Contraband Hospital and School (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact location where the hospital once stood. Today, the building is now a multi-family residence with retail space on the ground floor.


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Here follows an excerpt from the City of Alexandria website:

Contraband Hospital and School
Two residences at 321-323 S. Washington Street were used as a hospital for Contrabands -- former slaves who made their way to freedom in Union territory.

The two side-by-side residences belonged to two members of the Society of Friends: Elisha Miller, who left Alexandria when the war began, and his brother Robert, who remained in Alexandria but refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union.

As the number of African American former slaves, known as contrabands, grew, health became an issue. Relief workers Julia Wilbur and Harriet Jacobs used part of the building to store clothes and other supplies for them.

In February 1863, Military Governor John Slough ordered one part of the building to be turned into a hospital for contrabands. As reported by Julia Wilbur, getting organized took a while.

On the 26th of February a house was appointed for a hospital and the Provost Marshall ordered it to be immediately recognized as such. On the first of May, no such recognition had been made. A part of these hospital stores had been sent to the small pox hospital, the rest were piled up in this house with the exception of about half a dozen beds, which were occupied by about as many sick women. Up to this time only ten persons, I think, had been brought to this house. Only one, and she an inexperienced woman, was employed to do the work and take care of the sick, and during the two months she was in this house no bed was provided for her and she slept on a blanket on the floor. Piles of beds and bedding, so generously provided by Government, were lying unused, while these poor people, for whom they were intended, were sick and dying in those wretched tenements, with nothing but a few old clothes or a single blanket to lie on.

The surgeon in charge was authorized to fit up a hospital equal to the best military hospitals, and employ competent nurses, &c., and I never heard any good reason why it was not done. The Assistant Surgeon was absent for a time; after his return things assumed a much better shape. The house is now [September? 1863] filled with those for whom it was intended, a competent matron and nurses are employed, and I thank God for the blessed change.

The U.S.A. Hospital for Contrabands, Alexandria, was also known as the Contraband Hospital, Bigelow’s Hospital (after the surgeon in charge), the Colored Hospital, or the Hospital at the corner of Washington and Wolfe Streets. Wilbur continued to complain about conditions and about Dr. Bigelow. In her diary she wrote (May 7, 1863):

“…a loathsome place. Those poor women are dying from neglect. I can hardly be civil to Dr. B”

Originally intended for African American soldiers, it was clear the hospital was not large enough. At that point, L’Ouverture Hospital was built to the northeast of the Contraband Hospital. With the closing of the hospital, the buildings had several uses, including a school for African Americans.

Location and the Site Today
The building still stands today at 321-323 S. Washington Street. It is now a multi-family residence with retail space on the ground floor. Shop windows have been added to the buildings and a doorway has been moved.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Out of the Attic" column in the Alexandria Times newspaper:

Two homes key in Alexandria’s Contraband history
Alexandria Times, March 23, 2017

Two o matching residences located at 321 and 323 S. Washington St., and now used for commercial purposes, played an important role in Civil War Alexandria and in the emergence of racial tolerance in what, before the war, was one of America’s largest slave trading ports.

Although the homes were built as mirror images of one another, as compared in the black and white and colors images taken about 1864 and 2015, respectively, they appeared as one large dwelling with symmetrical fenestration and architectural details.

When the war broke out, they housed two Quaker brothers of the Miller family — Elisha, who left Alexandria when Union troops arrived, and Robert, who remained in the city but refused to swear the required oath of allegiance to the United States.

Due to the large size of the structure, its strategic location on Washington Street, and the questionable loyalties of the brothers, Union authorities confiscated the homes to house relief workers and to store goods and supplies for nearly hospitals, including the Lyceum and Downtown Baptist Church Hospital.

Two women who lived at the site included Julia Wilbur, a social reformer from Rochester, N.Y., and Harriett Jacobs, a former slave who became an influential nurse and writer.

In 1863, military Gov. John Slough ordered that one of the two houses be converted into a hospital to care for African American soldiers serving with the Union Army. But the single residence allotted was much too small to serve that purpose, and ultimately the L’Ouverture Hospital complex was built along nearby Prince Street.

Instead, the buildings at Washington and Wolfe streets cared for ailing Contraband refugees, slaves who had escaped bondage in the Deep South, seeking protection behind Union lines in Alexandria. It came to be known interchangeably as the Contrabands Hospital or Bigelow’s Hospital, named for the surgeon in charge.

Despite having the authority to resource the hospital with the best available supplies, equipment and staff, there appears to have been a conscious decision by Dr. Bigelow to ignore Slough’s intent, without repercussions.

He directed that supplies housed in the building be used elsewhere or remain in storage rather than be used for their intended patients. The hospital was so ill-equipped and understaffed that Wilbur complained repeatedly in her diary about the so-called medical care facility, calling it “a loathsome place. Those poor women are dying from neglect. I can hardly be civil to Dr. B.”

But as the plight of the desperate Contrabands grew worse, and Alexandria’s health crisis deepened over the ensuing months, even Bigelow’s apparent racial bias seems to have waned in favor of compassion. By the fall of 1863, Wilbur wrote, “The house is now filled with those for whom it was intended, a competent matron and nurses are employed, and I thank God for the blessed change.” Alexandria’s long journey to racial tolerance had begun.

“Out of the Attic” is published each week in the Alexandria Times newspaper. The column began in September 2007 as “Marking Time” and explored Alexandria’s history through collection items, historical images and architectural representations. Within the first year, it evolved into “Out of the Attic” and featured historical photographs of Alexandria.

These articles appear with the permission of the Alexandria Times and were authored by Amy Bertsch, former Public Information Officer, and Lance Mallamo, Director, on behalf of the Office of Historic Alexandria.


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Here follows an excerpt from Tim Dennee's article for the Friends of Freedmen’s Cemetery in 2011:

A House Divided Still Stands:
The Contraband Hospital and Alexandria Freedmen’s Aid Workers

Among the many photographs collected by the War Department during and after the Civil War is an image of a large group of people standing in front of a three-story brick Italianate-style double house. Even at first glance, the crowd is more compelling than the stylish new homes. Composed of adults and children, blacks and whites, males and females, soldiers and civilians, and the smartly and the shabbily dressed, the group’s striking heterogeneity is cause for wonder at the purpose and occasion of this portrait.

