By Tom Perry
Every spring, as I ride through Ararat, Virginia, I remember my mother because it seems that every one of our former neighbors has a blast of yellow in their yard. The forsythia blooming up and down the road comes from clippings of my grandfather, Floyd Thomas Hobbs. He brought clippings from his home at 1815 Fenwick Street in Augusta, Georgia, where my mother grew up. She lived just a few miles from Augusta National Golf Club and received free tickets to The Masters golf tournament every year because she worked for Georgia-Pacific. She met my father, who was stationed at Fort Gordon in the United States Army, just outside the Garden City of Georgia. They were married in 1957 and came to Ararat in 1959, where he began teaching at Blue Ridge High School, and she went to work for Dr. Tuledge.
If you ride by the entrance to the Laurel Hill Farm, the birthplace of J. E. B. Stuart, this time of year, you will notice the blast of yellow as my mother’s forsythia dominates the scene. My mother spent many happy hours planting flowers at Laurel Hill, and almost all of the flowers there today she planted came from my grandfather’s home in Georgia. He was a car mechanic by trade who helped build ships in Savannah during World War II. His hobby was flowers, and the small lot around his and my grandmother, Elizabeth Prescott Hobbs, was a blaze of color from azaleas to roses to the aforementioned forsythia. With the Masters golf tournament being played this week, I thought it was appropriate to make a connection to Stuart’s Birthplace.
I asked my mother once why the forsythia at Stuart’s Birthplace, and she looked at me like I knew nothing about history. “Yellow! Yellow for the cavalry.” My mother had been watching too many John Wayne movies, but she knew about J. E. B. Stuart’s role in the United States and Confederate States armies.
One of my favorite movies is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford, from 1949. Part of Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, the film is one of Wayne’s best performances, in which he plays a much older man than he was at the time.
“Yellow is the Cavalry branch color. The song ‘Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon’, tracing back centuries but copyrighted by George A. Norton in 1917.”
“Round her neck she wore a yellow ribbon
She wore it in the winter and the merry month of May
When I asked her, ‘Why the yellow ribbon?’
She said, ‘It’s for my lover who is in the Cavalry’
Cavalry (Cavalry), Cavalry (Cavalry)
She said, ‘It’s for my lover who is in the Cavalry’
Cavalry (Cavalry), Cavalry (Cavalry)
She said, ‘It’s for my lover in the U.S. Cavalry’”.
“Yellow is the traditional branch color of the U.S. Cavalry, officially established in 1855, representing the cavalry’s historic roots in mounted, horse-bound combat, speed, and reconnaissance. It signifies high-mobility elite troops, distinguishing them from infantry (blue) and artillery (red) in military heraldry. Historically, yellow was used for hat cords, scarves, and trousers stripes (some times called the “blood stripe”) worn by cavalrymen. The ‘yellow ribbon’ tradition, associated with waiting for loved ones to return home, has roots in the 19th-century practice of cavalrymen and their sweethearts.”
In more modern times, the Tony Orlando song “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Around The Old Oak Tree reached #1 in April 1973, and was a song that you heard often in the Iraq War of the early 1990s and the Iranian Hostage crisis of 1979-80.
So, bringing yellow flowers full circle back to Laurel Hill. The day after J. E. B. Stuart died on May 13, 1864, Friday the thirteenth, they held a wake for Stuart at the Charles Brewer Home on Grace Street. Brewer like Stuart was married to one of Philip St. George Cooke’s daughters. Among those recounted in the book The Pattons by Robert H. Patton was George S. Patton, who lost his life in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign that same year of 1864. “George put on his best uniform and went to pay his respects, taking his son with him. A hushed crowd of soldiers and citizens filed slowly into the house. Mourners passed in silence before the billiard table on which Stuart was laid out. The white sheet draped over his legs and torso was smooth as marble and contrasted vividly with his wiry red beard. He can’t be dead. People like that do no die. The boy breathed the scent of flowers as he left the house. Yellow roses were in bloom outside the door, and it would be this, the scent of yellow roses in the spring that for the rest of his life would remind him of that day. The father could offer no more eloquent comment on the occasion than the fact he wanted his son to witness it. But after that day, the phrase, “our glorious struggle” was absent from his letters. The war, its outcome ever more apparent became a grim obligation of honor.”
Eight-year-old George Smith Patton never forgot the scene and, no doubt, told his son, World War II General George S. Patton, about it.
