Petersburg National Battlefield

Perhaps I had just gotten myself a bit too psyched up for this one.

I had read about the Battle of the Crater, where Union forces had secretly tunneled beneath Confederate lines, packed the whole thing full of explosives and detonated it. The resulting blast shook the ground violently. Huge pillars of debris sprang up into the air. Men and equipment were thrown around violently. As a direct result of the blast, 268 men were killed, two cannons, weighing in excess of 1000 pounds each were tossed effortlessly into the distance.

The blast left a crater nearly 300 feet long, over 100 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.

Following the confusion of the blast, Union soldiers attacked Confederate positions. Not thinking, many of them jumped into the crater where they became trapped, easy targets for Confederate soldiers.

The battle was brutal and bloody. It created an amazing story, one of the stories of Civil War battles that I find most intriguing of all.

The unfortuate thing is that seeing the actral crater itself was so anticlimactic. The crater has filled in over the years through natural sloughing off due to erosion and perhaps other factores as well. The once might crater now looks like little more than a low spot in the lawn. It is a mere shadow of its former once-great self.

I’ll arrive in the Richmond area on Monday afternoon. My meeting is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. My plan is to zip down see the Petersburg Battlefield first thing in the morning, and have a look around. I can then hurry back up to my hotel, change clothes, grab some lunch and make it to my meeting.

I was always amazed at the story of tunneling under the city and trying to blow it up. I figure that as long as I’m this close, and have a prime opportunity, I need to take advantage of it. I’m eager to learn more about it and to see what is left of the crater.