National Park ServiceU.S. Department of the Interior

Guilford Courthouse National Military ParkGreensboro, North Carolina

guco_front.ai Crop Marks are Black

Cultural Resources  ·  Southeast Region

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Cultural Landscape Report

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Cultural Landscape Report

Written by John Hiatt

Under the direction ofNational Park Service Southeast Regional OfficeCultural Resources Division

2003

Cultural ResourcesSoutheast RegionNational Park Service100 Alabama St. SWAtlanta, GA 30303(404) 562-3117

2003Cultural Landscape ReportGuilford Courthouse National Military ParkGreensboro, North Carolina

The cultural landscape report presented here exists in two formats.  A printed version is available for study at the park, the Southeastern Regional Office of the National Park Service, and at a variety of other repositories.  For more widespread access, this cultural landscape report  also exists in a web-based format through ParkNet, the website of the National Park Service. Please visit www.nps.gov for more information.

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Cultural Landscape Report

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Contents

Figures viiForeword ixAcknowledgments xi

Introduction

Management Summary 1Historical Summary 2Site Boundaries 3Scope of Work and Methodology 3Summary of Findings 4

Site History

The Pre-Colonial Setting 7The Genesis and Settlement of North Carolina, 1663-1770 10Guilford, 1770-1777 12The Battlefield Scene, 1781 14From Guilford Courthouse to Martinville,1779-1857 22Preserving and Commemorating Guilford Courthouse Battlefield, 1857-1917 31Federal Custodianship of the Guilford Battlefield 43The Era of the National Park Service 48

Existing Conditions

Topographical Overview 65Circulation 65Visitor Center and Other Park Facilities 72General Vegetation Patterns 73Greene Monument-Amphitheater Component Landscape 76Newly Acquired Parcels 77

Analysis of Integrity

Guilford Court House Battlefield: Evaluation of Landscape Integrity 79The Guilford Battle Ground Company’s Commemorative Layer 83Character Areas 84

Treatment Recommendations

Treatment Recommendations for the Battle-era Landscape 90General Treatment Recommendations for Commemorative Resources 95Greene Monument-Amphitheater Landscape 96Visitor Center Landscape 96Superintendent’s Residence-Maintenance Complex 97Newly Acquired Tracts 98

Bibliography 107Appendix A 111Appendix B 112

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Figures

1 Regional Context for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. 62 Detail of John Collet’s 1770 “A Compleat Map of North Carolina.” 93 New county creation in the North Carolina backcountry before the Revolution. 124 1781 British plan of the Battle of the Guilford Court House. 165 The “Tarleton”map of the Battle of Guilford Court House, 1787. 176 Detail of Guilford County from 1808 Price-Strother map. 247 Raleigh Taylor’s conjectural plan of Martinville. 258 Author’s revised conjectural plan of Martinville. 269 Benson Lossing’s view of the battlefield’s eastern sector, 1860. 3010 Martinville, rendered by artist David Hunter Strother, 1857. 3111 Reverend Eli Caurthers’ 1856 plan of the battle. 3412 Judge David Schenck’s 1889 plan of the battle. 3513 Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1889. 3814 A train thunders through Guilford Battle Ground Park, circa 1893. 3915 The Clyde and Leonidas Springhouses, circa 1893. 4016 Guilford Battle Ground Park, circa 1893. 4017 Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1892. 4118 Lake Wilfong, circa 1893. 4119 Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1903. 4220 The Nash & Davidson Arches, 1905-1937. 4321 Guildford Courthouse Land Acquisition Map, 1911 - 1970s. 4422 Greene Monument, 1924. 4523 View of Green Monument landscape, circa 1936. 4724 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1933. 4925 Administration Building, 1935. 5026 Superintendent’s Residence, 1935. 5027 Utility Building and Inflammable Storage Unit, 1935. 5028 Superintendent’s Residence - Maintenance Complex, 1935. 5029 General Planting Plan, 1936. 5230 Superintendent’s Residence Area Planting Plan, 1936. 5431 General Development Plan, 1938. 5532 Outdoor Amphitheater Plan, 1938. 5633 Amphitheater stage and portico, circa 1939. 5734 The Anderson inholding, circa 1940. 5835 The Webb property, no date. 5836 Intersection of Martin’s “Trespass” and New Garden Roads, circa 1949. 5837 Detail of a 1957 aerial photograph of the park. 5938 Development Concept Plan, 1973. 6139 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park:  Existing Conditions. 6740 Old Battleground Road. 6541 Overflow Parking Lot. 6642 Intersection of Old Battleground Road and the tour road’s southern route. 6643 Transition between New Garden Road’s modern and historic courses. 6644 The New Garden trace intersecting Old Battleground Road . 6945 New Garden’s restored course. 69

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46 View of the New Garden trace exiting the woods. 6947 The convergence of the New Garden trace and the paved tour road. 6948 The  comfort station at Tour Stop 6. 7049 The former “Holt Avenue” stretch of the tour route. 7050 The divergence of the New Garden trace and the tour road. 7151 View of the Bicentennial Greenway. 7152 The “Martin Trespass” path. 7153 The park Visitor Center. 7254 View of Monument Row. 7255 The Superintendent’s Residence. 7256 The Utility Building and Inflammable Storage Unit. 7357 Remnant walkways and garden plot at Superintendent’s Residence. 7358 Quarters No. 2. 7359 The revised site of the Third Line, near Tour Stop 6. 7460 The former Third Line. 7561 “Schenck’s” field. 7562 Looking in the direction of the former drive-in theater. 7563 The gravel path from Tour Stop 8. 7664 The Greene Monument. 7665 Grass growing up between the brick joints on the amphitheater’s northern radial walk. 7766 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park:  Historical Base Map. 9967 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park:  Treatment Recommendations A. 10168 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park:  Treatment Recommendations B. 10369 Guilford Courthouse National Military Park:  Treatment Recommendations C. 105

Figure Credits

Cover:  Sir Henry Clinton Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan.

Figure 1: GUCO Cultural Landscapes Inventory, 1998; Figure 2: Collet, 1770; Figure 3: Corbitt, 1950; Figure 4: Sir Henry Clinton Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan; Figure 5:  Tarleton, 1781;  Figure 6:  Price, 1808;  Figure 7:  Hatch, 1970;  Figure 8:  Plan by author;  Figure 9:  Lossing, 1860;  Figure 10:  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1857;  Figure 11:  Caruthers, 1856;  Figure 12:  Schenck, 1889, copied from Hatch, 1971, Plate 8;  Figure 13:  GUCO Archives;  Figures 14-16:  Schenck, 1893;  Figure 17:  GUCO Archives; Figure 18:  Schenck, 1893;  Figure 19:  NPS Plan 316.1023;  Figure 20:  GUCO Archives;  Figure 21:  Baker, 1995;  Figures 22-23:  GUCO Archives;  Figure 24:  NPS Plan 316.41005.1;  Figures 25-28:  GUCO Archives;  Figure 29:  NPS Plan 316.2000.1;  Figure 30:  NPS Plan 316.2000.3;  Figure 31:  NPS Plan 316.1009.1;  Figure 32:  NPS Plan 316.1020;  Figure 33:  GUCO Archives;  Figures 34-37:  GUCO Archives;  Figure 38:  NPS Plan 316.40004;  Figure 39:  NPS, SERO Cultural Resources;  Figures 40-65:  Photos by author;  Figures 66-69:  NPS, SERO Cultural Resources.

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Foreword

We are pleased to make available this cultural landscape report as part of our ongoing effort to provide comprehensive documentation for the historic structures and landscapes of National Park Service units in the Southeast Region.  Many individuals and institutions contributed to the successful completion of this project.  We would especially like to thank Guilford Courthouse National Military Park Superintendent Charles Cranfield, former Superintendent Bob Vogel, and park staff for their support and contributions to this work.  Thanks also to Lucy Lawliss, Lead, NPS Park Cultural Landscapes Program, for her knowledgeable guidance throughout the project.  Finally, we would like to recognize the labor and dedication of John Hiatt, author of this report.  We hope that the study will be a useful tool for park management and for others interested in the history and significance of the many cultural resources at Guilford Courthouse. 

Dan ScheidtChief, Cultural Resources DivisionSoutheast Regional Office

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Acknowledgments

Several persons were instrumental in the conception and preparation of this report and deserve special thanks.  I owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Lucy Lawliss, Lead, Parks Cultural Landscape Program, for her invaluable input at every phase of the project.  She served not only as a supervisor, but also as a mentor; her sincere encouragements, advocacy, and technical expertise made my task all the more manageable and enjoyable.  I am likewise especially grateful to Bob Vogel, former Superintendent Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (now Superintendent, Cape Lookout National Seashore) for his ambitious vision for the battlefield’s rehabilitation and for his enthusiastic support.  Supervisory Park Ranger Steve Ware, Park Ranger Don Long, and Park Historian John Durham, all of Guilford Courthouse NMP, warrant recognition, too, for their assistance in gathering essential materials and for their vast knowledge of the battle as well as the park’s cultural and natural resources.  In addition, I wish to acknowledge independent historian Dan Stebbins for his research on the Guilford Court House community and the county court minutes.  His willingness to lead me to references regarding the area’s road development and other germane bits of evidence facilitated the research.  Credit also goes to Susan Hitchcock, Historical Landscape Architect, NPS Southeast Regional Office, and David Hasty, Cultural Landscape Inventory Coordinator for the NPS Southeast Region, for their assistance with several technical aspects of the report.  I further wish to recognize Archeologists John Cornelison and Lou Groh of the NPS Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) for furnishing archeological data and analysis of recent excavations at Guilford Courthouse NMP.  Last but certainly not least, I wish to thank independent landscape architect Susan Vincent for her contribution to the treatment recommendations as well as John Robinson and Peter Callahan, both professors of landscape architecture at North Carolina A&T State University, for their initial efforts on this project.

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Introduction

Management SummaryThis cultural landscape report provides treatment recommendations for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO), Greensboro, North Carolina (fig. 1).  The 220.25-acre park commemorates the pivotal Battle of Guilford Court House1 and interprets its significance within the greater context of the American Revolutionary War.  As the first Revolutionary War battlefield site to be preserved as a national park, GUCO (established in 1917) currently serves as the centerpiece of a National Historic Landmark district.  This district encompasses about 320 acres of battlefield land and consists of federal, municipal, and privately owned properties. 

The park comprises not only many features associated with the 1781 Battle of Guilford Court House, but it also contains a myriad of significant post-battle features, such as archeological remains from the town of Martinville (established at the county seat in 1785) and other cultural resources connected with the battlefield’s commemorative period, which began in earnest in the mid-1880s.  During the final decades of the twentieth century, the park underwent considerable infrastructural development, and, therefore, embraces several non-historic resources as well, including an automobile tour route and comfort station, an overflow parking lot, and a modern visitor center.  

Officially absorbed by Greensboro in 1984, GUCO lies in one of the most rapidly growing quarters of the city.  Consequently, it and its immediate environs 

face the numerous challenges unique to historically rural, vernacular landscapes that are now beleaguered by urban sprawl.  Incompatible residential and commercial development, which crowds around the park’s boundaries, has consumed nearly all of the remaining unprotected portions of the battlefield, while the volume of commuter traffic passing through the park (on Old Battleground and New Garden Roads) continues to increase at an alarming rate.  These untoward effects of the area’s urbanization, coupled with the presence of GUCO’s own contemporary infrastructure, serve to compromise the historic scene, making it difficult for visitors to fully appreciate the significance of the resource.  The park, therefore, has been moving toward a rehabilitation of the battle-era landscape.  This effort, components of which are outlined in the park’s 1997 General Management Plan, will necessitate removing certain intrusions and mitigating the impact of others.  Furthermore, recent research has led to important revisions in the interpretation of the battlefield landscape, particularly regarding the location of the third American battle line.  To properly tell the story of Guilford Court House, the landscape will need to more accurately reflect these revisions so as not to confuse the visitor.  Thus, certain areas in the park may require different treatment and management in the future.  

As a necessary preliminary to any landscape rehabilitation scheme, this report provides the following:

a) treatment recommendations for the park’s historic landscape features, both battle-era and commemorative,  

b) treatment recommendations for the park’s non-historic infrastructure, 

c) a separate set of treatment recommendations for a component landscape within the park: the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex (built 1934-1937), and, 

1.  In the eighteenth century, courthouse was generally written out as separate words, i.e., court house.  The authors of all extant participant accounts of the battle spelled its name accordingly; however, sometimes the “h” in house was not capitalized or the words were hyphenated.  Congress modernized the spelling to courthouse when it established Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in 1917.  Since “Guilford Court House” is the historically appropriate construction, it will be used in this report when referring to the engagement itself.   

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INTRODUCTION

 d) guidance on interpreting the landscape’s multiple layers in relation to battle era.

While this report by no means purports to be an interpretive document, it is hoped that the site history herein will furnish the park with material that will enrich interpretation of the periods before and after the battle.

Historical SummaryThe park embraces the central core and most-intact remnant of the Guilford Court House Battlefield, preserving approximately one-fourth of the entire area over which the fighting occurred.2  A pivotal engagement of the Revolutionary War’s climatic southern campaigns, the bloody clash that put the backcountry hamlet of Guilford Court House on the map represented the culmination of a dramatic four-month contest of wills between the armies of 

American Major-General Nathanael Greene and British General Lord Charles, Earl Cornwallis.  On 15 March 1781, General Greene deployed his 4,400 continentals and militiamen on the rising ground west of the county seat, and fought a savage defensive battle against a smaller but quite formidable British army.  The ever-aggressive General Cornwallis, resolving to crush his adversary once and for all, ordered his 1900 disciplined veterans forward in spite of the odds, attacking across open ground as well as through a seemingly impenetrable forest, before finally driving Greene’s army from the field of battle.  This impressive accomplishment earned him the right to claim victory, but, ironically, the British triumph at Guilford Court House bore every consequence of a defeat.  Cornwallis had gained little more than possession of the field at a cost of over one-fourth of his army, a deprivation that rendered him unable to continue operating offensively.  The American army, conversely, not only sustained comparatively lighter losses (only about six percent), but also retreated in good order, thereby remaining intact to fight another day.

Too crippled to realistically achieve the reconquest of North Carolina, Lord Cornwallis had little choice 

2.  Thomas E. Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion: An Administrative History of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (National Park Service, 1995), 1n3.  

FIGURE 1. Regional Context for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.

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INTRODUCTION

but to withdraw from the interior and led his weary troops to the port of Wilmington on the coast.  The British general, long convinced that Virginia was the strategic key to the South, then made the fateful decision to march northward into the Old Dominion.  In October 1781, only six months after the Battle of Guilford Court House, combined French and American forces, led by General George Washington, compelled Cornwallis to surrender his greatly reinforced army at the Virginia port of Yorktown.  Though sporadic fighting would continue until 1783, the devastating defeat at Yorktown essentially sealed Britain’s fate in America, ensuring the independence of the United States.

Within the park’s boundaries, identifiable features directly related to the Battle of Guilford Court House include: the restored course of the historic New Garden (Old Salisbury) Road, the battlefield’s principal axis; archeological remains from the Guilford Court House (later Martinville) community; the center sections of the positions held by the first and second American lines; as well as the ground defended by the left wing of the third American line.  The park also contains assorted cultural resources and features associated with the early commemorative efforts of the Guilford Battle Ground Company (GBGC).  During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the GBGC superimposed a designed memorial landscape over the core of the battlefield.  The most notable vestiges of this designed landscape are twenty-three monuments and gravesites3; the bed of artificial Lake Wilfong (drained and reforested by the NPS in the 1930s); the remnants of two sugar-maple allées; portions of other company avenues (now assimilated into the modern tour route); and 

the archeological remains of several company structures demolished in the 1930s.  In addition, the park boasts significant historic structures constructed during the Park Development Era of the 1930s.  These structures include a terraced-earth amphitheater, a Colonial Revival superintendent’s residence, and Colonial Revival utility facilities. 

