Qualla: Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia)

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of December 13, 1862, a 24-year-old Alabama artillery officer named John Pelham brought a single battery of two guns down from Hamilton's Crossing to a point just south of an old plantation house called Smithfield. From that low rise he opened fire at a glancing angle into the flank of an entire Union division marching south to attack Stonewall Jackson's line. Pelham's commanders ordered him to withdraw. He refused. He kept firing until his casualties left the guns nearly silent, by which time he had stalled the Union advance for almost an hour. Robert E. Lee would later refer to him as the gallant Pelham. The house behind him, then a Brooke family residence, is now the clubhouse of the Fredericksburg Country Club.

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): Charles II's Grant

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The land that became Smithfield was first held under a 1671 grant of about 5,000 acres from Charles II of England to Major Lawrence Smith of Gloucester County. The Algonquian-speaking peoples who fished the Rappahannock had lived on and around the property for generations before ...

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): The 1822 House

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Pratt of Caroline County bought Smithfield in 1814. The original Brooke dwelling burned down shortly after, and by 1822 Pratt had built the brick mansion that still stands. The Pratt family held the property through the rest of the nineteenth century. During the Battle of Fr...

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): Pelham's Stand

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most dramatic moment on Smithfield's ground belonged to John Pelham, the young West Point graduate who commanded the Stuart Horse Artillery. As the Union division of George Meade began its advance toward Jackson's line, Pelham positioned two guns - a Napoleon and a Blakely ri...

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): Mannsfield Hall and the Country Club

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1905 Captain Reginald Henley Conroy Vance of New York bought Smithfield and added the wings and white columns that give the house its present face. The work was done by architects William Penn Cresson and Nathan C. Wyeth - the same Wyeth who would later design the Oval Office ...

Smithfield Plantation (Fredericksburg, Virginia): What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1822 mansion still anchors the property. From the air the country club reads as a broad green park stretched along the Rappahannock four miles south of downtown Fredericksburg, the brick clubhouse white-columned at its center, the golf course wrapping it on three sides. The 5...