The image was unfamiliar to most historians of Alexandria, Virginia. Identified only as a “House” or “House with group in front,” for decades it had hidden in plain sight in the National Archives among negatives acquired from Mathew Brady and other sources.

Only recently has the Archives posted the photo on Flickr, one of our new media, with an entirely accurate description likely added by a former head of the Archives’ Still Pictures Branch: “House, Corner of Wolfe and Washington Streets, Alexandria, Virginia.” Spotted by Office of Historic Alexandria Public Information Specialist Amy Bertsch, it quickly made its way to the Alexandria Archaeology Facebook page.

As there were few substantial buildings standing near the corner of Washington and Wolfe Streets during the war, Amy instantly narrowed the location of the building, which still stands. Presently occupied by an antiques shop, a pet boutique and a public relations firm, the double house at 321-323 South Washington Street is remarkably intact, with only a couple of small additions. It retains its original cornice and window hoods, and even several of the original windows. But it is now less imposing due to the introduction of commercial show windows and the painting of the masonry during the mid twentieth century.

The building was erected for china and glass merchant Robert Hartshorne Miller on a lot he purchased from Maria Louisa Jackson in August 1853. Miller’s motivation, at least in part, was to make a wedding present of a new home to his son Elisha, married two months earlier. But tax assessments indicate that construction of the houses did not begin in earnest until sometime between mid 1857 and early 1858. They were designed in the most modern style, but to a conventional side-hall plan, with front parlors leading to a dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, four small chambers on the second, and two in the attic. It was not until June 1859 that the southern “of the two brick tenements recently erected,” then numbered 77 Washington Street, was conveyed to Elisha by Robert and Anna Miller “in consideration of one dollar, and of the affection which they bear for their son.”

War Arrives
Despite a considerable wait for the completion of their home, an impending armed conflict between the federal army and the forces of the seceded states would deny Elisha Janney Miller and wife Betty Scott Ashby Miller a long and peaceful tenure. Although they were members of the pacifist Society of Friends and supporters of the Constitutional Union Party, the Miller family was fiercely loyal to Virginia.

Within months of Union troops’ entry into Alexandria, at least a third of their white neighbors decamped for points south and west. The Millers joined this group, whose real estate was soon subject to seizure by the United States as abandoned.

One would think that, at 62 years old, a member of the Common Council, a commissioner of the Alexandria Water Company, president of the Old Dominion Bank, and with principal responsibility for running the King Street store of R.H. Miller, Son & Company, Robert Miller would have no thought of leaving his native city. But he did disappear for a time, only to return to a new responsibility: the defense of his family’s interests, including his extensive property holdings and even his own person, from punitive measures of the federal and reconstituted state governments.

As an officer of a chartered utility corporation, Miller was required by a new state law to swear an oath of allegiance. This he refused to do. Having already “abandoned” his property, he now had two strikes against him and consequently lost, for the course of the war, his own half of the Washington Street building. Late in the conflict, he would be among the prominent citizens with Southern sympathies proposed to ride as hostages in Union supply trains as an anti-guerrilla measure.

For nearly the first year of the conflict, the front remained within a day’s ride of Alexandria. In addition to garrison and provost troops, the city and its environs were overrun with soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. On December 14, 1861, the Eighth Illinois Cavalry arrived from Meridian Hill in the District of Columbia. The regiment bivouacked at Camp California, a hillside three miles west of Alexandria, near the Fairfax Theological Seminary and the fortifications newly built to defend Washington. The weather remained mild and fair as the horse soldiers prepared their winter quarters.

The soil was a reddish clay loam, and the men at once went to work digging down to level the floors of their tents, and some of them even dug to the depth of eighteen inches… They were warned that when the rainy season began, the water would leak through this soil and make the tents very unpleasant as well as unhealthy. Not believing this, however, they persisted, but sadly repented before spring….

[N]o sooner did the rain begin than we were in a perfect mire; literally there seemed to be no bottom to the mud, and it held the water like a sponge. [We were forced to wade from tent to tent]. The horses were taken from their lines in camp and picketed over the surrounding hills, but they would not stand an hour in a place without making a deep mud-hole.

Many of the troops were stricken with disease, soon desperate for a proper hospital. Around January 24, 1862, the unit received orders to prepare to move into town. A week later they occupied a dozen vacant “secesh” houses and a remnant of the old Irwin brewery. They stabled their horses in several locations, including the Wilkes Street railroad tunnel and the city’s two foundries. Several officers and their families sheltered in that “fine brick building” “lately occupied by… E.J. Miller, and the new house adjoining the latter, on Washington St.,” sharing some of that space with a medical dispensary staffed by regimental surgeon Abner Hard.

The men passed more pleasant, but not idyllic, days in town. In fact, they suffered double the number of deaths from typhoid fever and other diseases as they had at muddy Camp California. And they were not idle. They drilled, tended their mounts, and patrolled as far as Accotink in Fairfax County. Despite orders requiring enlisted men to obtain permission from company commanders to leave their quarters, several quickly found trouble. Already on February 12, a regimental court-martial convened to try several soldiers for drunkenness, disobeying orders, damaging private property, and being absent without leave. The proceedings were conducted at the quarters of Major John L. Beveridge, likely in Elisha Miller’s home. Alexandria’s military governor, Brigadier General William R. Montgomery, had the regiment investigated for “irregularities.” He nearly ordered them out of town for offenses against a hostile populace, including the arrest during services of Rev. Kinsey Stewart of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church for refusing to lead a prayer for President Lincoln. Such zeal earned the ire of General Montgomery, but won the favor of Unionist mayor Lewis McKenzie, to whom the troopers presented a gold-headed cane.

The Eighth Illinois remained at Alexandria until ordered to Bull Run in March, where it would be one of the units engaged in the Second Battle of Manassas. The regiment would later distinguish itself at Gettysburg in a delaying action against a much larger force. It played a similar role at the Battle of Monocacy in 1864, when the Confederates menaced the nation’s capital from Maryland. Months later, while on a patrol into Loudoun County, Virginia, the troopers wounded the famous raider John Singleton Mosby.