Site BoundariesLocated off of U.S. 220 (Battleground Avenue) in Greensboro, North Carolina, about six miles northwest of the city’s downtown business district, the park encompasses roughly 220 acres of land situated around the junction of New Garden and Old Battleground Roads.  The latter road, running along an approximate north-south line, bisects the park into two unequal portions.  The largest portion stretches eastward from Old Battleground to Lawndale Drive, which doubles as the park’s easternmost border.  Heading back westward from Lawndale Drive, GUCO is bounded on the south successively by Greensboro Country Park, Forest Lawn Cemetery, and a strip of commercial property situated at the corner of Old Battleground Road and the park’s southern boundary line.  A nearly unbroken arc of residential development—including single-family homes, townhouse communities, and apartment complexes—hems in the park’s western and northern boundaries.

Scope of Work and MethodologyBoth field study and a thorough examination of the historical record are essential prerequisites to any attempt to devise a comprehensive set of treatment recommendations.  Such research enables investigators to peel back and scrutinize the “layers” of a given landscape, affording a better understanding of the complex relationship between its continuity and change over time.  Consequently, the site history section of this report charts the evolution of the landscape that presently constitutes Guilford Courthouse National Military Park through all of its developmental stages, specifically documenting the accumulation, retention, modification, and/or eradication of integral natural and cultural resources.  The site history also necessarily places past developments and certain 

3.  Five additional extant memorials were erected during the War Department’s tenure (1917-1933), thereby accounting for the park’s current total of twenty-eight monuments and gravesites.  With respect to the gravesites, the Guilford Battle Ground Company succeeded in having the remains of ten Revolutionary statesmen and soldiers reinterred at various spots within the park.  Some of these gravesites were adorned with formal monuments, while others were marked with traditional headstones.  Two of the monuments, namely the Hooper-Penn and the Delaware, stand above the remains of two and three individuals respectively.  Thus, for the sake of convenience, these multiple burials are deemed to constitute one gravesite apiece, permitting one to say that twenty-eight monuments and gravesites currently lie within the park.   

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INTRODUCTION

landscape treatments into broader historical and cultural contexts in order to establish their levels of significance.  An evaluation of the park’s existing conditions follows the site history, providing the baseline from which to assess how closely the contemporary landscape corresponds to the scene at the time of the battle in 1781.  Such analysis, in turn, makes it possible to propose recommendations for the future treatment and interpretation of the park’s landscape resources. 

The park’s leadership, in commissioning this report, primarily seeks guidance on how best to manage the overall landscape in relation to its battle-era features (principally the three battle lines and the historic New Garden Road).  Involving a number of circulatory and interpretive issues, this is a complicated and delicate operation, especially when one considers that recent research has demonstrated that the location of the third line was misidentified during the early commemorative period.  Authorities now convincingly maintain that the third line actually stood about 400 yards east of its previously interpreted position, i.e., the monument-marked field located between Tour Stops 5 and 7.4  Although the battle era constitutes the landscape’s defining period of significance, the park’s staff also acknowledges the considerable importance of Guilford’s commemorative layers and requests direction regarding their proper treatment.  

Of specific interest here are the component landscapes associated with the highly visible General Nathanael Greene Monument (erected 1915) and the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex (established during the Park Development Era of the 1930s).

Time constraints precluded an exhaustive examination of the historical record; nevertheless, this CLR rests on a strong foundation of primary sources.  Including both published and unpublished materials, the primary sources utilized herein take the form of participant accounts of the battle, travel narratives, newspaper articles, various land records, colonial and state records, period maps, and government documents (statutes, bills, and acts).  GUCO’s own extensive, if not diffuse, files (consisting of superintendent’s narratives, correspondence, photographs, construction plans and reports, etc.) greatly inform the content of this report as well.5 In addition to the original hardcopy files, the park also owns microfilm copies of selected GUCO records reposited at the National Archives (Record Group 79).  

One manuscript collection deserves special mention for its inestimable value in documenting the landscape’s treatment during the early commemorative period.  This collection comprises the voluminous papers of Judge David Schenck, the progenitor of the battlefield’s preservation movement.  The Schenck Papers are part of the Southern Historical Collection, housed in the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH).  Other institutions and repositories visited during the course of this project include the North Carolina Collection (also on the campus of UNC-CH), the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, and the Guilford County Courthouse in Greensboro.

Naturally, the work of other scholars likewise played a vital role in adding substance to this report.  Any student of Guilford’s cultural landscape would be 

4.  In the early-1980s, two members of GUCO’s current staff, Park Historian John Durham (then an undergraduate at UNC-Greensboro) and Park Ranger Don Long, along with former Park Interpreter Thomas Taylor, began to question the accuracy of the third line’s then-interpreted location near present-day Tour Stop 7.  Judge David Schenck, the “father” of the battlefield’s commemoration movement, had identified this location as such back in the 1880s and his interpretation went virtually unchallenged for a century.  The three investigators, however, reached a different conclusion after having reexamined the best primary sources in relation to the park’s topography.  Principally basing their new theory on the scale and terrain features depicted on the 1781 map “Battle of Guildford” (refer to fig. 4), produced within days of the engagement, they advanced the contention that the third line actually stood about 400 yards east of the judge’s designated site.  This puts the third line just east of Hunting Creek on the ridgeline that extends northwest from Tour Stop 6.  John Durham then argued the case for revision in his 1987 paper “Historical Marking of the Third Line of Battle at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse” (copy in GUCO Files).  By the mid-1990s, former Park Historian Tom Baker had endorsed the theory for revising the third line’s site and conducting archeology to confirm the location, which  precipitated an ongoing controversy. 

5.  During the preparation of the CLR, the park was engaged in a reorganization of the library and archives.  Records, consequently, were scattered between the visitor center and Quarters No. 2, and many pertinent documents were found in unmarked boxes with unrelated materials.  This made it impossible to specify the exact locations of certain records within the greater corpus of archives; thus, “GUCO Files” suffices as the all-encompassing collection name in such instances.

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INTRODUCTION

remiss in not acknowledging the debt owed to both Charles Hatch’s historic resource study Guilford Courthouse and Its Environs (1970) and former Park Historian Tom Baker’s pathbreaking administrative history Redeemed From Oblivion (1995).  Combined, these two studies constitute a considerable body of research and analysis, tracing Guilford’s evolution from the colonial period to the mid-1990s.  Thus, they are indispensable additions to any bibliography on the subject.  Also of note are two theses on the park’s development: Oliver B. Ingram’s The Preservation of Guilford Battleground (1972), and, to a lesser extent, Dennis F. Daniels’ Guilford Courthouse National Military Park: The Early Years With A Concentration on the 1930s and 1940s (1994).  A host of other secondary sources from several disciplines provide context and background information on a variety of topics, ranging from the specific (such as area’s physiography, settlement and land-use patterns, and ethnography) to the general (such as the preservation/commemoration history of the United States).  

Summary of FindingsMore than two centuries have passed since the fields and woodlands west of Guilford Court House resounded with the concussive din of musketry and clashing steel.  In that eventful span of time, Guilford’s once-rural site context has experienced a sustained and striking suburban metamorphosis—a phenomenon that has been on the upswing since the mid-twentieth century, when large sections of the greater battlefield landscape was affected by the “manifest destiny” of Greensboro’s expansion.  On contemporary maps of the city, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO), which preserves about one-fourth of the battlefield’s total acreage, resembles a small nucleus of greenspace encapsulated within a frenzied and ever-thickening “electron cloud” of residential and commercial development.  Yet even more intrusive to the park’s interpretive goals than the surrounding subdivisions and strip malls is the fact that commuter politics have imposed an unfortunate permeability upon the park’s boundaries.  Screen plantings may buffer views of incompatible neighboring development, but they will never be able to mitigate the subversive effects of the traffic that daily cuts through GUCO’s heart on stretches of two public roads.  

Of additional concern is the park’s own infrastructure and visitor service facilities.  At various places in the park, these modern features (especially the interpretive tour road) interrupt, overlap, or come into some form of conflict with primary historic features.  This confusing overlay of historic and modern elements, coupled with the fact that the park’s vegetation only loosely corresponds to battle-era patterns, impedes the visitor’s ability to grasp the crucial role that topography played in dictating the tactical dynamics and movement of the battle’s action.  Furthermore, the sites of such key cultural resources as the first Guilford Court House and the Reedy Fork “Retreat” Road, which bore such prominence in the 1781 landscape, have yet to be conclusively pinpointed.  Consequently, the discontinuities between the contemporary and battle-era settings pose considerable challenges to effective interpretation at Guilford because they have eroded the immediacy and comprehensibility of the landscape’s defining historic event.

Despite the changes outlined above, this report finds that the battle-era “layer” of the park landscape possesses a high degree of integrity; that is to say, its historic essence remains intact despite certain alterations and modifications, the majority of which are quite reversible.  By implementing an extensive and methodical program of rehabilitation, the park can bring the battlefield landscape into a better state of correspondence with its conditions at the time of the bloody clash between Greene and Cornwallis.  Treatment recommendations along these lines propose the removal, relocation, or impact-mitigation of the most intrusive features, while at the same time addressing the park’s need to retain the balance of its current infrastructure for interpretation, circulation, and visitor comfort.  Since a more accurate depiction of battle-era land-use patterns would greatly enhance interpretation, this report also recommends the park to begin opening up the wooded areas west of the first and third line positions to simulate the field systems that existed there at the time of battle.  Inversely, replanting is proposed for inappropriate clearings, such as the former third line (or “Schenck’s”) field, which would have been forested in 1781.    

While the primary focus centers on rehabilitating the battle-era landscape, the recommendations also include strategies for treating and managing the park’s valuable commemorative resources.  Several 

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INTRODUCTION

monuments and buildings, in fact, remain from both the Guilford Battle Ground Company (1887-1917) and Park Development (1933-1942) eras, both of which were watersheds in Guilford’s developmental history.  Each period’s extant features, moreover, reflect a particular set of cultural attitudes and ideas concerning preservation and memorialization.  In essence, they serve as material testaments to the evolution of historic preservation philosophy in the United States.  Thus, the park’s commemorative resources have acquired historical significance in their own right and warrant preservation and interpretation as vital components of the cultural landscape.  

Finally, with respect to the park’s commemorative layers, this report concludes that the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s designed landscape has sustained such a considerable loss of integrity that it fails to meet the eligibility requirements for the National Register.  In light of this finding, the Revolutionary War-era remains the sole period of significance for Guilford’s overall landscape.  On the other hand, the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex, a character area installed during the Park Development Era, does satisfy the National Register criteria and merits nomination as a component landscape of significance.

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Site History

The Pre-Colonial Setting

PhysiographySituated in north-central North Carolina, the Guilford Court House battlefield—with its low, irregular ridgelines, sinuous creeks, and narrow ravines—possesses terrain features typical of the piedmont physiographic region to which it belongs.  The piedmont, in its entirety, extends from northern New Jersey down into central Alabama, embracing the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain.1  Earth scientists have traced the origins of the piedmont’s dissected topography to a geological upheaval that occurred during the late Paleozoic era.  Roughly 300-million years ago, the drifting predecessor of the African continent collided with North America’s ancestral landmass, thrusting up a mountain chain, comparable in size to the Himalayas, along the eastern coast of the latter.  (A sizable portion of this range covered what is now the North Carolina piedmont.)  But after the continents broke apart 100-million years later, erosion inexorably reduced the peaks for thousands of millennia, leaving an undulating plateau between the dramatic rise of the Blue Ridge and the modest relief of the coastal plain.2  In the Carolina piedmont, river and stream activity continued to define the intricate contours of the plateau, cutting narrow valleys from rock of 

variable hardness and sculpting the region’s characteristic well-rounded hills and long, rolling ridges.3  

Soil, Climate, and Vegetation Besides helping to carve the piedmont’s distinctive surface features, the region’s watercourses, during periodic flooding, deposited sediments beyond their usual banks and thereby produced rich alluvial soil in adjoining bottomlands.  Consequently, the first settlers of European descent to take up residence in the region typically established themselves along the rivers and streams so as to exploit the superior quality of the alluvial soil.  Within the bounds of present-day Guilford County (the unit of local government in which the battlefield lies), colonists would have found these fertile, waterborne soils bordering the main arteries and tributaries of the Haw and Deep, a pair of diminutive rivers that rise respectively in the northwestern and southwestern sections of the county, before merging in Chatham County to form the more substantial Cape Fear.  On the eve of European settlement, however, alluvial soils accounted for only a small fraction of those covering the land that now constitutes Guilford County.  The most widespread class of soil intrinsic to the area was residual in nature—i.e., formed from the decomposed residuum of underlying rock.  Twentieth-century soil surveys have revealed that the battlefield landscape, though now somewhat disturbed by extraneous infill, once chiefly contained residual soils of the Cecil series.  Still widely distributed in the North Carolina piedmont, these well-drained, if only moderately productive, soils generally consist of layers of sandy loam, sandy clay loam, clay loam, and mottled clay (moving from topsoil to substratum).  As the earliest planters of the 

1.  Named after a region of analogous terrain in northern Italy, the piedmont—or the “foot of the mountain” as the term literally translates—occupies about 40% of present-day North Carolina.  Topographically, the Carolina piedmont rises gradually from east to west, generally displaying only a few hundred feet of variation in local relief.  Elevations range from as low as 400 feet above sea level on the region’s eastern margin (approximated by the fall zone) to 2,000 feet at the foot of the Blue Ridge escarpment.  The Guilford Court House vicinity contains elevations that vary between 800 and 900 feet.  See Jasper L. Stuckey, North Carolina: Its Geological and Mineral Resources (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, 1965), 16, 19; United States Geological Survey, ”Lake Brandt, North Carolina” Quadrangle, 1951, revised 1994. 

2.  Douglas M. Orr and Alfred W. Stuart, The North Carolina Atlas: Portrait for a New Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 10-11, 17; Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990), 11-12.  

