McLean House (Appomattox, Virginia)

• 1. Introduction

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  The McLean House near Appomattox, Virginia holds a distinction that almost no other building in American history can claim. On the 9th of April 1865, General Robert E. Lee rode into its yard, dismounted, and walked inside. About ninety minutes later, the bloodiest war in American history was effectively over. But the story of how that house came to host that moment, and what happened to the building in the decades that followed, is as strange as anything from the war itself.

  The man who owned it, Wilmer McLean, had already watched the Civil War arrive on his doorstep once before. The First Battle of Bull Run, fought on the 21st of July 1861, had torn across the farm he owned roughly a hundred and twenty miles to the north. He moved his family south to get away from the fighting. He ended up in a village then called Clover Hill, Virginia. That village would soon be renamed Appomattox Court House. What are the odds that the same man's property would be touched twice, at the very opening and the very close of the war? The answer, it turns out, involves sugar smuggling, Confederate currency, a heap of salvaged bricks, and a Pulitzer Prize winner cutting a ribbon.

• 2. Wilmer McLean's World

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  Charles Raine built the McLean House in 1848, and it originally served as a tavern before the estate of Eliza D. Raine sold it to McLean in 1863. McLean was a retired major in the Virginia militia who was too old to enlist when the war broke out. He later described himself as a man who loved peace and moved south to escape the conflict. The fuller picture is more complicated.

  McLean did not simply sit out the war quietly. He built a small fortune running sugar through the Union blockade, a trade that put him on the wrong side of the law enforced by the very army that would one day fill his parlor. He was also a slave owner, and slave quarters stood beside his house. His prosperity was real but precarious. His money was held in Confederate currency, which meant that when Lee rode out of his yard on the 9th of April 1865, McLean's savings were already becoming worthless.

  The village itself caused lasting confusion. Because county seats in rural Virginia were commonly named for the county plus the words "Court House," visitors and historians alike assumed the surrender had been signed in a courthouse building. The actual courthouse stood about three miles from Appomattox Station, where the trains came in. The surrender happened in a private home, not a government building, which made McLean's parlor all the more unusual as a setting for such a consequential meeting.

• 3. The Surrender Terms

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  Grant's terms, as recorded, were precise and deliberately generous. Officers were to give individual paroles not to take up arms against the government of the United States until properly exchanged. Each company or regimental commander was to sign a like parole for the men under their command. Neither the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage were to be surrendered. Because many privates in the Confederate Army owned horses and mules, all horses and mules claimed by men in the Confederate ranks were also to be left in their possession.

  The ninety-minute meeting produced artifacts that scattered quickly. Union soldiers purchased much of McLean's furniture in the aftermath, though some pieces were simply stolen. The table and chairs that Lee and Grant used when negotiating are now part of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the Chicago History Museum. McLean himself tried to profit from the moment, selling pictures of his house after the war. It was not enough. He failed financially all the same.

  Elizabeth Bacon Custer, in a will dated the 18th of November 1926, and presented to the Probate Court of New York City on the 11th of May 1933, described two flags of truce she had kept: one made from a white towel, the other from a white handkerchief, both used at the surrender at Appomattox. She noted in the same document a table on which the surrender was written. These items, she stated, were held at the Memorial Hall of the War Department Building in Washington, D.C.

• 4. Financial Ruin and Sale

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  By the fall of 1867, McLean and his wife Virginia had left Appomattox Court House for her estate in Prince William County, Virginia. The Confederate currency that had represented his fortune was worthless. The banking house of Harrison, Goddin, and Apperson of Richmond obtained a court judgment against him after he defaulted on loans secured by the property.

  The house, already being called the "Surrender House," went to public auction on the 29th of November 1869, and a man named John L. Pascoe purchased it. Records show Pascoe then rented it to the Ragland family of Richmond. The renter, Nathaniel H. Ragland, later bought the property outright for $1,250 in 1872. After Ragland died in 1888, his widow Martha sold it in 1891 for $10,000 to a Captain Myron Dunlap of Niagara Falls, New York.

  Dunlap and a circle of investors saw historical opportunity. Their plan was to disassemble the house, transport it to Washington, D.C., and charge entrance fees to visitors at a permanent Civil War museum display. They hired architects to produce measured drawings with elevations. They hired contractors to produce materials specifications. The house was taken apart piece by piece and packed for shipping. Then the money ran out and legal problems multiplied. The scheme collapsed. For more than fifty years, the materials sat exposed to vandals, collectors, and the weather as a heaping pile of boards and bricks.

• 5. Reconstruction and Reopening

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  Congress created Appomattox Court House National Historical Park on the 10th of April 1940, encompassing approximately nine hundred and seventy acres at the site of the village once known as Clover Hill. Archaeological and reconstruction work began in 1941, with crews clearing overgrown brush and honeysuckle to reach the site. A key early step was gathering historical data so that accurate architectural plans could be drawn. Critically, the original materials were still there, including some five thousand original bricks, which made the project salvageable.

  The work halted abruptly on the 7th of December 1941, when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Reconstruction bids were reopened on the 25th of November 1947, and the project resumed. Eighty-four years after the surrender that had reunited the country, the McLean House opened to the public on the 9th of April 1949.

  The dedication drew a crowd of approximately twenty thousand people. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman gave a speech at the ceremony. A ribbon was cut on the 16th of April 1950, by the guests of honor: Major General Ulysses S. Grant III and Robert E. Lee IV, grandsons of the two commanders who had met in that parlor nearly nine decades earlier. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 15th of October 1966, and recorded in the National Park Service's database of Official Structures in 1989.