Succor to the Refugees
Once largely deserted, Alexandria was soon bursting at the seams, not only with troops, but with government employees, camp followers, entrepreneurs—and African Americans who had freed themselves from bondage in the chaos of war. Until autumn 1862, the military authorities paid little attention to these former slaves or “contrabands,” except as sources of cheap labor and of information on enemy troop movements. The rising numbers of the indigent presented a potential humanitarian crisis that was relieved only by the war’s demand for workers. More troubling to the military, the overcrowded poor were particularly susceptible to dangerous communicable diseases such as smallpox and typhoid fever, illnesses that threatened the troops, their logistical base, and the defenses of Washington. In October 1862, Alexandria’s new military governor, Brigadier General John P. Slough, appointed the first commissary to the contrabands, Sidney A. Burdge, to see to their employment and rations, and the first physician, Dr. Charles Culverwell, to treat and vaccinate them. About this time, the Millers’ building was transferred to the control of the military government and dedicated one of the first official shelters for formerly enslaved families.

Julia Wilbur, agent of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and one of Alexandria’s first freedmen’s aid workers, later described the Washington Street dwellings as the “only good building the contrabands occupy.” But it suffered considerable wear and tear by the end of 1862. Even after a handful of residents had been moved to other quarters Wilbur counted 115 occupants. “I would like to have you see a house that soldiers have been quartered in for one year, & contrabands for another year. You would think that all the rain in the sweet heavens c[oul]d never wash it clean, & years of purification c[oul]d never sweeten it.”

Wilbur’s interest in the property was at least partly personal. Provost Marshal John C. Wyman had promised her the use of the southern half of the building—E.J. Miller’s house—as quarters for herself and a space for storing and distributing clothing donated by Northern freedmen’s aid societies. The northern dwelling was to become the boarding house of a Mrs. Munsell. For her clothing room, Wilbur almost immediately, took possession of at least one room, likely the parlor, of the “South House,” as the E.J. Miller home would come to be known. The military removed several women, including one stricken with smallpox, to make space for her.

Mr. W[hipple] & I went there [the morning of December 22, 1862]… to tell them they must leave this room & go into another. They said there were two women that hadn’t been ‘laid in’ but a week, but we c[oul]d not help it, they must go into a room on the other side of the hall. [B]ut in this room were 2 or 3 women rolled up on the floor….

[The next day] I went [back] to my brick house. The small pox woman was moved out last night, the room was fumigated, & the rest will go on living there. They are cleaning no room for us to day….

When I went to the brick house this morning [Christmas Eve] the people from our room were piling into a great 4 horse wagon. The two women who had “been laid in only a week” were there with their babies, & ever so many were there to see them load up & start off. Instead of putting them in another room, Mr. B[urdge] is sending them to another house. It looked hard. I c[oul]d have cried, but that would not have helped the matter.”

Wilbur had the room and hall cleaned and whitewashed at her own expense and informed her sponsors to “Please direct your box or bale to ‘Miss Julia A. Wilbur, Cor. Washington & Wolfe sts, Alexandria, Virginia.” But while she moved her coats, shawls, cloaks, bonnets and blankets into the building, it was months before she could take up residence.

Although the remaining freedpeople had been forced to vacate at least the South House by the end of February, a new provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Horatio Wells, nearly reneged on his predecessor’s promise. In fact, Mrs. Munsell never got her boarding house, but the colonel allowed Wilbur’s clothing room to remain. Julia and a new aid worker, Harriet Jacobs, finally moved into a couple of chambers near the end of May 1863, after the building had been fully cleaned and repaired.

Harriet Jacobs had gained some notoriety in abolitionist circles for the publication of a pseudonymous autobiography detailing her life as a slave and her escape from bondage. Leaving her adopted home in New York State, she arrived in the nation’s capital in 1862 to help the freedpeople there, but with the backing of the yearly meeting of New York Quakers, she relocated to Alexandria. Jacobs provided food, fuel and clothing to the freedpeople and championed their welfare to often callous authorities. With the assistance of her daughter Louisa and two other teachers from New England, she would establish a free school for African-American children in the new “Petersburg” or “Grantville” neighborhood.

Delighted to obtain the best chambers in a substantial house, Jacobs and Wilbur nonetheless owed a nominal monthly rent and endured Spartan conditions. Julia penned letters home “sitting on a chair without a back & writing on a dry goods box.” After nine months’ residence she considered her quarters:

"well enough now for the purpose for wh[ich] I use it; my bed is comfortable, I have a bit of carpet for the middle of the floor, which is enough, & I am entirely reconciled to the room. It is a queer way to live I’ll allow. When ladies come I take them in to my room. If I had a large clothes press or wardrobe to put things away out of sight I w[oul]dn’t mind the bed so much, & would like to have a little furniture, & then I could receive visitors in it. But those that I once knew here have found out I have no place to receive co[mpany] & many do not come any more.

Julia paid Lucinda, a freedwoman, to wash her laundry once a month, but she ironed her own clothes and was responsible for her share of the cleaning of the house’s halls and stairway. A friend, “Aunt” Lucy Lawson, would visit daily when Julia was ill and do some work for her. Harriet Jacobs had her own housemaid. For a time, these servants may have occupied interior, windowless rooms on the second floor

The Contraband Hospital
The military government had reason to economize with the buildings it controlled. In addition to suffering a housing shortage, Alexandria’s African-American community was in great need of a hospital. Black smallpox patients were accepted into wards at the Claremont hospital south of Cameron Run, and Quartermaster and Commissary Department employees were treated in their respective infirmaries, but the average person received medical care from an overworked visiting physician, from their own families, or from no one at all.

In January 1863, John Reynolds Bigelow, a Manhattan doctor and former surgeon to the 83rd New York Infantry, was appointed physician to Alexandria’s freedpeople, in charge of smallpox vaccinations and the Claremont hospital. He was also ordered to take command of a segregated hospital to be established as quickly as possible. Near the end of February, General Slough directed that the northern of the two Miller houses would accommodate this facility. Julia Wilbur reported that:

The North house is to be fixed up right off for a hospital. The iron bedsteads & every thing necessary has been sent from W[ashington] & they are in a ware house, & it will be just as good & nice as any other hospital, because the medical director does this. Gen. S[lough] & Col. W[ells] has nothing to do with this. But, will you believe it? Dr. B[igelow] asked Col. W[ells] if he could not have the control of both houses, in case he should want both for hospital. But Col. W[ells] was man enough to say “that there would be time enough for that when the South [i.e., Elisha Miller’s] house was needed.” Now it is not needed for a hospital, & we can have the S[outh] house to use for our purposes.