3.  Stuckey, North Carolina: Its Geological and Mineral Resources, 19.

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Carolina interior discovered, the yellowish-red Cecil soils, which naturally include high concentrations of potash, lent themselves well to the cultivation of staple grains, such as corn and wheat.4

In addition to suitable soils, the piedmont’s temperate climate further enhanced its potential for agriculture.  Climatologists doubt that the meteorological conditions of the region have changed significantly since the eighteenth century; thus, the colonial inhabitants of north-central North Carolina most likely enjoyed around 44 inches of annual rainfall, dispersed fairly evenly throughout the year.  With considerable amounts of moisture and relatively short winters, the piedmont afforded a growing season of over 200 days, which the area attractive to early settlers.5

Before colonists began to settle in the region, bringing with them cultural practices that would fundamentally transform the prevailing woodland setting, the piedmont boasted expansive, nearly unbroken, tracts of oak-hickory-pine forest.  The canopy of this predominantly hardwood forest included a variety of oak species—including the white (Quercus alba), black (Quercus velutina), scarlet (Quercus coccinea), southern red, or Spanish (Quercus falcata), and post (Quercus stellata)—as well as embracing such common hickories as the shagbark (Carya ovata), mockernut (Carya tomentosa), and pignut (Carya glabra).  These majestic oaks and hickories competed for canopy space with the fast-growing tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) and the black gum (Nyssa sylvatica).  In wetter areas, particularly along the floodplains of streams, star-leafed sweetgums (Liquidambar stryraciflua), red maples (Acer rubrum), thicket-forming alders (Alnus serrulata), and the once-ubiquitous white elm (Ulmus americana) thrived, bringing a diversity of foliage to the woodland.  In spite of their preponderance, broadleaf trees did not monopolize the forest.  The 

occasional trunks of shortleaf (Pinus echinata) and loblolly (Pinus taeda) pines rose up into the latticework of spreading crowns, adding an evergreen presence to largely deciduous surroundings.  The dogwood (Cornus florida) and sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum) were the most prominent understory trees.6

In certain areas of the virgin forest, the dense canopy of tall hardwoods restricted the understory’s growth by preventing sufficient sunlight from reaching the forest floor.  As a consequence, localized sections of open woodland occurred, presenting unobstructed spaces between trees that were large enough to accommodate travelers on horseback.  Native American cultural groups in the piedmont, intending to improve their hunting grounds, achieved similar results through the use of controlled burning.  This periodic practice eradicated the targeted underwood, while generally sparing the larger, more mature trees.7 

American Indian Habitation of the North-Central PiedmontGiven the likelihood that nomadic groups of subsistence forager-hunters appeared in the Carolina Piedmont as early as 8,000 BC,8 one might expect to find traces of American Indian material culture associated with this itinerant behavior within the confines of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  No significant American Indian site, however, has been identified on or in the immediate vicinity of the Guilford Court House battlefield, though important settlements did exist relatively nearby.  During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, two Siouan cultural groups—the Keyauwee and the Saura (Cheraw)—occupied 

4.  Robert C. Jurney, et al., Soil Survey of Guilford County (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1923; microfilm version, Atlanta: Solinet, 1994), 171-177, passim; Ronald B. Stephens, Soil Survey of Guilford County (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1977), 5, 8-10, Sheet No. 15.  

5.  Stephens, Soil Survey of Guilford County, 1; Orr and Stuart, The North Carolina Atlas, 25, 26; Harry Roy Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Historical Geography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 44.  

6.  Orr and Stuart, The North Carolina Atlas, 35; Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 46-47; Paul A. Delcourt and Hazel R. Delcourt, “Vegetation Maps for Eastern North America,” in ed. Robert C. Romans, Geobotany II (New York: Plenium Press, 1981), 142, 152; Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 21.  

7.  “Scotus Americanus,” Informations Concerning the Province of North Carolina (Glasgow, 1773), in ed. William K. Boyd, Some Eighteenth Century Tracts Concerning North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Co., 1927), 441; Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 21, 59-62. 

8.  H. Trawick Ward and R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr., Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 1-2, 37.    

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villages located within a forty-mile radius of the  Battle of Guilford Court House site.9   

In the early-1730s, the prolific Virginia planter, William Byrd II, visited one of the Saura’s former towns on the Dan River near the North Carolina-Virginia border (fig. 2).  Byrd, who penned a brief account of his sojourn there, noted that the Saura “had been a considerable nation” until the incursions of Iroquoian peoples from the north compelled them to abandon their homeland in the first decade of the eighteenth century.  Retiring 

southward, they joined the Keyauwee, who resided in a palisaded village near present-day Asheboro.  The merged groups later resettled on the Pee Dee River in the Cheraw District of South Carolina, where they were apparently assimilated into the Catawba nation sometime before 1739.10

Despite the fact that the Saura lived dozens of miles distant from the future battle site, they may have left 

9.  Stanley A. South, Indians in North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1965), 47; John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), 109-110, 144-145.  

FIGURE 2. Detail of John Collet’s 1770 “A Compleat Map of North Carolina,” showing the abandoned Saura towns (top).  Note:  Guilford Court House was not constructed until the mid-1770s, so it does not appear on Collet’s map.  Its approximate location, however, lies between Horsepen and Richland Creeks of the Reedy Fork, northeast of New Garden Friend’s Meeting House (center).

10.  William Byrd II, “A Journey to the Land of Eden,” in ed. Louis B. Wright, The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1966), 398, also see Wright’s “Introduction”, 31; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1967), 56; Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States, 109-110, 144-145.  

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a cultural impression in its immediate environs.  This possibility is suggested by the observations of a group of Pennsylvania Quakers, who moved to the North Carolina piedmont in the mid-eighteenth century and established the settlement of New Garden near present-day Guilford College (located about four miles southwest of the park).  While surveying the surrounding countryside, the newly arrived Quakers reportedly found tracts of open grassland.  The Saura, certain historians have posited, may have employed fire to create and maintain these fields for either hunting or agricultural purposes.11 

The Genesis and Settlement of North Carolina, 1663-1770

The Colony’s Founding and the Formation of the Granville DistrictKing Charles II officially created the province of Carolina in 1663, when he granted its charter to eight of his staunchest aristocratic allies.  As originally constituted, the new proprietary colony, at least in theory, comprised all of the territory between colonial Virginia and Spanish Florida, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the “South Seas” (Pacific).  By the 1690s, two distant population centers had developed in Carolina, prompting the proprietors to divide the prodigious province into administrative units in the north and south.  In 1712, North Carolina, which had been under the rule of a deputy governor for twenty years, finally received its own chief executive and thus became a separate political entity.     

During the following decade, proprietary mismanagement convinced the Board of Trade in London that the two Carolina provinces should be brought under royal control.  In 1729, governmental officials persuaded seven of the eight proprietors to sell their rights to the crown, and, later that year, North Carolina was officially converted into a royal colony.  The one abstaining proprietor, John, Lord Carteret, would have to wait until 1742 to receive his 

one-eighth share of the original Carolina charter.  Consolidated into a single district, Carteret’s claim essentially embraced the northern half of North Carolina, extending from the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge.  Although he agreed to forfeit his privilege to participate in the colony’s administration, Lord Carteret retained the right to dispose of his land, and collect profitable quitrent revenues, as he pleased.  Carteret, however, never visited his vast North Carolina landholding, which became known as the Granville District after he inherited the title Earl Granville in 1744.  Instead, he appointed agents to manage the affairs of his land office in the colony.  The unscrupulous practices of some of these agents brought disrepute upon the lucrative office.  Nevertheless, it remained in operation up until the Earl’s death in 1763, issuing thousands of grants to incoming settlers before its closing.12

The Great Migration: Settlement of the BackcountryThe population of provincial North Carolina remained largely restricted to the seaboard and inner coastal plain for three-quarters of a century after the colony’s founding.  Spearheading what would soon evolve into a migration of colossal proportions, small groups of settlers began to infiltrate the Carolina interior, or backcountry as contemporaries dubbed it, in the mid-1730s.  By the 1750s, the intermittent trickle of immigration had accelerated into a seemingly inexhaustible torrent that continued unabated until the outbreak of the Revolution.  While some immigrants moved westward from the coast or north from South Carolina, the overwhelming majority of them came overland from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.  The sustained influx of new citizens from the north effected a dramatic rise in the colony’s overall population, which doubled to about 70,000 between 1730 and 1750.  By 1770, the number of inhabitants, province-wide, had risen to 180,000, half of which resided in the piedmont’s seven westernmost counties.13

11.  Ethel S. Arnett, Greensboro, North Carolina: The County Seat of Guilford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 7; Hiram H. Hilty, New Garden Friends Meeting (Davidson, NC: Briarpatch Press, 1983), 3.

12.  Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 32-33, 87-88; Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 18, 24; Thornton W. Mitchell, “The Granville District and Its Land Records,” The North Carolina Historical Review 70 (April 1993), 103-107, 114-116, 127.  

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Lured by the prospect of cheap, arable land, the immigrants who streamed into the North Carolina backcountry consisted of peoples from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds.  Settlers who could trace their ancestry to the British Isles, primarily the Scots-Irish and the English, accounted for the greatest portion of the incoming masses; however, colonists of German heritage arrived in considerable numbers as well.  Persons of African descent also contributed to the diversity of the population, although to a lesser extent at this early stage, as only a modicum of newcomers either brought or could afford to purchase slaves.  Extant tax lists for representative counties indicate that only about ten percent of backcountry households owned slaves in the early 1760s, and those that did held only a few.  Furthermore, certain religious groups that established residency in the piedmont were morally opposed to slavery and refused to tolerate the institution in their communities.  One of these groups, the German-speaking Moravians, a Protestant sect from what is now the eastern Czech Republic, purchased a 100,000-acre tract, which they named “Wachovia,” from Granville’s land agents in 1753.  They established three successful towns (in and near present-day Winston-Salem) and contributed greatly to the backcountry’s emerging economy.14  

Like the Moravians, who ventured down from other settlements in Pennsylvania, many of the immigrants who moved into the western sections of the Granville District entered North Carolina via the “Great Wagon Road”.  This extensive highway originated in Philadelphia, ran south through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, then continued southward, crossing over the piedmont region of the two Carolinas, before eventually terminating in Augusta, Georgia.15  In upper North Carolina, the wagon road, running southward from the Dan River, passed through the Wachovia tract, roughly thirty miles to the west of the Guilford site, and then 

headed south toward Salisbury, the seat of Rowan County (established in 1753).  

Regardless of what route they followed into the Granville District, new residents were permitted to acquire up to 640 acres of land in return for an annual quitrent of three shillings sterling per 100 acres.  Granville’s modest land prices allowed the majority of settlers to secure tracts containing over 200 acres, with the typical grant ranging between 300 and 400 acres.16

Backcountry Land-Improvement MethodsAfter receiving their land grants, the settlers undertook the arduous tasks of constructing dwellings and clearing sections of the hardwood forest for agricultural purposes.  In the mid-1750s, Arthur Dobbs, governor of North Carolina between 1754-1765, observed and recorded the improvement practices of the recent settlers.  “[T]heir method upon entering their Lands,” the governor related, “is to cut down, where they build their Loghouses, all the Trees fit for logs.”  The timber left over from home construction would then be used to “make rails to fence their corn field.”  In areas designated for fields, backcountrymen burned the forest to eliminate the “underwood,” and then girdled the surviving trees.  The technique of girdling, adopted from the Native Americans, entailed cutting a sizable ring out of a given tree’s bark, a treatment that would, in turn, cause the tree to die within a year.  “[W]ith one horse plow,” Dobbs went on to report, the settlers prepared “the upper swad [sic] of grass and sow[ed] their Indian corn etc. among those dead Trees,” letting them rot for a few years before finally felling them and leaving their stumps to decay.  In addition to corn, backcountry farmers cultivated a variety of other crops, including wheat, barley, rye, oats, flax, and hemp.  Some even experimented with indigo and cotton on a limited basis.17  It was necessary, however, to ensure that good fences protected the crop fields because farmers typically allowed their livestock to range free for forage in the surrounding woods.18   

13.  Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 54, 66; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 96, 98-99, 218-219. 

14.  A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 7; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 96, 104, 106; Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century, 61-62, 75, 80-81.

15.  Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 129.  

16.  Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”, 129-131.17.  Governor Arthur Dobbs to the Board of Trade, 24 

August 1755, in ed. William L. Saunders, The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 5 (Raleigh: P.M. Hale, 1886), 356, 362-363. 

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Guilford, 1770-1777

The Establishment of Guilford CountyThe need for installing government on the local level increased as immigrants continued to pour into the North Carolina interior during the mid-eighteenth century.  Responding to the requests of the burgeoning backcountry populace, the General Assembly established several new counties, including Guilford, in the piedmont between 1750-1771 (fig. 3).19  First introduced as a bill before the legislature in early-December 1770, the “Act for erecting a new County...by the Name of Guilford” officially became law after receiving Governor William Tryon’s assent on 26 January 1771.20  The new unit of local government, formed from portions 

of Orange (1752) and Rowan (1753) Counties, was named in honor of Francis North, Earl of Guilford, whose more famous son, Lord Frederick North, became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1770.21    

In the preamble of the Guilford Act, lawmakers disclosed the justification behind the county’s establishment, declaring that “the great Extent of...Rowan and Orange [Counties] render[ed] the Attendance of the Inhabitants...[,]to do Public Duties in their Respective Counties, extremely Difficult and Expensive.”22  The decision to create the new county, however, was based on more than just a concern for the convenience of backcountry citizens; it was also a political expedient designed to diffuse a volatile protest movement that had been escalating in the backcountry since the mid-1760s.  The proponents of this movement—primarily small 

18.  [Anonymous], American Husbandry, ed. Harry J. Carmen (London, 1775; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 241, 243; John S. Otto, The Southern Frontiers: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 56.

19.  David L. Corbitt, The Formation of the North Carolina Counties, 1663-1943 (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1950), passim. 

FIGURE 3. A barometer of growth:  new county creation in the North Carolina backcountry before the Revolution.

20.  Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 8: 290, 353, 383-384.  The Guilford County Act is reprinted in toto in Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23 (Goldsboro, NC: Nash Brothers, 1904), 823-826.   

21.  Corbitt, Formation of the North Carolina Counties, 113. 

22.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23: 823.  

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to middling planters from Rowan, Orange, and Anson Counties—sought to check, or “regulate,” the widespread corruption of county officials, who embezzled tax revenues, extorted exorbitant fees for required public services, seized private property arbitrarily, and imposed high regressive taxes on the county citizenry.  At first, the protestors, or “Regulators” as they styled themselves, pursued their anti-graft crusade non-violently, voicing their complaints through legitimate political channels.  But when the government failed to redress their grievances in a timely manner, the Regulators became defiant, refusing to pay taxes, assaulting many of the offending county officials, and even rioting in Hillsborough, the seat of Orange County, which essentially served as the epicenter of Regulator disturbances.23  

As Governor Tryon readily acknowledged, the desire to decentralize the Regulators figured prominently into the decision to create Guilford County.  “The erecting of Guilford County out of Rowan and Orange Counties,” Governor Tryon wrote in March 1771, “was[,] in the distracted state of this country[,] a truly political Division, as it separated the main Body of the Insurgents from Orange and left them in Guilford.”24  But the formation of Guilford County, in addition to three other new backcountry counties, neither mollified nor decentralized the Regulators, whose numbers continued to grow.  No longer willing to countenance the excesses of the insurgents, Tryon mobilized the still-loyal provincial militia, marched into the backcountry, and decisively defeated a superior Regulator force, thereby crushing the quasi-rebellion once and for all at the Battle of Alamance (fought near present-day Burlington) in May 1771. 

Building Guilford Court HouseSoon after the Regulator hostilities ended, a controversy of a far less violent nature erupted in 

Guilford County.  The legislation that established the county had also provided for the appointment of “commissioners for laying off...a Place, and thereon erecting a Court House, Prison, and Stocks,” the expense of which would be defrayed by “a Poll Tax of two shillings...laid on each taxable Person...for Three years.”25  By early-December 1771, the seven Guilford County commissioners—who included such prominent backcountrymen as Edmund Fanning, Alexander Martin26 (future governor of North Carolina), and John Campbell—had selected a location for the public buildings.  Not everyone, however, found this site agreeable, and John Kimbrough, a member of the General Assembly from Guilford County, asked his fellow legislators to consider a “Bill for altering the place fixed upon by the Commissioners for building a Court House.”  Although the Lower House initially appeared receptive to Kimbrough’s bill, the Assembly rejected it after about a week’s deliberation.27  

Contention over the placement of courthouses was an unfortunate but inevitable concomitant of new county creation.  It derived, in general, from the competition of locally influential men, who strove to locate the structure on their property so as to profit from the commerce that its presence would necessarily generate.28  Delays resulting from such disputes could last years, and, in fact, did in the case of Guilford County, for Kimbrough refused to concede victory to his rivals without a fight.  Enlisting the support of “sundry Inhabitants,” he revived his petition in February 1773.  Exasperated, the supporters of the commissioners filed a counter-petition, which included the signatures of nearly 250 county residents.  Aside from disparaging their opponents as self-interested agitators, the authors of the counter-petition informed the Assembly that the commissioners had “already laid 

23.  For an excellent and scholarly analysis of the Regulator Movement, see Ekirch, “Poor Carolina,” 164-202.  For a slightly different interpretation, see Marvin L. M. Kay and Lorin L. Cary, “Class, Mobility, and Conflict in North Carolina on the Eve of the Revolution,” in ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978): 109-154.  

