Before it became a word every American schoolchild learns, Appomattox Court House was simply Clover Hill -- a small stop along the Richmond-to-Lynchburg stagecoach road. When Appomattox County was carved from parts of four neighboring counties and established on February 8, 1845, Clover Hill became its seat of government. Hugh Raine, who owned most of the surrounding land, saw it divided into town lots. A courthouse rose across the Stage Road from the Clover Hill Tavern's stable, with a jail erected behind it. But the village's growth was brief. In 1854, a new railroad bypassed Appomattox Court House entirely, routing through nearby Appomattox Depot instead. Businesses packed up and followed the tracks. The stagecoach route was discontinued. By the time the Civil War reached its doorstep, Appomattox Court House was already a village in decline.

In early April 1865, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was in retreat, pursued relentlessly by Grant's forces. Exhausted, outnumbered, and cut off from supplies, Lee's troops made a final desperate attack at Appomattox Court House on the morning of April 9 -- and failed. That afternoon, Lee, in a crisp dress uniform with a jeweled sword at his side, met Grant, who arrived in a mud-spattered field coat, at the McLean House. The terms Grant offered were generous: Confederate soldiers could go home, officers could keep their sidearms, and any man who claimed a horse or mule could take it for the spring planting. Lee signed. Three days later, on April 12, the Army of Northern Virginia formally laid down its arms and marched away. Though fighting continued elsewhere for weeks, the surrender at Appomattox became the enduring symbol of the war's conclusion.

The war's end brought no revival to Appomattox Court House. The village continued its slow decline. When an 1892 courthouse fire destroyed the county records, officials moved the county seat to the railroad town that had stolen its commerce, now called simply Appomattox. The old village might have vanished entirely had Congress not intervened in 1930, authorizing the War Department to acquire a site for a monument. The National Park Service took over in 1933, and by 1935 the site was enlarged and renamed. Plans to reconstruct the McLean House were delayed by World War II, but in 1949 the restored building opened to visitors. Today the park preserves the village much as it appeared in 1865, with original structures like the Clover Hill Tavern, built in 1819, standing alongside careful reconstructions including the courthouse that now serves as the visitor center.

The park offers both a driving tour and hiking trails that wind through the landscape where the final act of the Civil War played out. Interpretive signs mark the site of Lee's headquarters and the positions of the last artillery pieces fired by Confederate guns. A Confederate cemetery holds the remains of soldiers who fell in those final hours. The rebuilt McLean House parlor has been furnished to evoke that April afternoon -- the small table where Grant drafted his terms, the larger one where Lee reviewed them. Cannons stand in an artillery park along the trail, silent witnesses arranged on ground that once shook with their fire. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966, recognizing a place where a nation's fracture began to mend.