The hospital did not have a promising start, given the Army’s priorities and inefficiencies, and possibly Bigelow’s shortcomings as a manager. “Dr. Bigelow thought it would take a week or 10 days perhaps to get things agoing, but he finds that he can’t hurry the authorities any more than the rest of us can…. Every item we get… has to go through a long process.”

Julia Wilbur, who was already employed—and would soon live—next door, visited the hospital often, and the quality of care was a constant theme of her letters home.

On the 26th of February a house was appointed for a hospital and the Provost Marshal ordered it to be immediately occupied as such. On the first of May no such organization had been made. A part of these hospital stores had been sent to the small pox hospital, the rest were piled up in this house with the exception of about half a dozen beds, which were occupied by about as many sick women. Up to this time only ten persons, I think, had been brought to this house. Only one, and she an inexperienced woman, was employed to do the work and take care of the sick, and during the two months she was in this house no bed was provided for her and she slept on a blanket on the floor. Piles of beds and bedding, so generously provided by Government, were lying unused, while these poor people, for whom they were intended, were sick and dying in those wretched tenements, with nothing but a few old clothes or a single blanket to lie on.

The surgeon in charge was authorized to fit up a hospital equal to the best military hospitals, and employ competent nurses, &c., and I never heard any good reason why it was not done. The Assistant Surgeon was absent for a time; after his return things assumed a much better shape. The house is now [early September? 1863] filled with those for whom it was intended, a competent matron and nurses are employed, and I thank God for the blessed change.

Bigelow was assisted by two Palmer, Massachusetts doctors, Assistant Surgeon Samuel Shaw and his son-in-law, 24-year-old medical-school graduate Joseph Warren Graves, hired as a surgical dresser. The New Yorker Bigelow married Eunice Parks of Palmer in 1836, and the Parks family were cousins of the Shaws, suggesting that the physicians knew each other before the war. In mid May, Graves was joined by his wife, Harriet, Shaw’s daughter, who served as a nurse and possibly matron in the new hospital. After seven and a half months, Dr. Shaw resigned September 20, 1863 and went home. He quickly returned to Alexandria, but only to treat Graves, who had contracted a fatal case of typhoid fever from a patient. Graves died October 20, and his wife resigned the same day. The two doctors would be replaced by Amos Pettijohn, M.D. of Deming, Indiana, a graduate of Chicago’s Rush Medical College, an ardent abolitionist, and former physician at the contraband camp hospital in Washington.

From month to month the staff of the “United States Army Hospital for Contrabands, Alexandria”—commonly known as the “Contraband Hospital,” but also called “Bigelow’s Hospital,” “the Colored Hospital,” and simply “the hospital at the corner of Washington and Wolfe streets”—consisted of only three to six African-American nurses and a cook. Over the course of a year, these employees included Harriet Graves, McAllister Craig and Matilda Craig, William Lowe, Peter Willis, Ann Jones, Maria Mitchell and Phebe Ann Turner, and possibly John Naylor. Turner was almost certainly the Phebe to whom Wilbur refers in her diary, a nurse and probably ultimately the matron, employed at a wage of only eight dollars per month. Mitchell had the prodigious cooking duties to herself, at the same pay. Matilda Yates Craig was the hospital’s first female nurse, probably the “inexperienced woman” of Wilbur’s report. A native of Rappahannock County, Virginia, she grew up enslaved to William Payne of Orlean, Fauquier County. In 1860 she married McAllister Craig, a slave of Dr. Amos Payne, William Payne’s cousin and neighbor. The couple came to Alexandria about 1862, likely in the wake of military operations around Warrenton. After several months’ employment at the hospital, McAllister, a shoemaker by training, enlisted in the 30th Connecticut Colored Infantry, which became the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry.

The Contraband Hospital’s first months were likely its busiest; in the wake of the smallpox outbreak of that winter, the building was bursting with 140 inmates. Of course, smallpox patients were transported to the months-old Claremont Eruptive Fever Hospital south of Cameron Run. But the cold season was worst, as it strained the refugees’ limited access to fuel and fresh food, weakening their immune systems. Living in cramped, overcrowded quarters lacking running water or sanitary facilities, often lacking heat, or warmed by smoky, open fires, the war’s refugees contracted pneumonia, tuberculosis, bronchitis, typhoid fever, diphtheria, cholera and many other afflictions. There are also records of treatment of skin ulcers, inguinal hernias, gunshot wounds, paralysis, ear infection and skin infection at the hospital. Infants were particularly susceptible to food- or water-borne germs and frequently perished with fevers, diarrhea and convulsions. The old often suffered from arthritis, general debility, and other maladies.

Patient registers were not retained after the war, leaving the identities of only a few dozen of the sick known from Wilbur’s diaries, records of transfers to other hospitals, and death records. The dead were packed into ultimately anonymous graves at Penny Hill, the city’s public burying ground and potter’s field.

Even after the Contraband Hospital had closed, Julia Wilbur never overcame her resentment of its chief surgeon. She blamed Bigelow for inattention to care and for frequent shortages of fuel and nourishment.

The chief surgeon said “these sick people wanted [i.e., needed] nothing but corn bread and pork,” and he certainly seemed indifferent as to whether they had anything else. He said a hospital was unnecessary, but was very willing to draw a salery [sic] from Government on account of it. I did what I could for the sick and so did Mrs. J[acobs], but there was much suffering for want of proper food and nourishment. The assistant surgeon [now Amos Pettijohn] did what he could to relieve the people, but there was little chance for him to carry out his humane feelings.

One evening, two men had been brought in from Brandy Station, Virginia, one so sick he could not sit up, and the other suffering from a gunshot wound to the hip received almost two weeks earlier. They “[l]ay on floor in kitchen an hour till Dr. P[ettijohn] came. No man here to help do any thing for them. Only one woman [nurse] here who is well enough to work.”

The winter was very severe and several times the Hospital was entirely without wood... Two rooms in the upper story had no fire in them until the twelfth of Dec. when a member of the New York [Friends] Com[mittee] happened here and provided a stove for one of the rooms. Old and sick men would crawl down from this attic, and it was a touching sight to see them standing or sitting on the sidewalk near the house enjoying the warmth of a December sun.