24.  William Tryon to Lord Hillsborough, 12 March 1771, in Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 8: 527.  

25.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23: 824.

26.  As two fixtures in backcountry local government, both Edmund Fanning (an Orange County militia colonel and register of deeds) and Alexander Martin (a justice of the peace and crown attorney from Rowan County) had incurred the contempt of the Regulators.  Their appointment as commissioners seems to underscore Gov. William Tryon’s above-quoted admission that the creation of Guilford County “was...a truly political Division.”    

27.  Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 9: 110-111, 138-139, 180. 

28.  Christopher E. Hendricks, “Town Development in the Colonial Backcountry: Virginia and North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1991), 65. 

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out a...Convenient and Centrical Place” with “good Water and plenty of Timber for Carrying on the buildings.”  Ultimately, the commissioners and their advocates prevailed, and in March 1774, the legislature approved their chosen site.29  

According to the 1774 Act that authorized the construction of the courthouse, prison, and stocks, John Campbell, one of the Guilford Commissioners, had already deeded to the county one acre of land “whereon to erect said public buildings.”30  The lot was situated east of Hunting Creek and north of the historic Salisbury Road (locally known as New Garden Road), which connected Salisbury and Hillsborough, the seats of Rowan and Orange Counties respectively.31  Unfortunately, the deed between Campbell and Guilford County has not surfaced.  Title information contained in a later land record, however, reveals that the one-acre courthouse lot was originally part of a 350-acre tract that William Churton, a surveyor for the Granville District, purchased from the Earl’s land agents in 1762, when the area was still part of Rowan County.32  The Churton deed describes the tract as “Lying on both Sides of Hunting Creek[,] a fork of Rich Land Creek waters of the Reedy Fork of Haw RiverÖand on both Sides [of] the Main Buff[a]lo Road.”33  When Churton died in 1767, Edmund Fanning, who became one of the Guilford Commissioners in 1771, inherited the surveyor’s 350-acre tract located on both sides of Hunting Creek.  Fanning, in turn, apparently placed the tract in the trust of the corporation, Young, Miller, & Company.34  Perhaps then, John Campbell purchased the courthouse land from either Fanning or the corporation, or acted as an agent for one of 

the parties in the one-acre transaction with the county. 

The Guilford Commissioners may have received the go-ahead on the courthouse’s construction in 1774, but the exact date of its completion remains a mystery.  Unfortunately, the loss of the invaluable first decade (1771-1781) of the county’s Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions minutes, which would have certainly noted such an event, has severely compromised the ability of historians to reconstruct the early history of the county seat.35  The earliest known reference to the edifice as a standing structure dates to October 1776, when a Moravian diarist noted that a “General Muster had been held at Guilford Court-House.”  But whether or not the courthouse was in a serviceable condition at that time is questionable because, in 1777, the General Assembly passed “An Act for appointing Commissioners to finish the building of a Court-House, Prison and Stocks in the County of Guilford.”36 

The Battlefield Scene, 1781

The Guilford Court House Community The construction of Guilford Court House and its allied public structures created new economic opportunities and encouraged settlement in the vicinity of the county seat.  Perhaps seeking to capitalize on the commerce of citizens coming to 

29.  Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 9: 466, 479, 806-809, 927-928. 

30.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23: 972. 

31.  Before being impounded as part of a public works project in the 1930s, Hunting Creek was a fairly substantial stream that meandered along a north-south course through the eastern extremity of the battlefield.  Today, its sluggish remnant runs northward through the eastern portion of GUCO.

32.  Guilford County Deed Books, vol. 2: 131-132. 33.  John Carteret, Earl Granville to William Churton, 16 

March 1762, Secretary of State, Granville Land Grants, Grant #115-E (in mfm box 111A – 119J), North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina. 

34.  Guilford County Deed Books, vol. 2: 131-132; vol. 4, 510. 

35.  Evidence suggests that the British may have destroyed a portion of the county’s public records, perhaps including the first decade of the court’s minutes, after the Battle of Guilford Court House.  For instance, in 1784, the county court requested the duplication of a certain Daniel McCollum’s will, noting that “the original” had been “destroyed by the British” (see Guilford County, Minutes of the Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions, Book 1, microfilm (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1965), 108.  Hereafter cited as Guilford County Court Minutes.  For a more in-depth analysis of the possible British role in the destruction of the county’s public records, consult Dan Stebbins, “After the Battle: Joseph Hoskins and Guilford County in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Part 1 (bound report, dated 12 January 2000, GUCO Files), 19-20.      

36.  Adelaide L. Fries, ed., Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, vol. 3 (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Company, 1926), 1079; Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 24: 20-21. 

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perform their public duties, the merchants Thomas Henderson and Thomas Searcy, both of whom would later hold office in the local government, reportedly opened a store near the courthouse in the 1770s.37 As a population center, however, the community that grew up around Guilford Court House fell short of achieving the prominence of a Salisbury or Hillsborough, and probably supported fewer than fifty inhabitants, chiefly of Scots-Irish descent, at the time of the battle in mid-March 1781.38 

A Contemporary Map of the BattlefieldAttesting to the rural character of the courthouse’s environs, American General Nathanael Greene describes the area as “a Wilderness, with a few cleared fields interspersed here and there.”39  Greene, who elected to fight a defensive battle, believed that he could derive tactical advantages from the landscape’s patchwork of fields and forest.  For this reason—and because militia, whose unreliability in battle had proven disastrous to other American commanders, composed two-thirds of his 4,400-man army—the general divided his forces into three successive lines, placing the militia in the first two.  These citizen soldiers, Greene hoped, would degrade Cornwallis’ effective strength before the British reached the third line, where the bulk of the American regular, or Continental troops, would be waiting to deliver the crushing blow.40  The first and third lines stood partially in the rear of clearings, with the third also occupying a piece of high ground, while the second line was posted in an expanse of woodland in between.  Thus, to evict the Americans from their prepared position, the British army, containing only 1,900 effectives, not only had to attack across two open areas, being exposed to deadly small arms and artillery fire each time, but 

they also had to negotiate a forest, which was better suited for defensive rather than offensive operations.  The fact that His Majesty’s troops did just that, thereby winning the day, speaks volumes of the British army’s professionalism, discipline, and sheer resolve on 15 March 1781. 

The map “Battle of Guildford [sic],” produced by a British officer within days of the engagement, illustrates Greene’s portrait of the landscape and shows the locations of the three American lines in relation to some of the battlefield’s most salient topographic features (fig. 4).  As one of the primary sources showing the lineaments of the battle-period cultural landscape, this map is indispensable for its depiction of the area’s road network; the shape and extent of the fields that punctuated the otherwise forested setting; the distribution of major elevations and ravines; and the sites of structures in or near the path of the fighting.  Park Ranger Don Long and former Park Historian Tom Baker have attributed authorship of this map to Lieutenant Henry Haldane, an engineer on General Charles, Earl Cornwallis’ staff.41  Regardless of its attribution, the 1781 map probably served as the prototype for the more polished engraving that British Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton included in his famous A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, printed in 1787 (fig. 5).  The “Tarleton map,” which has the distinction of being the first published plan of the Battle of Guilford Court House, corroborates the “Haldane” map in every essential detail, down to the misalignment of the directional arrow.  

In the late 1930s, Park Historian William Brandon compared the defining landscape features represented on the Tarleton map to the twentieth-century topography of the battlefield, and declared 

37.  Charles D. Rodenbough, “Thomas Henderson,” in ed. William S. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 3, H-K, 107; Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 43, 194.   

38.  Charles E. Hatch, Jr., Guilford Courthouse and Its Environs (Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1970), 4; William Seymour, “A Journal of the Southern Expedition, 1780-1783,” in Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware, no. 15 (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1896), 19.

39.  Nathanael Greene to Samuel Huntington, 16 March 1781, in ed. Richard K. Showman, et al, The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 7 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 434.

40.  Greene also posted a contingent of regular infantry and cavalry on each flank of the first line to serve as “Corps of Observation” and to bolster the morale of the militia.   Since this report is concerned with the action of the battle as it relates to the landscape, it is beyond its scope to examine the tactical progression of the Battle of Guilford Court House.  The best book on the subject is Thomas E. Baker, Another Such Victory (Eastern National, 1981).  Also see Charles E. Hatch, Jr., The Battle of Guilford Courthouse (Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1971).

41.  GUCO Park Ranger Don Long and former GUCO Park Historian Tom Baker, personal conversation with author, September 1998.  The original 1781 “Battle of Guildford” map resides in the Sir Henry Clinton Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan. 

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the map “surprisingly accurate in most details,” with one major exception: he concluded that the north indicator needed to be turned counterclockwise 50× for proper orientation.  Despite certain flaws in his methodology, Brandon’s contention that the map’s “North Point...is more nearly Northeast than North” seems accurate, given the fact that the Salisbury (now New Garden) Road, seen connecting the two major clearings on the map, traversed the battlefield on an approximate east-west line.42  General Greene himself acknowledged that the battle “was fought a little west of Guilford Court House,” instead of southwest, as it would have been if the map’s compass point were correctly oriented.43  The exact number of degrees to which the directional arrow should be rotated leftward, however, remains somewhat debatable.

“A Considerable Plantation”: The Battlefield’s Western Sector.   For a contemporaneous written description of the battlefield that reinforces the 

land-use patterns depicted in the above-mentioned graphic representations, one does not have to look much further than General Cornwallis’ official report.  “We found the rebel army,” the general recounted a few days after the battle, “posted on rising grounds about a mile and a half from the court house.”  He then proceeds to describe the mosaic of forest and fields that characterized the landscape west of the county seat:

Immediately between the head of the [British] column and the enemy’s line was a considerable plantation, one large field of which was on our left of the road  [Salisbury Road], and two others, with a wood of about two hundred yards broad, between them, on our right of it; beyond these fields the wood continued for several miles to our right.  The wood beyond the plantation in our front, in the skirt of which the enemy’s first line was formed[,] was about a [half-]mile in depth, the road then leading 

FIGURE 4. The 1781 British plan of the Battle of the Guilford Court House, attributed to Lieutenant Henry Haldane.  Note:  For proper orientation, the north indicator should be turned counterclockwise approximately 50 degrees (annotations by author).

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into an extensive space of cleared ground about Guilford court house.44   

The “considerable plantation” that Cornwallis mentioned, undoubtedly the farmstead of Joseph Hoskins, is depicted in the bottom half of the 1781 “Battle of Guildford” map.  Hoskins and his family had emigrated from Chester County, Pennsylvania, 

acquiring, in 1778, a 150-acre tract of land situated west of the courthouse and “on both sides of the Main [Salisbury] Road”.  “It has been assumed over time,” as one historian has noted, “that the two small rectangles shown” near the bottom of the 1781 map “represent...the Hoskins House, and a dependency, probably a kitchen.”  Recent dendrochronology, however, has demonstrated that the structure traditionally believed to be the original eighteenth-century Hoskins House (currently located in Tannenbaum Historic Park) actually dates to the late-1850s.  While the two rectangular symbols on the map may in fact denote the location of the original Hoskins House and a dependency, one could just as easily argue, given the lack of any concrete evidence, that they might represent agricultural outbuildings instead of a dwelling and kitchen.45

Immediately above, or east (taking into account the error in the north indicator) of the two structure icons, the author of the 1781 map clearly delineates 

42.  For instance, Brandon used the traditional site of Guilford Court House (near GUCO’s Tour Stop 6) and the putative Hoskins House (located in Tannenbaum Historic Park) as fixed or given points.  (See William P. Brandon, “The Tarleton Map of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse: A Critical Study” [TMs, 1938, File A-11, GUCO Files], 2, 11, 27.)  The location of the courthouse, however, has yet to be pinpointed with certainty. 

43.  Nathanael Greene to Daniel Morgan, 20 March 1781, in ed. Showman, et al, Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 7: 455. 

44.  Charles, Earl Cornwallis to Lord George Germain, 17 March 1781, in Papers of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, Public Records Office, London, 30/11/76: 38-39.  GUCO owns a microfilm copy of the Cornwallis papers.

FIGURE 5. The “Tarleton”map of the Battle of Guilford Court House, so-called because it appeared in British Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s 1787 A History of the Campaign of 1780-1.  

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two contiguous fields, contrasted by vertical and horizontal dots, on each side of the Salisbury Road.46 Whether or not the two, pictured pairs of fields bordering the Salisbury Road were actually divided as such cannot be determined; interestingly enough, Cornwallis, in the quoted passage above, mentioned only one field along each side of the highway.  Perhaps, the general simply saw each pair as a single field, since together they would have constituted a more expansive clearing.  At any rate, these fields, which were reportedly still covered in corn stubble from the previous harvest on the day of the battle, composed the major open area in the western sector of the battlefield, encompassing approximately 35 acres in total.47  

The 1781 map also shows the third field that Cornwallis mentioned in relation to the “considerable plantation.”  It is depicted in the woods about 200 yards to the right, or south, of the fields configured around the Salisbury Road, and possibly contained close to 8 acres.  It is doubtful, however, that Lieutenant Haldane, if he did in fact execute the map, would have had the time or the inclination to take exacting measurements of the fields; therefore, their bounds are probably only rough approximations.

At the time of the battle, fences, presumably split rail in construction, framed the fields associated with 

the Hoskins plantation.  As British Commissary Charles Stedman related, the North Carolina militia, which constituted the center of the first American battle line, was “posted behind a fence in the skirt of a wood, with open ground in front,” and Lieutenant-Colonel Tarleton specifically stated that the North Carolinians stood “behind rails”.48  As further evidence, the North Carolina General Assembly, in 1771, enacted legislation that mandated the construction of fences in Guilford County.  To protect crops from “Damages done by Horse, Cattle or Hogs,” and to minimize the number of lawsuits that attended such destruction, the legislature decreed: “every Planter shall make a sufficient Fence about his cleared Ground under Cultivation.”49  Although split-rail fencing offered only minimal protection against British volleys, the center of the first American line still held a strong tactical position on rising ground and enjoyed a clear field-of-fire down into the cropland across which the king’s troops had to advance.  Since archeology has confirmed that the center segment of the first American line (shown directly behind fields on 1781 map) stood just east of GUCO’s western border, the general consensus holds that the eastern margins of “Hoskins” fields would have necessarily overlapped the park’s western boundary line.50

The Intervening Woodlands: The Middle Third of the Battlefield.   After passing the farmstead of Joseph Hoskins, a citizen or soldier, heading east along the Salisbury Road toward the courthouse in March 1781, would have had to travel through a half-mile stretch of oak-hickory-pine forest before reaching the cleared ground in front of the county seat.  General Greene positioned his second line (shown directly above the British army’s “Second Position” on the 1781 map) about midway through this forest, along the crest of a low, broken ridgeline that ran roughly perpendicular to the Salisbury Road.  (Today, GUCO preserves the center section of the 

45.  Guilford County Deed Books, vol. 1: 439; Stebbins, “After the Battle,” Part 1: 23-24; Herman J. Heikkenen, “Final Report: The Year of Construction of Hoskin[s’] House as Derived by Key-Year Dendrochronology” (TD, dated 28 January 2000, copy on file at Tannenbaum Historic Park, Greensboro, NC), 6.

