By Tom Perry
The past two years, I have been asked to speak at Yellow Tavern, the site of the mortal wounding of J. E. B. Stuart just north of Richmond on the Telegraph Road. Today, there is a marker at the site of the wounding. Sadly, the battlefield has been destroyed by development, with Interstates 95 and 295, along with Route 1, coming together within sight of where James Ewell Brown Stuart fought his last battle. I was reminded of one of the many men who followed the plume of Stuart during the War Between the States.
W. W. Blackford wrote in his book War Years With JEB Stuart that a white cross was erected at the site of Stuart’s wounding at Yellow Tavern. “I had a large cross sixteen feet high made of cedar with the inscription cut on it in neat large letters,’ Here fell Gen J. E. B. Stuart, May 11, 1864.’” The present day marker at Yellow Tavern was placed in 1888 by the men who served under Stuart.
William Willis Blackford was born on March 23, 1831, in Fredericksburg, the second of six sons and third of eight children of William Mathews Blackford and Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford. In 1845, the family moved to Lynchburg. Blackford continued his education and then worked on railroad construction survey crews for three years, saving enough money to study engineering at the University of Virginia for the academic year 1849–1850. Blackford worked as a civil engineer during the construction of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad and served as acting chief engineer upon its completion.
On January 10, 1856, he married Mary Trigg Robertson, of Richmond. Of their four daughters and three sons, two daughters and one son died in infancy. Between his marriage and the outbreak of the Civil War, Blackford and his wife moved to Washington County, where he became a partner with his father-in-law, former governor Wyndham Robertson, in a mining operation near Abingdon.
After John Brown raided Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Blackford organized the Washington Mounted Rifles as part of the county militia and was elected lieutenant. Although opposed to secession, he led his company into Confederate service in July 1861 as part of the 1st Virginia Cavalry, under the command of James Ewell Brown Stuart. Blackford served as Stuart’s aide-de-camp and, on October 3, 1861, was promoted to captain.
Blackford rode with Stuart’s cavalry in every major engagement of the War except Chancellorsville (1863). He was wounded twice and had at least three horses killed under him. On January 19, 1864, Blackford was promoted to major of engineers, and on April 1, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After Stuart’s death on May 12, 1864, Blackford supervised the digging of shafts and tunnels to detect Union attempts to place subterranean mines under Confederate emplacements. He surrendered in April 1865 at Appomattox.
After the war, Blackford worked as chief engineer for the Lynchburg and Danville Railroad. His wife died in 1866, after which he and his children moved to Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where he operated a sugar plantation that his father-in-law had given him. A flood in 1874 destroyed much of the property, and Blackford returned to Virginia.
From 1880 to 1882, he was professor of mechanics and drawing at the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (later Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) at Blacksburg. He also served as superintendent of grounds and buildings, landscaping the campus. He developed a plan for the campus that many Boards of Visitors and Presidents followed, effectively laying out the campus that is today Virginia Tech.
Between 1882 and 1890, Blackford worked as a construction engineer for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and on the construction of a rail-road between Lynchburg and Durham, North Carolina. Blackford then retired and moved to Princess Anne County, where he died on May 1, 1905, and was buried in Sinking Spring Cemetery in Abingdon.
William Willis Blackford might be the most influential of those who followed the plum of J. E. B. Stuart. Blackford wrote War Years With Jeb Stuart, which was published in 1945 under the influence of Douglas Southall Freeman. In one of the more famous accounts in that book, Blackford writes about how he and Stuart were nearly captured by some of George Custer’s men at Hanover, Pennsylvania, before Gettysburg in 1863.
“Stuart pulled up and, waving his sabre with a merry laugh, shouted to me, ‘Rally them, Blackford!’ and then lifted his mare, Virginia, over the hedge into the field. I knew that he only said what he did to let me know that he was off, so I followed him. I had only that morning, fortunately, mounted Magic, having had her led previously, and Stuart had done the same with Virginia, so they were fresh. As we alighted in the field, we found ourselves within ten paces of the front of a flanking party of twenty-five or thirty men which was accompanying the charging regiment, and they called to us to halt ; but as we let our two thoroughbreds out, they followed in hot pursuit, firing as fast as they could cock their pistols. The field was in tall timothy grass and we did not see, nor did our horses until close to it, a huge gully fifteen feet wide and as many deep stretched across our path. There were only a couple of strides of distance for our horses to regulate their step, and Magic had to rise at least six feet from the brink. Stuart and myself were riding side by side and as soon as Magic rose I turned my head to see how Virginia had done it, and I shall forget the glimpse I then saw of this beautiful animal away up in mid-air over the chasm and Stuart’s fine figure sitting erect and firm in the saddle.”