Conditions were no better for the huge outpatient population, themselves short of food, firewood and attention. The hospital was headquarters for the visiting physicians as well as for free smallpox inoculations, but neither the doctors’ orders nor their contracts specified how conscientious they had to be in the performance of these duties. “Dr. Bigelow informs me that his contract does not oblige him to visit but once those contrabands who are outside the hospital, & what further he does is for humanity’s sake.”

Many freedpeople mistrusted strangers, the authorities, and the medical care they provided. Some shunned hospitals, often for the very sensible reason that it was a good place to contract a serious disease. Some had other motives. Once, a “queer story” circulated that Louisa Jacobs and Virginia Lawton had been kidnapped “by Northern doctors for dissection”—not a fantastic notion for people just out of bondage, familiar with brutal masters and slave-catchers and with recent cases of young men abducted by private agents paid for recruiting for the U.S. Colored Troops. Body-snatching corpses for medical research and instruction was common in that era, too, and reported in the papers.

To Julia Wilbur, the Contraband Hospital would remain “a loathsome place. Those poor women are dying from neglect. I can hardly be civil to Dr. B…” Bigelow’s superiors did not wholly disagree. The doctor had not endeared himself to his peers or to the military governor, once testifying against Superintendent of Contrabands Albert Gladwin, another time reprimanded for laxity with the vaccination program, and once charged with being absent without leave. His major personal failing seems to have been self-regard, including an unseemly concern with the quality of his quarters and office. As the Union army increasingly accepted African-American soldiers into segregated units, their commanders recognized that Alexandria’s extensive hospital complex would need at least one more facility, for the separate treatment of the “Colored Troops.” Although the Contraband Hospital had undergone minor repairs in

December, it was simply too small to serve both soldiers and civilians, and the authorities meant to put the institution on a proper military footing.

In mid November 1863, the decision was made to construct new hospital barracks around some seized buildings on Prince and Payne Streets. Julia Wilbur reported that:

"They have at last received orders to build a hospital in spite of Dr. Bigelow, & Dr. [Christian M.] Hines [the military governor’s health officer] says it will be done in 2 weeks, but I know better than this! They are now preparing the ground for the building. Hines is surgeon in charge & Pettijohn & Bigelow are both assistants, but they think they will work Dr. B[igelow] out before long & work Dr. Shaw in…."

After her experience with the establishment of the Contraband Hospital, Wilbur was properly skeptical about the pace of construction. The new facility, which its patients dubbed L’Ouverture after the hero of the Haitian revolution, was not finished for nearly three months. But Julia erred in her assessment of the politics of appointments. Dr. Edwin Bentley, already commanding the Second and Third Division General Hospitals, took charge of inpatient care for the freedpeople, including supervision of L’Ouverture and Claremont. Hines and Bigelow were released, and Shaw never returned to Alexandria. Thomas C. Barker, formerly of the Seventh Maine Infantry and of the King Street and Camp Distribution hospitals, served as L’Ouverture’s first chief surgeon. Eunice Bigelow, the doctor’s wife, was apparently interested in an appointment as matron, and Harriet Jacobs was also considered, but after four months, a Mrs. Margaretta Hazzard was selected instead.

The Contraband Hospital did not disappear without a trace. A Miller descendant offered a lurid explanation of residual damage, “the now filled in bullet holes in the front parlor floor where operations took place… [were] put there for [the] draining of blood!” And the many deaths there were said to have left remnants of a spectral nature. On Saint Valentine’s day 1864, Patsey, one of the women whom Julia Wilbur had visited, perished after an illness of more than two months, leaving her son an orphan. Just a day and a half later, the rest of the inpatients were transported to L’Ouverture. “The North House looks lonely enough now; as if ghosts, spooks & spirits might take possession of it. Indeed Phebe says she saw ‘something in white’ in Patsey’s room last night, & Patsey’s boy saw it too, & it clutched him by the neck.”

Amos Pettijohn remained in the service of Alexandria’s military government, quartered in the room above the North House’s front parlor, which was now a medical dispensary. In April 1864, General Slough and his new health officer, Dr. James Collins, again ordered that all smallpox cases be reported to the authorities: “Cases occurring among ‘contrabands’ will be reported promptly to Dr. A. Pettijohn, at the Dispensary for Contrabands on Washington street, near Wolfe st.” Pettijohn also provided treatments for minor illnesses and injuries and prescribed medicines. Before long, the demand for medication from white refugees outstripped that from the larger freed population.

The doctor was also responsible for “outdoor duties, sometimes visiting hundreds of Patients a day—mostly colored.” This impossible workload demanded more hands. In July 1864, Slough appointed as assistant to Pettijohn the 27-year-old Edward W. Janney, M.D., a resident of Alexandria, a native of Loudoun County, and graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Baltimore. As a Virginian, Janney was a rarity for his willingness both to practice for the federal army and to serve African Americans. This may be explained in part by the fact that he was a Quaker. But he was also a cousin to Anna Janney Miller, Robert’s wife and Elisha’s mother. Surely not regarding himself as an enemy of the Millers, Janney may have assumed the role of accidental guardian of his kinsmen’s property

Janney remained at the dispensary until its close in September 1865, a few weeks after his transfer to a new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. He then served at L’Ouverture Hospital, now run by the Freedmen’s Bureau, until the spring of 1867. In contrast, a month after war’s end, Amos Pettijohn would request the annulment of his own contract because of ill health. He recommended as a replacement, and aide to Janney, Dr. James G.D. Pettijohn, a first cousin and a Methodist minister. An African-American employee, Lewis Gray, assisted the two physicians during the dispensary’s last months.

The Entourage
With the closure of Bigelow’s Hospital, much of the North House was freed for other purposes. Rev. Albert Gladwin, Alexandria’s “Superintendent of Contrabands” since May 1863, immediately requested that space not needed for the doctors be renovated and given over to “use of the Missionaries and Teachers connected with the Contraband department.” Gladwin, a Connecticut-born Baptist organizer and fundraiser, was never known to have led a congregation. After a year and a half soliciting money for church construction in Rhode Island, he was engaged by the American Baptist Free Mission Society for service in the slums of New York. In May 1862, “Brothers” Gladwin and C.M. Welles were dispatched to Washington to establish freedmen’s schools. After some success there, Gladwin drifted to more open fields of endeavor. As the Society’s support was meager, he parlayed his missionary work into a paid position with Alexandria’s military government by ingratiating himself with the provost marshal. But he would make himself the nemesis of Harriet Jacobs and Julia Wilbur by his strict treatment of the freedpeople, especially for charging rent to the refugees at the new Contraband Barracks on Prince Street and at other substandard accommodations.