46. Although it appears unnamed in the plan, the Salisbury Road, also known as the “Great State” or “Mane [sic]” Road, served as the area’s principal highway, linking the backcountry seats of Rowan, Guilford, and Orange Counties.  It also doubled as the battlefield’s axis, astride which the first two American battle lines took up position and up which the British army marched before deploying, west of the Hoskins plantation, into a formation perpendicular to the thoroughfare.

47.  According to American Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Lee, these fields “appeared to have been cultivated in corn the preceding summer.”  See Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, ed. Robert E. Lee (New York: University Publishing Co., 1869), 275.  The acreage estimate for “Hoskins” fields derives from the author’s rough calculations of each field’s surface area, applying the scale that appears in the top right-hand corner of the map.  

48. Charles Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, vol. 2 (London, 1794; reprint, New York: The New York Times & Arno Press, 1969), 337-338; Banastre Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America (London: T. Cadell, 1781; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 271.

49.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23: 854-855.  

50.  Two remote-sensing surveys were conducted in the first-line area during the late-1990s.  They fall under the following accession: SEAC Acc. 1309, GUCO 57 (see suffixes 1 and 2). 

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second line, which occupied the ground just east of the General Nathanael Greene Monument.)  A number of participants, including Greene himself, noted that “thick under brush” covered the forest floor, and Cornwallis complained, “[t]he excessive thickness of the woods rendered our bayonets of little use...enabl[ing] the broken enemy to make frequent stands.”51  With its dense distribution of trees and underbrush (which is more clearly represented on the 1787 “Tarleton” map), the woodland between the battlefield’s two major clearings not only provided effective cover for the American second line, but it also proved unsuitable ground for the application of eighteenth-century linear tactics, obscuring line of sight as well as disrupting the formations and unit cohesion of the advancing redcoats and the retiring rebels.  As a testament to the confusion that the woods engendered among the combatants, the vigilant British Sergeant, Roger Lamb, discovered General Cornwallis, who had lost his way, riding perilously close to a party of concealed American militiamen.  According to Lamb, “the saddle-bags” of the General’s mount “were under the creature’s belly, which much retarded his progress, owing to the vast quantity of underwood that was spread over the ground; his lordship was evidently unconscious of his danger.”  The sergeant, however, managed to secure the horse’s bridle and then dutifully led his commander back to safety.52   

Cornwallis was but one of many to fall victim to forest-disorientation, a condition which likewise affected whole regiments.  As a case in point, elements of the British right and American left, straying from their main lines, became embroiled in “a kind of separate action,” to use Tarleton’s words, and veered southeastward into the rugged and steeply undulating terrain now encompassed by Greensboro Country Park.  On the map attributed to Haldane, the diagonal lines, emanating from the right flank of the “Second Position”, denote this tangential movement.  The unnamed road, toward which these lines extend, however, has not been identified.53  None of the extant accounts of the 

battle make reference to this route, although it may have been used, or at least encountered, by the troops engaged in the “separate action.”

In addition to the three roads delineated on the 1781 map, evidence suggests that another thoroughfare may have traversed the Guilford landscape at the time of the battle.  As noted in the county court minutes for November 1781, an overseer was appointed to maintain the “Road leading from Mr. Bruce’s to the Court House.”54  This well-trodden backcountry lane, known alternately as the Bruce Road and Bruce’s Cross Road, ran southeastward from Bruce’s Mill (located on a branch of the Reedy Fork) and effected a junction with the Salisbury Road a short distance west of Hunting Creek.  Regrettably, the minutes antedating the August-1781 quarter session of court were destroyed, and, without such crucial records, the date of the Bruce Road’s establishment cannot be precisely determined. 

“An Extensive Space of Cleared Ground”: The Battlefield’s Eastern Sector.   By and large, the eastern third of the battlefield constituted the most topographically complex and culturally patterned component of the contested landscape.  The 1781 “Haldane” map depicts the third American line deployed atop a bilobate elevation that extends roughly northwestward from the perpendicular junction of the Reedy Fork and Salisbury Roads.  From this formidable defensive position, the Continental troops composing the third American line commanded the “extensive space of cleared ground about Guilford court house” to which Cornwallis referred in his official report.  This clearing (shown as a large, boot-shaped opening, with its “toe” pointing northward and wrapping around the southernmost lobe of the “third line” elevation) apparently comprised seven fields: two north of the highway and five, south.  General Greene described the fields below the third line as “old”, so whether or not they were fallow or still in use at the time of the battle remains unclear.55  Nevertheless, if one extrapolates their aggregate size using the scale found on the map, they, as a whole, seem to have embraced a little over 75 acres.  As previously mentioned, however, it is doubtful that 

51.  Greene to Huntington, 16 March 1781, in ed. Showman, et al, Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 7: 434; Cornwallis to Germain, 17 March 1781, Cornwallis Papers, P.R.O., London, 30/11/76: 40. 

52.  Roger Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War (Dublin: Wilkinson & Courtney, 1809; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 362. 

53.  Hatch, Guilford Courthouse and Its Environs, 65. 54.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 13. 55.  Greene to Huntington, 16 March 1781, in ed. 

Showman, et al, Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 7: 434. 

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the map’s author applied a surveyor’s rigor to his work.  Instead of precisely measuring the limits of each field and then drawing them on the map with strict adherence to spatial fidelity, he probably just approximated their extent, not intending for their boundaries to be translated literally, as if on a plat.  Notwithstanding this observation, the collection of contiguous fields in the immediate vicinity of the courthouse certainly formed the most expansive open area on the face of the battlefield.  

Within the confines of the fields located on the right, or south side, of the Salisbury Road, the cartographer of the 1781 map depicted five structures of indeterminate type and function.  These structures, one could argue, appear to have been part of two separate groupings: one containing two buildings and the other, three.  Perhaps then, each grouping represented a self-contained farmstead, which consisted of a dwelling house and the number of dependencies indicated thereon.  It also seems plausible that one of the structures could have been a dwelling-based tavern, given the convenient proximity to the courthouse.  In fact, about nine months after the battle, a soldier passing through the county seat noted the existence of an ordinary standing near Guilford Court House.56

Unfortunately, the owner or owners of the buildings shown on the 1781 map cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty.  As previously mentioned, Edmund Fanning, a leading backcountryman from Orange County, inherited the area as part of a 350-acre tract in 1767.  Sometime before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he apparently sold the tract or a portion of it to the merchants, Young, Miller, and Company.  (If Fanning or the merchants disposed of or leased any of this property, they left no record of it in the county’s early deed books.)  During the struggle for American independence, Fanning and his business associates remained loyal to Great Britain.  Their allegiance to the king cost them dearly, for, in 1778, the State of North Carolina confiscated all of their landholdings, including the aforesaid 350-acre tract, on which Guilford Court House had been erected in the mid-1770s.  The state held on to this property until May 1781, and thus still 

owned it when the battle was fought earlier that year.57 

In addition to the five structures shown south of the road, the “Haldane” map also includes the locations of the courthouse, depicted just above the Reedy Fork Road’s termination into the Salisbury Road, and what appears to be an unnamed rectangular building adjoining the opposite, or west, side of Reedy Fork Road.  The courthouse was obviously the most significant cultural landmark in the area, and, although its exact site still eludes definitive identification, evidence suggests that it stood somewhere near GUCO’s Tour Stop 6.  Its placement on the map indicates that it sat about 200 feet east of Reedy Fork Road and 80 feet back from the Salisbury Road.  But one should use caution when attempting to infer precise distances based on the map’s scale, because, in the case of the courthouse, the cartographer probably just observed that the edifice stood closer to the Salisbury Road than the Reedy Fork Road and drew its icon on the plan accordingly.  Fortunately though, the historical record corroborates the map’s depiction of the courthouse just above the intersection of the Reedy Fork and Salisbury Roads.  Lieutenant-Colonel Lee, in his Memoirs, wrote that the structure had been “erected near the great State road,” as the Salisbury Road was also known, and, in May 1782, the county court appointed an “overseer of the Road from the Court House to the Reedy Fork.”58  These are but two of a number of small, albeit telling, primary references that confirm the county seat’s location relative to the road network shown on the map.  One final note of importance regarding the courthouse’s situation is that it stood on an “eminence,” or as Lee wrote “on the brow of a declivity, which descends gradually for about a half mile...[before] terminat[ing] in a rivulet.”  The courthouse lot evidently overlooked the position held by the third American line; for it afforded a vantage point from which Nathaniel Slade, a local militiaman, reportedly recalled watching the savagely fought mêlée that preceded the American retreat down the Reedy Fork Road.59

Curiously enough, no illustration or description of the original courthouse’s appearance, let alone its 

56.  William Feltman, The Journal of William Feltman, of the First Pennsylvania Regiment, 1781-1782 (Philadelphia, 1853; reprint, New York: New York Times & Arno Press, 1969), 30.

57.  Guilford County Deed Books, vol. 2: 131; ibid., vol. 4: 510. 

58.  Lee, Memoirs, 275; Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 31. 

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construction details, has surfaced.  In the extant accounts of the battle, the participants merely mention it as a reference point when discussing topography or recounting the progression of the action.  This lack of descriptive accounts suggests that the courthouse was a rather unexceptional structure, or at least presented such an ordinary aspect that it failed to inspire praise, disdain, or even the use of a single qualifying adjective.  Luckily, the minutes of the county court offer a clue as to what type of building the courthouse was.  In February 1782, the court found it necessary to award a contract to the lowest bidder for underpinning the courthouse “on blocks or pens.”60  Inferring from this court order, one can easily reach the conclusion that the building was earthfast in construction, “that is, standing or lying directly on the ground or erected in postholes.”61  Subject to the ruinous effects of ground moisture and rising damp, the wooden groundsills and/or the embedded posts of earthfast structures gradually and sometimes rapidly decayed, depending on the conditions.  This deterioration naturally compromised the structural integrity of such buildings and necessitated the intervention prescribed by the county court. 

Although neither shown on the map nor mentioned in the extant participant accounts of the battle, the county jail was probably also standing on the courthouse lot at the time of the battle.  Two pieces of evidence support this claim.  First, in July 1780, a Moravian observer noted that local Whigs had conducted “some captured Tories to Guilford Courthouse.”62  While this reference far from proves the existence of the jail, one could infer that the Whigs, being cognizant of the facility’s serviceability, brought their prisoners there for incarceration.  Furthermore, the jail’s presence is mentioned incidentally in an oral tradition preserved by Rev. Eli Caruthers, a local minister with an abiding interest in the Battle of Guilford Court House.  The reverend related that when the American army began to 

withdraw from the field, a retreating militiaman, “being wrapt [sic] in his blanket, became very warm; and as he passed the jail stuck it in a crack not doubting that he would return again in a few minutes.”63  Of course, the veracity of oral traditions is always somewhat suspect, for even if the interviewer records them with fidelity and objectivity, there is always the possibility that the person or persons recalling the events distorted the facts (either intentionally or inadvertently) over the years.  With that said, at least Caruthers’ credibility seems tenable, owing to the fact that he actually walked the battlefield with a number of surviving veterans and collected their reminiscences. 

Caruthers also noted the presence of another structure that is not depicted on the map attributed to Lieutenant Haldane.  According to the reverend, the British departed Guilford Court House “without doing any harm to the village, except [for] burning the house of Mr. Campbell, who lived at the northwest corner of the court-house, and who was an active Whig.”64  Could this have been John Campbell, the county commissioner who conveyed the one-acre lot on which the county’s public buildings were erected?  The proximity of “Mr. Campbell’s” home to the courthouse certainly suggests prior ownership of the lot.  One historian has even advanced the compelling theory that Campbell, who served as the clerk of court, used his own home as a repository for the county’s public records, as was often customary in fledgling counties.  Thus, when the British burned his house, they also destroyed a portion of these records, which explains the loss of the first ten years of the county court’s minutes.65        

The Battlefield’s Watercourses.   Perhaps the most perplexing characteristic of the 1781 map is its omission of Hunting and Little Horsepen Creeks, two meandering streams that cut across the battlefield landscape, running roughly perpendicular to the Salisbury Road.  Had the author of the 1781 map included these integral water features, it is doubtful that the controversy surrounding the location of the third American line 

59.  Stedman, History of theÖAmerican War, 341; Lee, Memoirs, 275; Rev. Eli W. Caruthers, Revolutionary Incidents, And Sketches of Character Chiefly in the “Old North State”, 2nd series (Philadelphia: 1856), 118. 

60.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 21. 61.  Cary Carson, et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the 

Southern American Colonies,” in ed. Robert Blair St. George, Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 114, 151n3.  

62.  Fries, ed., Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, vol. 4: 1553. 

63.  Rev. E. W. Caruthers, A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Rev. David Caldwell (Greensboro: Swaim and Sherwood, 1842), 234; see also Caruthers, 

Revolutionary Incidents, 2nd  series, 121-122.  64.  Caruthers, Revolutionary Incidents, 2nd series, 173. 65.  Stebbins, “After the Battle,” Part 1: 19-20. 

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would have ever emerged.66  Since Hunting Creek’s location, in relation to the battlefield’s other salient topographic features, has profound implications on the interpretation of the battle, it is important to try to delineate its course on the “Haldane” map.  Toward this end, Lieutenant-Colonel Lee’s Memoirs—which contains the only extant participant account of the battle to specifically mention watercourses—provides assistance.  In a somewhat garbled explication of the battlefield’s topography, Lee observes: 

On the right of the road [heading westward from the courthouse] is open ground with some few copses of wood until you gain the last step of the descent, where you see thick glades of brushy wood reaching across the rivulet.”67  

If this rivulet was Hunting Creek, then it would have traversed the “courthouse” fields, perhaps running roughly coterminously with the clearing’s western margins.  Logic certainly dictates that the local farmers would have established crop fields close to Hunting Creek in order to take advantage of the alluvial soils found in its floodplain.

Little Horsepen Creek, the other major stream that the author of the 1781 map neglected to depict, essentially served as the battlefield proper’s westernmost boundary.  This stream presently follows a rather sinuous northwest-southeast 

course just west of U.S. 220 (Battleground Avenue).  Its exact location on the map is difficult to pinpoint, but it definitely ran below, or west of, the first British position, shown as “Order of Battle”.

