle.
 |
Commander of the 5th Corps, 4th Division |  |
Text from the monument:
James S. Wadsworth
Brigadier General and Brevet Major
General United States Volunteers
commanding the 4th Division
V Corps Army of the Potomac
was mortally wounded near this spot
May 6, 1864 and died two days later
in the field hospital of Hill’s
Confederate Corps.
He fell attempting desperately to
resist a Confederate advance which
threatened the strategic Plank-
Brock Road intersection.
Map and directions to the monument
The monument to Union Brevet Major General James Wadsworth on the Wilderness Battlefield is on the north side of Orange Plank Road about 0.1 mile northeast of Hill-Ewell Drive. (38°18’17.0″N 77°42’33.8″W)