Wilbur and Jacobs had beaten Gladwin to the best rooms in the South House, and the minister, who moved in shortly after, intended to dislodge them. As early as February 1863, Wilbur predicted that “Mr. G[ladwin] will want a room to sleep in, &c. I have told him, there is no room for his bed where our goods are.” Nevertheless, two weeks later the minister’s bedstead was stored “in our [clothing] room yet. It is so annoying & so in the way but he ‘don’t see it.’”

As Alexandria’s freed population continued to grow, so did the force of workers sent by the freedmen’s aid societies and employed by the government. Rev. Gladwin made successful pitches to General Slough to hire a secretary and for the detail of a couple of convalescent soldiers to assist him. But he was still serving a double role as a representative of the Free Mission Society and thus hosted several missionaries. Aside from his secretary, Rev. Eliphalet Owen, the former publisher of an Elgin, Illinois newspaper, Gladwin quartered the Rev. William M. Scott and John Ellison Vassar. Scott was an agent of the Free Mission Society and a physician by training. In addition to teaching a night-school class for freedpeople, he assisted the authorities with smallpox vaccinations. “Uncle John” Vassar, cousin of the Poughkeepsie brewer, was a lay minister and colporteur for the American Tract Society, come to save soldiers’ souls through personal conversation and conversion. Finally, Peter Washington, an African American and recent licentiate, served as a missionary to the freedpeople. He spoke often at celebrations and recruiting meetings. The ministers performed marriages, baptisms and funerals in the white and black communities and conducted worship services. Owen periodically served as a hospital chaplain and heard the last words of condemned soldiers before execution. He also kept the memoranda of freedmen deaths, births and marriages that are today commonly referred to as the “Gladwin Record.”

In the meantime, Harriet Jacobs was joined in November 1863 by her daughter Louisa and another teacher, Sarah Virginia Lawton, who together opened the Jacobs School at Pitt and Oronoco Streets in the Petersburg neighborhood. The arrival of the young women precipitated Gladwin’s next attempt to eject Julia Wilbur from the South House, just as he was shutting her out of her orphanage/women’s room/sewing school at the Prince Street Barracks. The superintendent’s report to the provost marshal may be read as a rationale and request to order certain residents to decamp:

"The present occupants of the house in which I live and transact my business, are, besides myself, Corporal [Amos H.] Denman [of the 1st D.C. Volunteer Infantry], who is detailed to help me [as clerk]; Rev. E. Owen, who has charge of my books, etc., and labors as a missionary among the people; Rev. W.M. Scott, who is a regular physician and also a Missionary to this people; Rev. John Vassar, who is a Missionary to the soldiers, in and about Alexandria, and at this front; Mrs. Jacobs, who has, besides her housemaid, Misses Jacobs and Lawton, teachers in the school at Grantville; Miss Wilbur, who has her stores of clothing, etc., in the same room occupied by Mrs. Jacobs and myself for the same purpose; Peter Washington, Cold., missionary, who, with his wife and a chore boy are my house keepers."

"There have also been applications from teachers who are laboring without expense to the people, and who have as yet been unable to secure rooms. We necessarily have a great many comers and goers, who are interested in our operations, or who come to obtain help, or children to bring up, rendering it necessary that some portion of the occupants, with those who are without rooms, have quarters elsewhere, and the house in question seems to be the most available… The house we occupy has three rooms [on the first floor] including store room and cook room, four in the second story, including servants room and two in the third story. The hospital under the same roof, is the same size with the same arrangements in apartments."

It was a full house indeed and growing still more crowded. Rev. Gladwin intended to add to their number the instructors at the Prince Street Barracks school, including Private T. McKenzie Axe of the Seventh Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry, a teacher by profession, recovering from a wound received at Second Manassas. Two women teachers were to occupy the attic space. These were Miss Mary Ann Collier of Chelsea, Massachusetts and Miss Merinda Celestia Owen, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Gladwin’s secretary. Owen’s wife also resided in Alexandria during much of her husband’s career there. So, in March 1864, Gladwin—the “selfish, contemptible fellow”—asked Wilbur and Jacobs to remove themselves to the North House:

"Mr. Gladwin… must have an office, a sleeping room & a spare sleeping room, & a reception room… also rooms for his men & servants &c. How many do you think he has of these? There are Mr. Owen, Secretary & toady, the Corporal who collects rents, carries dispatches &c., Mr. Axe, who teaches at Barracks, Peter Washington & wife Susan, the latter does most of the cooking for all these, washing for some of them, & cleaning, & is paid nothing. Peter preaches for Mr. G[ladwin] & keeps up prayer meetings, goes for rations, saws the wood, washes dishes or cooks, makes fires or any thing else. & a boy who does errands, cleans knives & blacks boots & washes dishes. Mr. G[ladwin] pays Peter $15 a month. Mr. O[wen] & Miss Owen [&] the Corporal & Mr. Axe & Peter & Susan draw full rations, wood, coal &c. Mr. Gladwin lives off of these. Peter buys all the milk & they are all mean enough to let him do it. Mr. G[ladwin] has been known to buy a little butter. He is the greatest sponger I ever saw."

"Neither Mrs. J[acobs] nor I will go into the other house. The only 3 front rooms the surgeon has. The others look out into a narrow back yard. The sick, the dying & the dead that we have seen there for the year past would haunt us…. So Mrs. J[acobs] told Mr. G[ladwin] she would not go out of this house unless Gen. Slough ordered her to do so, & then she should go to him & ask if she couldn’t remain here until she c[oul]d send to Mr. Tatham [of the New York Friends Committee] & he could come & find her a house. “Oh! I don’t want you to go to Gen. Slough, don’t do that. I didn’t know but you w[oul]d rather go in there & be by yourselves.” The idea of putting us out & putting 2 other women in here! I think he has given it up, but I can’t tell, he is not apt to give up any thing.