From Guilford Courthouse to Martinville, 1779-1857 

The Establishment of MartinvilleAlexander Martin (1738-1807), the son of a schoolteacher and justice of the peace from Hunterdon County, New Jersey, moved south from his native province in the early-1760s and eventually established himself in the backcountry town of Salisbury, the seat of Rowan County, North Carolina.  Educated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), Martin used his erudition not only to become a successful merchant in Salisbury, but also to gain entrance into the backcountry’s political establishment, securing appointments as a justice of the peace and crown attorney in Rowan County.  When the Provincial Assembly created Guilford County out of portions of Orange and Rowan in 1771, lawmakers selected the counselor as one of seven original commissioners.  In 1773, Martin decided to take up permanent residence in Guilford, settling northwest of the Guilford Court House community, near present-day Danbury (now in Rockingham County).  That same year, the county’s enfranchised inhabitants elected him, along with John Kimbrough, to represent them in the Assembly, and Martin soon emerged as a dominant political force in the county.68

A number of prominent Guilford residents, including Alexander Martin, evidently had greater aspirations for their fledgling county seat and perhaps believed that they could foster its growth and ensure its future by incorporating the community into an official town.  The first attempt toward this end occurred during the Revolutionary 

66.  In the late-nineteenth century, Judge David Schenck, the “father” of the battlefield’s preservation movement, fixed the location of the third line west of Hunting Creek, maintaining that its left flank occupied the elevation at present-day Tour Stop 7.  Schenck’s interpretation was accepted for more than a century; however, several students of the battle began to take issue with it in the 1980s.  The findings of further inquiries convinced the park’s staff that the third line actually stood east of Hunting Creek and its interpreted location has since been revised accordingly.  Archeologists from the Southeast Archeological Center, with the assistance of metal-detecting volunteers, surveyed the revised location in 1995 and did not uncover any military material culture in the area.  Consequently, a debate has erupted between historians and archeologists regarding the reinterpretation’s validity.  See Thomas E. Baker, Redeemed from Oblivion: An Administrative History of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (National Park Service, 1995), 7; John L. Durham, “Historical Marking of the Third Line of Battle,” (TMs, dated 9 April 1987), passim.  The accession number for the above-noted archeological project is SEAC Acc. 1189; the final report of the principal investigator, John E. Cornelison, Jr., was still in draft at the time of this report’s completion.

67.  Lee, Memoirs, 275. 68.  Elizabeth Yates, “The Public Career of Alexander 

Martin” (M. A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1943), 1-5; Charles D. Rodenbough, “Alexander Martin,” in ed. William S. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 4, L-0, 222-223.   

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War.  In January 1779, Martin, who now also held a commission as a colonel in the state service, went before the legislature and “presented a Bill to lay out and Establish a town on the land adjoining to the Court House in Guilford County."69  However progressively minded the local proponents of Martin’s bill may have been, their position might have also been informed by concern for the security of the county seat’s location.  It was probably no coincidence that Martin introduced his bill around the same time that the Assembly created the new county of Randolph out of the bottom third of the elongated rectangle that originally constituted Guilford County.70  This division left Guilford Court House, which had been relatively close to the geographic center of the county before the split, in the southern half of the newly truncated unit of local government.  This meant that the inhabitants in the northern part of the county had to travel a disproportionately greater distance to attend to their public duties at the courthouse.  Perhaps then, the constituency that Colonel Martin represented sought to incorporate the courthouse community in order to frustrate future attempts to move the county seat to a more central location—the expenditure of such a move would be exceedingly difficult to justify if the courthouse already stood in an established town with requisite supporting infrastructure in place.    

Whatever the intentions of the bill’s supporters, the State Assembly declined to act on the proposed legislation.  This reversal, however, only delayed the inevitable by a few years.  In 1778, the State of North Carolina confiscated the 350-acre tract, which embraced the Guilford Court House community from Edmund Fanning and Young, Miller, & Company.  Alexander Martin must have seen viability in the idea of establishing a town at the courthouse because, in 1781, he and his brother-in-law, merchant Thomas Henderson, purchased the full 350 acres from the state at public auction.71  The following year, the politically savvy Martin was elected governor of North Carolina, an office that 

he held through 1785, and then again between 1789-92.  Although preoccupied with the affairs of the state, Martin still found time to pursue his own private interests.  The development of the property around Guilford Court House clearly figured prominently into his personal economic agenda.  By the autumn of 1785, Martin and Henderson had laid out a town at the courthouse and had started selling off lots; the only formality that remained was to acquire an official charter from the Assembly.  In November of that same year, Guilford Representative John Hamilton, who kept a tavern at the county seat, took the matter before the legislature.72  This time, lawmakers responded favorably, and Hamilton’s bill became law on 29 December 1785.73  

Named Martinville (without an “s”) in honor of the governor, the newly chartered town contained 100 acres of land, including the one-acre public lot on which Guilford Court House stood, and consisted of a town proper as well as a town common.74  The proprietors, as stated in the Martinville Act, had founded their town in order to encourage and promote inland trade in their region of the state.  By the time of the town’s incorporation, “[d]ivers merchants, artificers, and other persons” had already “purchased lots, erected buildings, and made considerable improvements” in hopes of capitalizing on the new commercial opportunities.  “For the further designing, building and improving the said town,” the state legislature appointed six commissioners—William Dent, Ralph Gorrell, Robert Lindsay, John Hamilton, William Dick, and Bazilla Gardner—and later added Martin to the board.  These commissioners were additionally empowered to oversee the granting of the town’s 

69.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 13: 554. 

70.  The Act for establishing Randolph County appears in Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 24: 234-236. 

71.  The deed describes the property as a “parcel of Land situate lying in the County of Guilford Whereon the Court house of the said County now Stands on both sides of Hunting Creek.”  See Guilford County Deeds, Book 2: 131; Book 4: 510. 

72.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 17: 297; Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 37.

73.  The Martinville Act is reprinted in Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 24: 779-780.  Just as Alexander Martin’s original 1779 bill (for establishing a town at Guilford Court House) happened to coincide with the establishment of Randolph County, its second manifestation, which Representative John Hamilton introduced in 1785, appeared concurrently with the state’s decision to create the new county of Rockingham out of the northern half of Guilford. (Guilford County assumed its present-day size and configuration after this final division in 1785.)  For the Rockingham Act, see Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 24: 745-746. 

74.  In the Act, the town is described as containing “one hundred acres of land adjacent to and whereon Guilford court house now stands.”  

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lots.  Martin and Henderson were entitled to all of the profits generated from such transactions, after the commissioners had subtracted their own “reasonable charges and expenses.”  As a further provision, the Assembly enacted “that the springs and water courses in the said town shall be reserved for public use, and the inhabitants thereof shall have free egress and ingress to and from the same, by such streets and alleys as shall be...laid off by the said commissioners.”  William Dent (a county surveyor who purchased a lot in Martinville along with fellow commissioners Lindsay, Hamilton, and Dick) drew up a formal plan or plat of the town, but, unfortunately, it has not surfaced and presumably no longer exists.75 

Despite the efforts of its promoters, Martinville never evolved into a major commercial locus or population center in the North Carolina piedmont.  Between 1785 and 1802, Martin and Henderson granted only twelve town lots.  The governor also acted on his right, as stipulated in the town’s charter, to retain one lot of his choosing, which brought the final total of conveyed lots up to thirteen.76  After an initial buying rush in November of the first year, when the proprietors disposed of eight lots, interest in the town abated, and, by the mid-1790s, many of the original buyers had sold off their properties.77

The Town Plan Explicated     Even though William Dent’s plat of Martinville has not surfaced, the fundamental layout of the town, including the distribution of the lots, can be inferred from boundary descriptions found in the deeds.  These valuable, if imperfect, land records reveal that Martinville was originally centered on a traditional right-angled intersection that divided the town into quadrants.  The town’s planners designated these quadrants the North, South, East, and West Squares.  Each square, in turn, consisted of an indeterminate number of one-acre town lots, each of which measured 162 feet by 269 feet.  The two principal intersecting streets, named Green and Battle for obvious reasons, ran east-west and north-south respectively.  (Therefore, the squares were not 

precisely aligned with the compass points, i.e., the North Square, for example, actually constituted the northeast quadrant, and so on.)  Former Park Superintendent Raleigh Taylor has maintained that Green Street corresponded to the Old Salisbury Road and Battle Street to the Reedy Fork Road, which would have been extended southward from its junction with the main highway sometime between 1781 and 1785.78  Taylor’s assertion stands up to scrutiny and is strongly corroborated by the Martinville road network that cartographers Jonathon Price and John Strother delineated on their 1808 map of North Carolina (fig. 6).  This map shows the Salisbury Road, which ran between its namesake and the town of Hillsborough, passing through Martinville on an east-west axis.79  Furthermore, the Price-Strother map depicts only one road heading directly north from the town’s center and crossing over the Reedy Fork of the Haw River; thus, this thoroughfare must be the same road that the retreating American army used to retire from the battlefield on 15 March 1781.  The Salisbury and Reedy Fork Roads, as depicted on the 1808 map, clearly bisect each another at right angles, thereby creating the intersection around which the conventional blocks, symbolizing the town of Martinville, are configured.  A chain of title, 

75.  Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 24: 779-780.

76.  For the original deeds for these thirteen lots, see Guilford County Deeds, Book 4: 510, 512, 513, 515, 516, 518; Book 5: 159; Book 6: 315, 532; Book 7: 33, 72; Book 8: 29, 30.  

77.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 5: 128, 318, 558, 567; Book 6: 72.  

78.  Raleigh C. Taylor, “The First Guilford Courthouse and Adjacent Land” (TMs, dated 12 January 1953, GUCO Files, Guilford Courthouse NMP), 7.   

79.  After exiting the eastern side of town, the Salisbury Road became known as the Hillsborough Road, or the “Great Road leading from Hillsborough to Martinville” (see Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 217).   

FIGURE 6. Detail of Guilford County from the 1808 Price-Strother map “The First Actual Survey of the State of North Carolina.” 

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established for four lots in Martinville’s East Square, further buttresses this conclusion.  This chain not only demonstrates that the East Square lies within the boundaries of GUCO, but it also shows that it adjoins the south side of the restored Old Salisbury/New Garden Road, at present-day Tour Stop 6.80  Consequently, it seems safe to aver that Green and Battle Streets followed the pre-established routes of the Salisbury and Reedy Fork Roads respectively.  Essentially, the primary arteries took on secondary names while within Martinville’s limits, just as highways often change appellations upon entering cities today.  Since the town’s proprietors were seeking to foster the growth of the area’s economy, logic dictates that they would have wanted to incorporate the main trading routes into their townplan.  Furthermore, from an investor’s perspective, Martin and Henderson perhaps found it financially advisable—at least initially, before the town’s chartering—to take the path of least resistance by utilizing existing roads rather than incurring the expense of cutting new ones.  

Green and Battle, however, may not have been the only streets included in Martinville’s townplan.  In fact, the county court minutes contain the following intriguing, if not imponderable, entry from February 1788: “Ordered that Caleb Jessop, the overseer of the road from the Court House in Martinville to John Ballingers...Turn the Road 

Agreeable and Straight with the East and West Streets of Said Town.”81  Did the “East and West Streets” simply refer to the eastern and western sections of Green Street, as created by its intersection with Battle Street?  The context of the court order seems to suggest that the road to Ballingers’ required turning so that it would be axially aligned with the streets in question.  Or rather, did the “East and West Streets” run parallel to and on their respective directional sides of Battle Street?  If so, did Martinville have other cross streets, parallel to Green, making the townplan a classic grid pattern?  Unfortunately, this is the only reference to such streets found in the court minutes, and, while it provides fuel for further speculation, it remains unresolved. 

If one consults Raleigh Taylor’s conjectural map of Martinville, he or she will quickly notice organizational idiosyncrasies in the townplan, especially with regard to lot numbering and ordering (fig. 7).  No lots numbered “four” or higher than “six” were sold in Martinville.  The original townplan, nevertheless, must have included properties with such numerical designations—how else would one explain the configuration of the North Square, where Lot 5 bordered Lot 1 to the north, without a hypothetical Lot 4 adjoining the east side of Lot 3.  Although Taylor allowed no room for hypothetical Lot 4s on his map, the land records do not bear out his conclusion that the two Lot 3s (of the North and East Squares) shared boundaries with the “out-of-town” properties of Obediah Dick and John Dickey.  Judging from the numerical ordering of the lots in both of those squares, it appears that a Lot 4 would have necessarily flanked each Lot 3 on the east.  It should also be noted that Taylor’s placement of Lot 6 in the East Square is purely speculative; the deeds neither mention its boundary measurements nor note its location relative to the streets and other properties in town.82

The discrepancy in orientation between Lot 5 of the East Square and its counterpart in the North Square, however, complicates any attempt to reconstruct the entire townplan based on a consistently patterned sequence of lots.  The original deed for the East Square’s Lot 5 specifically states that it possessed 162 feet of frontage on Battle Street and extended back 269 feet.  Taylor, therefore, placed it on his map 

80.  See John Hiatt, “The Southeast Square of Martinville” (TMs, dated August 1998, GUCO Files), passim. 

FIGURE 7. Raleigh Taylor’s conjectural plan of Martinville.

81.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 321. 82.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 8: 29; Book 9: 144. 

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accordingly.  Conversely, Lot 5 of the North Square fronted Battle for 269 feet, reaching back 162 feet, and thus exhibited the same vertical alignment as the other lots.83  The reason for the East Square’s apparent deviation from the uniform lot-orientation of the other quadrants remains a mystery, but could have been the result of a simple clerical error.  Perhaps the county register accidentally transposed the dimensions of Lot 5 in the deed book, whereas in reality it actually conformed to the verticality of the others.  Further support for this theory may be found in an 1836 land transaction, in which the grantee purchased East Square Lots 1, 2, and 6 from one grantor and Lot 5 from another.84  The fact that the grantee united these four lots into one parcel demonstrates their contiguity and suggests that they, together, constituted a larger rectangle of land, with Lots 1 and 2 occupying the top half of the rectangle and Lots 5 and 6 mirroring them below.  If so, the townplan would have been more logically ordered and symmetrical, possessing the layout proposed in the second conjectural map of Martinville accompanying this report (fig. 8). 

The most popular addresses in town were the East and North Squares, where buyers purchased five and four lots respectively.  The owners of Lot 1 in both the North and East Squares further subdivided 

their properties, selling off parcels to other parties, which suggests that these two lots encompassed some of the most desirable property in town, perhaps due to their location at the intersection of Green and Battle Streets or their proximity to the courthouse.85  A flurry of tavern openings occurred in both of these squares during the first few years of the town’s development.  In 1786, the county court issued Richard Wilson, owner of Lot 5 in the North Square, a license to keep a tavern on his property.  Later that year, William Dent received a permit to establish a “public house” on Lot 2 of the same square.  Property owners in the East Square soon followed suit: Captain Patrick Shaw of Lot 3 obtained a license to keep a tavern at his dwelling house in 1787, as did William Dick of Lot 1 in 1788.  Countywide growth must have occasioned a need for additional accommodations in town because William Reed opened yet another tavern on his acre (Lot 1) in the South Square in 1792.86  

These competing tavern keepers undoubtedly enjoyed the greatest volume of business during the quarter sessions of the county court (held in February, May, August, and November).  At such times, inhabitants from various parts of the county arrived for a myriad of different purposes, such as registering deeds, settling the estates of deceased 

83.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 4: 516, 518. 84.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 22: 407, 408. 

West Square

South Square

Conjectural Townplan of Martinville

568 7

124 3

875 6

431

7

431 2

875 6

124 3

568

2

GREEN STREET (OLD SALISBURY RD.)BATTLESTREET(REEDYFORKRD.)

East Square

2000200 400 600 feet

Conjectural Lot

Actually sold lot

Size of lot

269ft.

162 ft.

N

S

EW

FIGURE 8. Author’s revised conjectural plan of Martinville.

85.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 5: 85; Book 8: 191, 319.86.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 183, 233, 270, 

318; Book 2: 166.   

