Qualla: Richmond National Battlefield Park

Richmond National Battlefield Park: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hal Jespersen at en.wikipedia, Public domain. There is no single Richmond battlefield. The fighting that swirled around the Confederate capital for four years happened across so much ground - so many creeks, hills, river bends, and small farms - that the National Park Service eventually had to gather it all into one park made of thirteen separate pieces. Together they cover more than 3,600 acres in the coastal plain of Virginia, bounded roughly by the watersheds of the James and the Chickahominy. Some of it preserves the Confederate manufacturing heart at Tredegar Iron Works. Some of it preserves the largest military hospital site of the war at Chimborazo. The rest is battlefields, where green meadows and old-growth forest hide entrenchments, redoubts, and the still-shapeless ground where tens of thousands of men were killed or maimed in the long, grinding effort to take Richmond - or to keep it.

Image: Hal Jespersen at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Richmond National Battlefield Park: Why Richmond Was Worth Four Years

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Frear, Public domain. Virginia voted to secede in May 1861. Richmond was chosen as the Confederate capital almost immediately - partly for symbolic reasons, partly because the city was already the South's most important manufacturing center. The Tredegar Iron Works, founded in 1837 on the north bank o...

Image: Richard Frear | Public domain

Richmond National Battlefield Park: Chimborazo Hospital and the Care of the Wounded

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Frear, Public domain. Chimborazo Hospital sat on a hill east of downtown Richmond - one of the city's "seven hills," named for a volcano in Ecuador. At its peak, the hospital cared for up to 4,000 patients at a time and treated more than 76,000 wounded Confederate soldiers over the course of the war. ...

Image: Richard Frear | Public domain

Richmond National Battlefield Park: The Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hal Jespersen, Public domain. George McClellan's first attempt on Richmond came in spring 1862 - the Peninsula Campaign, an amphibious approach up the James and York rivers. He got within four miles of the city before being checked. At Drewry's Bluff, Confederate gunners on a high river bend hammered Union gu...

Image: Hal Jespersen | Public domain

Richmond National Battlefield Park: The Overland Campaign and the Siege

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Frear, Public domain. Two years later, in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant made the second great attempt. The Overland Campaign opened in the Wilderness and ground south through Spotsylvania Court House. At Totopotomoy Creek - protected today as a park unit including the Shelton House at Rural Plains - Grant tr...

Image: Richard Frear | Public domain

Richmond National Battlefield Park: What You Can Still See

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Stierch, CC BY-SA 2.0. Richmond National Battlefield Park is unusual among Civil War parks for how scattered it is. There is no single grand vista like Gettysburg's Little Round Top or Vicksburg's hilltop. Instead the park is a network: the Tredegar Iron Works downtown, Chimborazo Hospital on its hill,...

Image: Sarah Stierch | CC BY-SA 2.0