Although he dared not trouble Harriet Jacobs further, Gladwin grasped a golden opportunity to evict Julia Wilbur. After a year and a half of toil, the weary Quaker former schoolteacher returned to her home in western New York for rest and to visit family. Away three months, she learned upon her reappearance at Alexandria that the minister had gotten hold of her door key and meant to take the whole room. As usual, Wilbur appealed first to the provost marshal, to no avail, and the military governor was out of town. Her absence—and Gladwin’s importuning—had presumably convinced the authorities that the space could be better used. A few days later, she bitterly:

"Packed up all my things & waited for Mr. G. to say that I could have a room on the other [north] side of the house, but he put me off till noon. Then Gen. Slough came [back] to town, & Mr. G. has been another man since. ‘Why, yes, you can have the room, of course. Can I do anything to help you?’ Moved this P.M. Room not half as pleasant & convenient as the other…"

Her disgust and her dissatisfaction with the change of accommodations may have moved Julia to pull up stakes in mid January 1865 to continue her work in Washington. But in an unexpected turn of events, Rev. Gladwin was forced out days earlier. His departure was the consequence of a dispute over the proper burial location for black soldiers. As superintendent of contrabands, Gladwin considered it his responsibility to inter all African-American newcomers in the Freedmen’s Cemetery, established by the military government in February 1864. Indeed, he had been ordered to do so. But the sick and wounded soldiers at L’Ouverture Hospital demanded to be accorded the same honor as their white comrades, not to be considered “contrabands,” but to be buried in the “Soldiers’ Cemetery” at the west end of Wilkes Street. The black troops had the support of Edwin Bentley, medical director of Alexandria’s hospitals, and of the Quartermaster Department, from depot quartermaster J.G.C. Lee to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Although the military governor supported the minister to the last, this incident proved the final straw after Gladwin’s contentious career. Slough could not save a haughty civilian from the Army brass, and so the minister, too, departed for Washington. Freedmen’s Cemetery was now closed to soldiers, and those who had been buried there were re-interred at Alexandria National Cemetery.

Gladwin’s staff had already begun dissolving. Rev. Peter Washington died May 20, 1864 and was buried in Freedmen’s Cemetery. Axe and Denman were discharged from the service in June and September 1864. Rev. Vassar and Rev. Scott had also left Alexandria, the former continuing his proselytizing for the American Tract Society, and the latter embarking for his society’s mission to the Karen people of Burma. In mid May 1865, their housemates, Harriet and Louisa Jacobs, boarded a boat for Richmond.

Postwar
At war’s end, the new Freedmen’s Bureau requested of the Army the transfer of a number of properties for use as quarters, schools and medical facilities for the freedpeople. For nearly all of the year 1865, the Washington Street houses continued to shelter the medical dispensary and much of the growing corps of teachers. The Freedmen’s Bureau office at Alexandria was ultimately staffed mainly by military men, but in its first few months, Gladwin’s successor, Rev. James Inglish Ferree, and his former secretary, Rev. Owen, held temporary offices. They presumably quartered in Elisha Miller’s house, as did Corporal John G. Richardson, the Bureau’s first chief commissary for the district.

The end of armed conflict did not mean that all was forgotten or forgiven, but the courts and the executive branch restored most of the rights of those who had supported the Confederacy. Those who had had properties seized for treason pursuant to the Confiscation Acts lost their land for life, but it could be returned to their heirs. And those whose real estate had been seized as abandoned or merely for sympathizing with the Southern states had it restored, except for properties still in use by the Army or the Freedmen’s Bureau. For these, the government would now pay the owner rent, at a rate determined by the government and for as long as the government chose to use the property, but only after the owner made application to the authorities.

Robert H. Miller had sought the return of the houses since they were taken. He wrote the military governor in March 1863 demanding compensation for their use and was rebuffed. The merchant naturally demanded they be restored after the war, but the Bureau instead simply paid him a monthly $60 rent until October 1865. At last securing the properties, Robert sold the North House a month later to Edward Stabler Hough, a fellow commissioner of the Alexandria Water Company. Elisha and Betty Miller returned to the South House with a son, one-year-old Ashby, born in exile.

The dwellings passed through a number of owners and tenants after the war, temporarily reunited in ownership in the 1950s as Pearl Shriver’s tourist home and rooming house. A retail conversion—and show windows—came in the 1960s

The Portrait
So, who appears in the only Civil War-era photograph of the Washington Street houses, and when was the photograph taken? The answers are closely related.

The time of year can be fixed as mid April because of the redbud tree blooming in front of the South House. But the key to the puzzle is the stout woman standing at the center of the South House’s stoop and the individuals connected with her. A light-skinned African-American woman, she can be identified, by comparison to other photographs, as author and freedmen’s aid worker Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs was associated with this property from February 1863 to May 1865, but did not reside here until late spring 1863.

Also recognizable are two teachers at the Jacobs School, not established until January 1864. One of these is Jacobs’s daughter, Louisa Matilda, seen here in the doorway behind her mother. Of Louisa, whose father was white, an English acquaintance had written, “No European would suspect the African blood in her veins.” The other is J. Stewart Banfield, the mustachioed white teacher from New Hampshire, wearing a cap and on the sidewalk in front of the North House stoop. He also appears in an 1864 group photo in front of the Jacobs School. In that image from the Robert Langmuir Collection, used as cover art for Jean Fagan Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life, Banfield sports a different hat, but his clothing and facial hair are unmistakable.

The white woman in the impressive bonnet standing between the two doors is probably Julia Wilbur, Jacobs’s friend and colleague.91 Although the hat obscures most of her hair, ears, chin and jaw, and we cannot tell the shape of her nose as she faces the camera, her apparent age, hair color, and the down-turned shape of her eye sockets are consistent with her photographs at Haverford College.

The smartly dressed, young African-American woman standing between Jacobs and Wilbur is probably Virginia Lawton, the 24-year-old schoolteacher and eldest daughter of a prominent Cambridge, Massachusetts family. It looks as if Harriet’s left hand may rest in the crook of Virginia’s right arm. Not only was Lawton a dear friend of the Jacobses, but she often visited Alexandria’s freedpeople in the company of Wilbur.

Two young white women—one in a prim bonnet standing at the base of the South House stoop next to the soldiers, and the other near the bottom right corner—may be Mary Ann Collier and “Minnie” Owen. Although Collier worked with Owen at the barracks school, she was also close to Jacobs and Wilbur.