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relatives, filing lawsuits, serving on juries, requesting licenses for taverns or mills, or petitioning for improvements in the public transportation network.  Merchants and peddlers (some local, some perhaps itinerant) took advantage of this predictable influx of potential consumers and periodically crowded into the public square to purvey their goods.  The clamor associated with these impromptu markets must have occasionally disrupted judicial proceedings because, in May 1804, county officials prohibited commerce “of any kind” in the public square while the court was in session.87

In addition to these transient markets, the town of Martinville also contained a permanent store. As one historian has related, the merchants Thomas Henderson and Thomas Searcy had established a store, under the name “Henderson and Searcy”, near the courthouse in the 1770s.  This store must have been incorporated into the townplan of Martinville in 1785, because it was still in operation in 1787, when future President Andrew Jackson briefly practiced law at the county seat before heading westward (to what is now Tennessee) the following year.88  A court order from August 1791 provides a clue as to the location of this store.  In this order, the court instructed the county clerk, John Hamilton, “to remove the house (formerly called the Store house) now the Office, that is on the Lot of Governor Martin and Thomas HendersonÖto his own lot for the purpose of Keeping the [county] Records.”89  Martin and Henderson had elected to retain Lot 1 of the West square, instead of offering it for sale, possibly because Henderson’s “Store house” already stood there.90  If Green and Battle Streets were indeed the Salisbury and Reedy Fork Roads, as evidence strongly suggests, then it is possible that Henderson and Searcy’s store appears on the 1781 British map (see fig. 4) and is represented by the building symbol shown across the Reedy Fork Road from the courthouse.  Henderson probably decided to close down the store after his partner headed west with Andrew Jackson and a few 

other local residents in 1788.91  This would explain why it subsequently became an office and was then moved, in 1791, to John Hamilton’s lot (Lot 5, North Square) to serve as a repository for the county records.  Although the existence of a mercantile business in town during in 1790s has yet to be uncovered in the historic record, someone certainly must have stepped in to fill the void left by Henderson and Searcy.  By 1803, the prominent local merchant and original Martinville commissioner, Robert Lindsay, was running a store out of a house located in the southeast corner of the North Square’s Lot 1.92

The Elusive Landmark: Locating the Site of Guilford Court House.   Regrettably, the limitations of the historical record have significantly frustrated efforts to ascertain the exact location of the most important building in town: the courthouse of Guilford County.  For the most part, the land records have proven unhelpful in this regard, as not one of the Martinville deeds contains even the remotest reference to the courthouse’s position relative to the town’s squares, individual lots, or streets.  This omission can be explained by the contemporary availability of Dent’s plat (now presumed destroyed), which would have illustrated such relationships, thereby precluding the need to verbally convey detailed situational information in the deeds.  Nevertheless, numerous references in the county court minutes at least confirm that the courthouse stood in Martinville proper and not outside of the town limits.93  Since the courthouse and its allied public structures predated Martinville, the proprietors had to layout their new town around the existing one-acre courthouse lot.  The dimensions of the public acre are unknown, but it is possible that they served as the precedent for the standard Martinville lot, which measured a peculiar 162 feet by 269 feet.  

However constraining the lack of forthcoming primary sources may be, historians are at least fortunate to have the 1781 “Haldane” map at their disposal.  This map, if one bears in mind the error in the orientation of its north indicator, places the site 

87.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 3: 312.88.  As the Novemeber-1787 Guilford County court 

minutes relate: “Andrew Jackson produced a license from the Judges of the Superior Court of Law & Equity to practice in this Court” (Book 1: 294).  Also see, Rodenbough, “Thomas Henderson,” in ed. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 3: 107; James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 1 (New York: Mason Bros., 1860), 114.   

89.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 2: 139. 90.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 6: 532. 

91.  Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson (New York: Twayne Pub., 1966), 24-25. 

92.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 8: 191.  93.  For example, the minutes record a 1788 appointment 

of an overseer “of the road from the Court House in Martinville to John Ballinger’s.”  See Minutes, Book 1: 321.  

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of the courthouse roughly east-northeast of the junction of the Reedy Fork and Salisbury Roads. These two historic thoroughfares, in all likelihood, corresponded to Battle and Green Streets in Martinville; therefore, the building would have necessarily stood somewhere in the town’s North Square.  The courthouse, along with the jail and stocks, occupied its own discrete acre, so it clearly could not have been situated within any of the four lots sold in the North square.  This leaves only two tenable alternatives: it either stood east of Lot 5 and north of Lot 2, in a hypothetical Lot 6, or east of Lot 3 in a hypothetical Lot 4.  The latter location better accords with the “Haldane” map, which shows the building closer to the Salisbury Road than the Reedy Fork Road.  But the fact that the court, as mentioned above, ordered Clerk John Hamilton to move the storehouse from Martin and Henderson’s lot to his own property, Lot 5 of the North Square, also suggests that Lot 5 was in close proximity to the public lot, since it would have been advisable to have the records’ repository close to the courthouse for the sake of convenience.

Guilford Court House is generally referred to as a single enduring building; however, recent research has demonstrated that a second structure replaced the original one in the early-1790s.94  This discovery has important implications on park interpretation because prior researchers have mistakenly applied a detailed description of the second structure to the first, thereby erroneously ascribing the architectural characteristics of the replacement to the original.95  Initially, in August 1787, the court engaged Captain Patrick Shaw of Martinville to repair the existing courthouse, which, when one considers the $400 sum appropriated for Shaw’s compensation, must have been in an advanced state of decrepitude.  But roughly a year after having issued the repair order, county officials decided to forego the building’s rehabilitation in favor of constructing a new courthouse.  Accordingly, the court drew up a second contract with Captain Shaw, voiding “his Bond Respecting the repairing of the old court house.”  Construction on the building lagged behind schedule and the court had to arrange to hold its 

sessions in a private residence, but Shaw finally completed the new courthouse sometime in the spring or summer of 1792.  In August of that year, the court—evidently seeking a comparison against which to assess the quality of the new structure—appointed a three-man inspection team “to go to Rockingham Court house and take the particular Dimensions of the same in Every Respect.”  They were also instructed to examine the “materials and workmanship” of the Rockingham Court House “and then view the Court house of this County and report the Difference if any to the next Court.”96  This comparative report vividly documents many of the second Guilford Court House’s construction details.  For instance, the inspectors noted that the new structure measured “thirty-six feet and some Inches in length and twenty-six feet in Width and Eleven feet nine Inches in Height,” while its porches were “Eight feet three Inches in Height and four feet deep.”  In most respects, the inspectors judged the workmanship of the new courthouse either equal or preferable to its counterpart in Rockingham County.  The contractor’s work, however, was not immune to criticism, for the inspection team also documented the following inadequacies: the courtroom floor was composed of “thin planks and bad Joints;” the majority of the structure’s windows lacked glass panes; its “underpinning” was left “unpainted;” and its chimney exhibited signs “of Indifferent workmanship.”  In May 1793, the court found further fault with the construction job, complaining that Shaw had failed to fully honor his contract by neglecting to point the underpinning and chimney with lime.97  The records do not indicate where Shaw erected the new courthouse, but if it did not go up on the site of its predecessor, then it certainly went up nearby in the one-acre public square.  Although the physical sites, or site, of the two courthouses have yet to be conclusively identified, all indicators suggest that their remains are located in the easternmost section of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.98

The Decline of MartinvilleThe second Guilford Court House remained in service until May 1809, when the court officially adjourned from Martinville and reconvened in the newly established town of Greensboro, named in honor of General Nathanael Greene.  The 

94.  Stebbins, “After the Battle,” Part 1: 31-34. 95.  See, for example, Hatch, Guilford Courthouse and Its 

Environs, 41-44; Trawick Ward and Joffre L. Coe, “Archaeological Investigations at the Site of Guilford Courthouse” (bound report, Research Laboratories of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill, 1976), 6-7, copy in GUCO library.  

96.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 1: 289-290; Book 2: 13, 61-62, 187.   

97.  Ibid., Book 2: 200, 212. 

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relocation of the county seat to Greensboro, situated about six miles southeast of Martinville, resulted from the political triumph of the so-called “Centre Party”, which had outmaneuvered the pro-

Martinville faction and won its bid to move the county’s administrative hub closer to Guilford’s geographic center.99  The county court’s quarter sessions, which consistently brought an influx of consumers into Martinville, had been the lifeblood of town’s economy.  But after the court resumed its functions in Greensboro, the area’s commercial focus also shifted there, and the former seat of local government, as one historian has observed, “began a half-century slide to extinction.”100

Land records for Martinville become scarce and nebulous in the period following the county seat’s relocation, making it impossible to track the ownership and conveyance of most individual lots.101  In fact, specific documentation has only been found for Lot 1 of the South Square and Lots 1, 2, 5, and 6 of the East square.  One William Brown purchased these five lots from three separate owners in 1836.102  By the mid-nineteenth century, Nehemiah Whittington had consolidated a number of parcels into one prodigious tract of land that encompassed the entire town of Martinville, with the exception of the five lots still owned by Brown.103  Although the 1833 MacRae-Brazier map of North Carolina shows several structures arranged around six roads radiating out of the center of Martinville, it is likely that most of the town’s buildings had fallen out of usage and were in various stages of disrepair at the time of the map’s printing.  A little over a decade later, author William Henry Foote, in his Sketches of North Carolina, Historical and Biographical, described Martinville as a virtual ghost town, noting: “the court-house is gone; [and] the village is wasted to a house;” that is to say, only one house was still occupied.  “Taking your stand on this highest ground, where the court-house stood,” 

98. A local tradition has fixed the site of the courthouse in the clearing across the restored New Garden (Salisbury) Road from the parking lot at GUCO’s Tour Stop 6.  The park acquired this property in 1934, by which time a local D. A. R. chapter had already marked the putative site with a commemorative pin oak tree (which still stands).  In 1972, preliminary to the construction of the comfort station and parking lot at Tour Stop 6, the National Park Service called in a team of archeologists to conduct a site survey of the area.  Roughly 100 yards east of the traditional courthouse site, the team uncovered the structural remains of a Martinville-era building, with a mean ceramic date of about 1824.  This discovery necessitated a slight adjustment in the tour route’s alignment and the relocation of the parking lot.  Two years later, the archeologists returned to excavate the reputed site of the courthouse, where they uncovered the vestiges of a post-in-the-ground building, measuring roughly 22  40 feet and possessing a mean ceramic date of 1801.4.  Though unable to definitively identify the remains, the archeologists maintained that they had found “a structure very similar to the old courthouse as described in the extant historical accounts.”  

Despite the inconclusive results of the archeology, the NPS continued interpreting the traditional site as the actual location.  Recently, however, the identity of the structural remains has been called into question.  For example, on the 1781 British map, the alignment of the rectangle representing the first courthouse indicates that its gables were on the east and west sides, but the remains unearthed at the traditional site are from a building with northern and southern gable ends.  (It seems doubtful that these remains could be those of the second courthouse either, not only because their dimensions do not agree, but also because they are from a posthole structure, whereas the second courthouse sat on a stone or brick foundation.)  Moreover, a chain of title, established for four contiguous Martinville lots, confirms that the East Square lies on the opposite side of the road from the traditional courthouse site.  This suggests that the traditional site lies in one of the first three lots of Martinville’s North Square.  Thus, the structural remains excavated there might be the vestiges of a store, tavern, dwelling house, or even a workshop.  In light of the East Square’s discovery in GUCO, however, it still seems likely that the courthouse site (or sites) exists within the park’s boundaries, since it probably stood somewhere in the North Square.  (See Taylor, “The First Guilford Courthouse,” 7; Guilford County Deeds, Book 865: 279, 293; Trawick Ward and Joffre L. Coe, “Preliminary Archaeological Tests: Guilford Courthouse” (bound report, Research Laboratories of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill, c. 1973), 25; Ward and Coe, “Archaeological Investigations at the Site of Guilford Courthouse,” 4, 14-21, 36; Hiatt, “The Southeast Square of Martinville,” passim.)

99.  Guilford County Court Minutes, Book 3: 462, 465; Arnett, Greensboro, 18-19. 

100.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 2. 101.  In 1814, for instance, Thomas Henderson, who 

became the sole proprietor of the town upon Governor Martin’s death in 1807, sold to Robert Lindsay “all that tract of landÖincluding the town of Martinville containing by estimation one hundred and thirty acres”  (Guilford County Deeds, Book 13: 41).  Did this substantial tract only include the remaining “unsold” portion of the 100-acre town or did it also embrace some of the original thirteen lots granted by Martin and Henderson?  In his will, probated in 1818, Lindsay left his wife “the Old Town tract,” which included his dwelling house, storehouse, and other outbuildings (Guilford County Wills, Book B, 66, #0462, in the Civil Index Vault, Guilford County Courthouse, Greensboro, NC).     

102.  Guilford County Deeds, Book 22: 407, 408. 

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he went on to say, “you may look over the whole battlefield.”  Regarding the general appearance of the battlefield landscape, Foote declared: “the face of the country is unchanged; the open fields and the woods retain the relative position of sixty years since.”104  This observation seems somewhat fallacious—albeit unintentionally so—given the fact that farmers and merchants continued to improve the area for years following the battle, not to mention the presence of many post-battle roads laid out during the Martinville era.  Such developments certainly altered the landscape’s field-to-forest ratio, if only subtly.  

When historian Benson J. Lossing visited the battlefield in 1849, he too found Martinville in a state of “desolation.”  “There are only a few dilapidated and deserted buildings left;” he reported, “and nothing remains of the old Guilford Court house but the ruins of a chimney.”  As he stood on an “eminence” at the junction of the Old Salisbury and Bruce Roads, he produced a sketch of the battlefield while looking east towards Martinville and “the site of Guilford Court House.”  An engraving based on this sketch later accompanied Lossing’s famous 1853 Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (fig. 9).  In explaining this illustration, Lossing recalled:

The log-house, partially clap-boarded seen on the right was uninhabited.  It stands near the woods which intervene between Martinsville [sic] and the plantation of Mr. Hotchkiss [Hoskins].  In the distance, near the center, is seen Martinsville and between it and the foreground is the rolling vale, its undulations formed by many gulleys [sic].105    

While Lossing stated that “[o]nly one house was inhabited, and that by the tiller of soil around it,” his illustration reveals that two clusters of buildings—one north of the Old Salisbury Road, the other, south—were still standing in Martinville in the late-1840s.106 

In addition to Foote and Lossing, the noted artist and travel writer, David Hunter Strother (who used the pseudonym, Porte Crayon), also made a pilgrimage to the Guilford Court House battlefield 

103.  In 1861, Whittington’s estate was divided into five separate tracts of land.  Tract 1, a 70-acre parcel, embraced the part of town lying on the south side of the public road (New Garden/ Salisbury), surrounding the five Martinville lots belonging to William Brown.  As specified in the deed, Tract 1 also contained a house and an old field at the time of the estate’s division.  By virtue of its location, the 110-acre Tract 2, which extended back from the north side of the public road in line with Tract 1, would have contained the North and West squares of Martinville.  See Guilford County Deeds, Book 35: 254-255.   

104.  William Henry Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, Historical and Biographical (New York: R. Carter, 1846; reprint, Raleigh, 1965), 277. 

105.  Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Harper Bros., 1860), 389, 405n2. 