An African-American boy near the left of the group stands out for his dapper ensemble of broad-brimmed hat, tie, waistcoat and watch chain. His coat looks a bit large—consistent with the style of the mid 1860s, or possibly a hand-me-down—but the level of attention to dress exceeds that of his peers. His watch is the key status symbol. Probably a member of Alexandria’s sizable native free-black community, he could be the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Edwin Allen Seaton, son of successful carpenter-builder George Seaton. Edwin (or “Allen”) had a brother five years older, a possible source of a used coat. In November 1862, Julia Wilbur had boarded at the Seaton family home one short block east of here.

Identification of the rest of the group is dependent upon which year the photograph was taken. After a cold, rainy, and even snowy month that delayed spring blooms, the April 22, 1864 Alexandria Gazette could finally report that the “trees are beginning to show their buds and blossoms…” The windows here are cracked open, and some people are heavily dressed, some lightly. The Contraband Hospital had vacated the North House two months before that date, Wilbur and Jacobs had been residents for almost eleven months, and Rev. Albert Gladwin’s staff had settled in at its peak size. A snapshot of these figures, central to the freedmen’s aid drama portrayed in Julia Wilbur’s writings, would be invaluable, and it is exciting to think that this photograph might have captured most of them. The soldiers, for instance, could be Corporal Amos Denman and Private T. McKenzie Axe, whose enlistments still had a few months to run. The African-American gentleman at the center of the photo might be Rev. Peter Washington, who perished only four weeks later. The men on the stoop of the North House would be expected to be the Rev. Albert Gladwin himself, with his hand on the shoulder of his secretary, Rev. Eliphalet Owen. But neither man resembles Owen, and neither of the candidates for Minnie Owen stands with them. The best guess then is that one of these men is Dr. Amos Pettijohn, in charge of the medical dispensary inside that door. For its convenient fit, the year 1864 is a compelling hypothesis. Yet, it is likely wrong.

We must keep in mind that there must have been an occasion for the portrait. Neither the duties of the individuals pictured nor the photographic process of the period allowed for spontaneous candid images of such a group. Both photographer and subjects had to be available to pose for a long exposure. As with the 1864 Jacobs School photograph, this may have been intended for promotional purposes, but it does not illustrate the same connection to the work with the freedpeople, and it would not explain the white urchins at play.

Could it be April 1865 instead? The dispensary was then still in operation, and the Jacobses and Owens continued to occupy the South House. But Gladwin had already departed for Washington, and Julia Wilbur moved there about the same time. Julia’s diary does describe occasional trips back to Alexandria, however, and visiting Harriet Jacobs each time. One of these occasions was an Alexandria celebration of a symbolic end to the war: the hoisting of the American flag at Fort Sumter after an absence of four years. On Friday, April 14 there were to be speeches at an evening meeting, followed by bonfires, fireworks and the illumination of several buildings. But the main event was an afternoon parade, a “Military and Civic Procession… [to] march through the principal streets, with music, banners, &c.”

After half a week of “rainy and disagreeable” weather, the parade day dawned bright and warmer. “The gardens are beginning to put forth their most beautiful flowers, the trees are in full blossom, and the fields are clothed in green.” Julia Wilbur arrived on the 10 a.m. train from Washington and called on other friends before meeting Mrs. Jacobs at the South House. E.J. Miller’s home almost certainly stood along the parade route, as Washington Street was then, and remains, one of the principal thoroughfares of the city. “The procession moved at 3 P.M.,” Julia recounted. “There were Cav[alry] & Inf[antry] & Art[illery] & Firemen, & Col[ore]d Home Guard, & various things. It was really very fine. Perfect order, & well-timed. Gen. Slough commanded.”

The military were out in full force, accompanied by fine bands of music, and these were followed by various Associations with appropriate emblems. The line extended fourteen squares, and took just half an hour in passing any point. The Fire Department had their apparatus ornamented and drawn by horses; there was a miniature Monitor on wheels manned and equipped—a blacksmith’s forge—a printing press in operation barouches filled with little girls handsomely attired, representing the States—a long line of carriages with citizens, the Sons of Temperance, and a Lodge of Colored Free masons dressed in their regalia. The procession passed through the principal streets, and was dismissed without accident or disorder about 5 o’clock, p.m. Many of the houses and stores on the line of march were decorated with flags, banners and devices. The streets were thronged all the afternoon with crowds of people, who cheered the procession during its march, and the bells were rung at intervals.

The coincidence of the parade with the blossoming of the trees is evidence difficult to dismiss in trying to explain the crowd and date the photo. While many of the children are at play, as one might expect on a holiday, some individuals are dressed in their Sunday best, appropriate to the significance of the event. Julia Wilbur can be counted among the latter. Having embarked at Washington in the cool of the morning with the intention of visiting friends, she is decked out in hat and cloak, proper social and traveling habit. In contrast, some of the women look as if they merely stepped out of their house, as was almost certainly the case.

Among the substantial body of wartime images of Alexandria, this subject—a large and mixed crowd of civilians on a principally residential street—is probably comparable only to the Langmuir Collection photo of the Jacobs school. Just as the Union troops were freed from their previous duties to participate in the celebration, so were the local and itinerant photographers, anxious to record history as it passed before their eyes and to collect a few more dollars before settling into peacetime pursuits. They may have shot multiple images of parade-viewers or been asked by one of those pictured to memorialize the scene. On such an exciting day, Julia Wilbur could be forgiven for neglecting to reveal this occurrence to her diary, just as she failed to mention that evening’s accidental explosion of wagons of fireworks at King and Washington Streets.

An 1865 date would mean that fewer of the individuals pictured are known for certain. The resident teachers were largely the same as the year before, but the soldiers are probably impossible to identify. The men on the North House stoop would likely be the 49-year-old Dr. Amos Pettijohn at left, and the 43-year-old Rev. James Ferree, former regimental and hospital chaplain and new superintendent of contrabands. They were both veterans of Washington’s contraband camp, devout Methodists, and almost certainly friends.

As historically significant as is the photograph, its subjects could not imagine how momentous was that day. Hours later, Abraham Lincoln would be mortally wounded by an assassin at Ford’s Theater. The President perished the next morning, as Alexandrians were rising and venturing out. As word of the “appalling tragedy” spread, the town’s bells tolled for a second time in two days, now for a very different reason. Shock, horror and grief replaced the joy, relief and thanksgiving of the previous afternoon, and throughout the town black crape took the place of yesterday’s celebratory red, white and blue bunting. One can only imagine the heart-rending scenes of mourning that a photographer might have captured that sad day.