106.  Ibid., 389.  An anonymous author visited Martinville six years after Lossing and left the following observations: “[n]ot a vestige of the old Court House is to be seen...Near it are several stone chimneys which indicate where the village once stood...nearly opposite these chimneys, there is still standing the Homestead and store of the Lindsays of a former generation.”  This visitor also left a wonderfully detailed description of the battlefield’s topography:  

From Martinville, in the road towards Salem, you immediately descend a steep hill, at the bottom of which is a deep ravine down which murmurs a gentle stream shaded by alder and other kinds of undergrowth.  On crossing this stream you immediately ascend a long sloping hill—From Martinville to near the top of this hill, the land is cleared for about half a mile on both sides of the road, and the brow of the hill is a little over half a mile from Martinville.  At this point, the brow of the hill, the road enters a dense oak forest and passes through it for about 500 yards.  In the latter 200 yards the road gradually begins to descend another hill; so that when you emerge for the forest you have a fine commanding view of a descending open country for about a mile ahead, and cleared about a mile in width.   

See, “For the Observer: Greensboro, Nov. 5th, 1855,” in Fayetteville Observer, 19 November 1855.  

FIGURE 9. Historian Benson Lossing’s view of the battlefield’s eastern sector, showing the town of Martinville (left center), as seen from the junction of Salisbury and Burce Roads, 1860

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and recorded his observations, both verbally and graphically, in a piece that appeared in the July 1857 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.  As the following quote attests, Strother came across a scene much like the one documented by his predecessors:

I reined up my horse in the midst of a group of ruined chimneys and decayed wooden houses, all, save one, silent and deserted.  There was no human in sight of whom to make an inquiry, but I knew instinctively that I was upon the field of Guilford.  The face of the country answered so well to the descriptions which I had read, and there had been apparently so little change since the day of the battle, that there was no difficulty in recognizing the localities.107

As with William Henry Foote’s comments concerning the unchanged state of the countryside, Strother’s sincerity is not in question here and it is highly probable that the battlefield’s key features were still quite legible despite certain alterations.  To someone not readily familiar with a given landscape, changes are often hard to detect and one could easily argue that the battlefield’s intrinsically rural condition led Strother, who expected to see a rural landscape, to believe that little had changed.  Sections of the battlefield, however, were still under cultivation at the time of Strother’s visit, for he encountered a “plowman” who “frequently turned up bullets, bayonets, and portions of arms and accoutrements that had withstood the tooth of time.”108  (The log house that Benson J. Lossing depicted at the corner of the Bruce and Old Salisbury Roads is a further indicator of change, as such a structure neither appears on the 1781 “Haldane” map nor is mentioned in any of the participant accounts of the battle.  This house is likewise represented on a later 1889 map of the Guilford battlefield [see fig. 12]). 

In his lithograph of Martinville, entitled “Guilford Court House” (fig. 10), David Hunter Strother depicted a grouping of structures in fairly good repair on the left side of the road, and, on the other side, he portrayed a thoroughly dilapidated building; the ruins of a chimney (perhaps that of the courthouse); a pile of debris; and a portion of a 

square-notched log structure.  Unfortunately, he neither indicated the direction he was facing when he first sketched the scene nor expressly identified the chimney ruins as belonging to the courthouse.  Although Strother remarked that he rode out of Greensboro, on route to Martinville, “at an early hour” in the morning, he apparently remained on the field most of the day, so trying to infer direction based on the inclination of the shadows is problematic.  Furthermore, it is impossible to know whether or not Strother took artistic liberties with his composition or if the image was accidentally reversed when lithographed.

Preserving and Commemorating Guilford Courthouse Battlefield, 1857-1917

Context: Evolving National Attitudes Toward MemorializationIn his 1857 Harper’s article on his visit to Guilford, the artist David Hunter Strother fervently expressed his pleasure at having found the battlefield in a near pristine condition, or, as he put it, “[u]nmarred by monuments” and “uncontaminated by improvements.”  Strother’s profound appreciation of the battlefield’s physical integrity—its ability, in his words, to evoke “the old times back, so fresh, so real, so near”—seemed to anticipate our own modern philosophy concerning the treatment of cultural landscapes, particularly the principle that 

107.  David Hunter Strother (Porte Crayon, pseud.), “North Carolina Illustrated: Guilford,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (July 1857), 163.  

108.  Ibid., 164. 

FIGURE 10. This illustration of a desolate Martinville, rendered by artist David Hunter Strother, appeared in the July 1857 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

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stresses the propriety of minimizing the number of scene-subverting intrusions allowed into historic space.  The historic preservation movement in the United States, however, was truly in its inchoate stage of development when Strother’s article first appeared in print, and the artist’s views held little currency among its early practitioners.  Moreover, American attitudes toward the veneration of the past had undergone a dramatic shift during the first half of the nineteenth century.  For decades following the establishment of the United States, many of the country’s most influential minds looked upon memorialization with suspicion and disdain, specifically decrying the building of monuments as a pursuit incompatible with republican values.109  Such thinkers maintained that memorializing acts were the province of a backward-looking monarchy, not a progressive democracy.  Yet, by mid-century, an upsurge in patriotism and filiopietistic sentiment had unleashed a new venerative spirit across the nation.110  At this time, many Americans, for various reasons, believed that the best way to commemorate momentous historical events, and those who participated in them, was through the placement of monuments on or near landscapes of significance.  Monumentation, consequently, not only became an integral adjunct of numerous early preservation endeavors, but it was often an end in itself.  

Coincidentally, the same year that Harper’s published Strother’s article, a group of prominent Greensboro citizens formed the Greene Monument Association for the purpose of erecting a monument to the general’s memory “upon the plains of Guilford.”111  Although locals had held a few sporadic celebrations and political rallies on the battlefield in previous years, the Greene Monument Association’s activities marked the first effort to permanently memorialize the battlefield.112  The outbreak of the Civil War, however, put an end to 

the organization’s plans and interest in commemorating the Guilford Court House battlefield, or any site associated with the Revolution for that matter, would not be popularly revived until the end of Reconstruction.113 

In 1876, a reawakening of patriotism pervaded the nation as Americans celebrated the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence.  In addition to enhancing awareness about the Revolutionary War in general, the Centennial undoubtedly helped to promote the nation’s healing process by encouraging both Northerners and Southerners to momentarily look beyond the horrors of the recent war toward the shared glories and nation-affirming legacy of the more distant past. Congress responded to the nation’s reanimated interest in its Revolutionary heritage during the centennial year by appropriating nearly $250,000 for the construction of monuments on eight battlefields.  Altogether, twelve bills soliciting public funds for monuments were introduced that year, including one for Guilford Court House—the Guilford bill, however, was one of only four that the legislature failed to enact.  The following year, the withdrawal of the last Federal occupation troops from the South further fostered sectional reconciliation.  As the spirit of nationalism increased, so too did public support for the establishment of memorials to honor the Revolutionary generation and its achievements. The House of Representatives, in response to this burgeoning commemorative zeal, commissioned historian Benson J. Lossing to identify Revolutionary War sites deserving of monumentation.  Lossing, who submitted his report to the House early in 1884, singled out Guilford Court House as one of fifteen primary battlefields that he believed merited considerable monuments.  Congress, nevertheless, declined to pass the enabling bill, H.R. 2435, which would have provided subsidies for such an undertaking.114

“Reclaimed from Desolation and Neglect”: The Vision of Judge David Schenck Although the preservation movement in America had crystallized into a crusade of national moment 

109.  Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 19, 25; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; reprint 1995), 105-114. 

110.  William J. Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (Pittstown, NJ: Main Street Press, 1988), 28, 37. 

111.  Greensboro Patriot and Flag, 25 September 1857.   112.  John T. Brittain, “The First Celebration of Guilford 

Battle” Greensboro Daily News, 1 July 1933; Oliver B. Ingram, “The Preservation of Guilford Battleground” (M.A. Thesis, Wake Forest University, 1972), 34-36.   

113.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 2. 114.  Ronald F. Lee, The Origin and Evolution of the 

National Military Park Idea (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1973), 9-10, 12.   

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in the 1850s, the federal government remained relatively inactive in this regard until 1889, when it acquired the prehistoric ruins of Casa Grande in Arizona, designating them the country’s first National Monument.  The following year, the federal government acquired the Chickamauga-Chattanooga battlefield and established it as the nation’s inaugural National Military Park.  The government soon extended the same protection to other Civil War battlefields, but several years elapsed before Congress, through the passage of the Antiquities Act (1906), finally empowered the President to set aside sites of historic and scientific significance as national preserves. 

Before the government got earnestly into the act, the preservation movement was largely the avocation of affluent and well-connected private citizens, who generally focused their attention on the built world, preserving the homes of the nation’s most-revered historical figures.  Persons such as Ann Pamela Cunningham exemplified the elite backgrounds and chauvinistic motivations of the early preservationists.  In 1853, Miss Cunningham, a wealthy South Carolinian, founded the widely emulated Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which acquired President George Washington’s deteriorating home on the Potomac and transformed it into a national shrine to his memory.

Just as a single individual, Ann Cunningham, had been largely instrumental in galvanizing public support for saving Mount Vernon, a former Superior Court Judge from Lincolnton, North Carolina, named David Schenck, would be the sustaining impetus behind the first effort to preserve the Guilford Court House battlefield.  In 1881, Schenck resigned his judgeship after having accepted the post of general counsel for the Richmond and Danville Railroad.  Since the railroad’s main offices were located in Greensboro, North Carolina, the counselor and his family relocated to that steadily growing city the following year.  

Soon after establishing residency in Greensboro, Judge Schenck, who already possessed an abiding interest in history, became fascinated with the Battle of Guilford Court House and sought out the site of the savagely fought contest between the armies of Greene and Cornwallis.  The residents of Greensboro, however, were apparently not so 

enamored of the battlefield, for Schenck later lamented that he “could not find a half dozen persons”, in a city of 3,000, who could instruct him on how to get there.  Finally, someone directed him to the scene of the engagement, which was located about six miles northwest of town, and he “continued to revisit it frequently thereafter,” employing a copy of Reverend Eli Caruthers’ Revolutionary Incidents (second series, published in 1856) as his favorite reference.  Caruthers’ map of the battlefield (fig. 11), Schenck acknowledged, enabled him to “study the positions of the armies and the progress of the battle.”115  

The judge, after much study, would publish his own map of Guilford in 1889 (fig. 12).  Like Caruthers, Schenck integrated post-battle cultural features into his map as modern points of reference, but the two authors differed in the placement and identification of a few essential topographic details.  Note in particular the discrepancy in the distances shown between the courthouse site and Hunting Creek.  Schenck depicted the structure as having stood about 375 yards east of the stream, whereas the reverend indicated that it was situated considerably closer.  Furthermore, Caruthers represented the New Salisbury Road as a southern extension of McQuistian’s Bridge (previously the Reedy Fork) Road.  Schenck, in contrast, labeled this highway the Fayetteville Road and indicated that the New Salisbury terminated into New Garden (Old Salisbury) on the western side of Hunting Creek.  The judge, however, followed Caruthers in placing the third American line west of Hunting Creek.  Accepted as factual until the late twentieth century, this problematic interpretation of the third line’s location would greatly inform future landscape-treatment decisions, the results of which still characterize the appearance of the park today.116  

When Judge Schenck began studying the battlefield in the mid-1880s, the landscape had already endured significant and discernible changes from its 1781 appearance.  All of the area’s “ancient roads,” he 

115.  David Schenck, A Memorial Volume of the Guilford Battleground Company (Greensboro, NC: Reece & Elam, Power Job Printers, 1893), 8.  Caruthers predicated his 1856 plan, in part, on the published “Tarleton” map (fig. 5), which itself was a more refined copy of the unpublished “Haldane” map (fig. 4), and on a later version of it found in Charles Stedman’s 1794 History of the...American War, vol. 2 (see insert between pp. 342-343 of Stedman’s work).    

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related, “had been abandoned for half a century.” 117  Moreover, many of these neglected highways—such as New Salisbury and Fayetteville Roads—were laid out subsequent to the battle and their presence probably rendered the 1781 layer that much less legible.  Aside from these untrodden roads, the battlefield of Schenck’s day also encompassed far less woodland than it had in 1781.  For several decades following the clash between Greene and 

Cornwallis, local property owners had continued to clear additional farmland out of the hardwood forest that originally “covered three-fourths of the battlefield’s one thousand acres.”118  Schenck, therefore, found a landscape that consisted of pockets of woodland circumscribed by abandoned and eroded fields, which, in the judge’s words, had 

FIGURE 11. Reverend Eli Caurthers’ 1856 plan of the battle, demonstrating his attempt to reconcile the contemporary, mid-nineteenth century scene with that of 1781.

117.  Schenck, Memorial Volume, 9. 

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degenerated into “tangled wilderness[es] of briars, old field pines, and every species of wild growth 

which comes up on old worn out fields.”  The town of Martinville, he also reported, had given way to a wheat field: “there being no vestige remaining except an ancient well of pure water, still used, and the scattered rocks and debris of the court-house and jail, and pieces of cooper,” perhaps the remnants of a coppershop that Schenck averred once stood in town.119  Notwithstanding the post-battle developments and the successional process that had begun, Judge Schenck, like William Henry Foote and David Hunter Strother before him, believed “the ground” was “very little changed” and felt assured that he could accurately identify “every point of interest on it.”120  

116.  This is particularly the case between Tour Stops 5 and 7, where a four-and-one-half-acre field, the largest in the park, currently lies as a testament to this century-old error in identification.  In the early-1880s, Judge Schenck inaccurately designated the area that this field encompasses as the site of the most decisive fighting at the third line.  The consensus among contemporary professionals holds that this field would have been forested at the time of the battle, with the actual third line standing several hundred yards to the east, on the opposite side of Hunting Creek.  

118.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 1. 

FIGURE 12. Judge David Schenck’s 1889 plan of the battle.

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Although the battlefield remained quite rural in the late-nineteenth century, it could not escape the effects of the North Carolina piedmont’s increasing industrialization.  In 1886, the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad completed a section of tracks (connecting Greensboro to the town of Madison) between the positions held by the first and second American lines.  Before being abandoned around 1980, the tracks ran parallel to and a few yards east of present-day Old Battleground Road.  The original roadbed for Old Battleground, which connected the battlefield to Greensboro, was cut in 1888.121

The Guilford Battle Ground CompanyAs one of his visits to the battlefield came to an end on an autumn afternoon in 1886, Judge Schenck suddenly conceived of the idea “to purchase the grounds and ‘redeem them from oblivion.’”  Overcome by “an irresistible and impatient impulse to carry out this scheme,” he disregarded the late hour of the day and called upon Emsley Sikes (also Sykes), a local farmer “who owned all that part of the battlefield [s]outh of the Salisbury or New Garden [R]oad.”  By twilight, the judge had convinced Sikes to part with thirty acres of battlefield land.  Within a few months, he negotiated another deal with the “Dennis heirs” to acquire twenty additional acres north of the Sikes’ parcel, which gave him an aggregate of fifty contiguous acres.  Schenck’s tract was bounded on the west by 

the Cape Fear & Yadkin Valley Railroad tracks and stretched eastward along both sides of the Old Salisbury’s seldom-used roadbed.  While Schenck correctly believed that the boundaries of his property contained a portion of the ground held by the second American line, he erroneously supposed that he had also acquired the site of the battle’s culminating melee at the third line.122

Sobered by the expense of his two impulse land purchases, Schenck realized that he could not alone bear the financial burden of the battlefield’s “redemption.”  Consequently, he decided to form a non-profit stock corporation, called the Guilford Battle Ground Company (GBGC), and secured the support of four of Greensboro’s leading businessmen: J. W. Scott, Julius A. Gray, Dr. D. W. C. Benbow, and Thomas B. Keogh.  Together, these politically connected men solicited the sanction of the state legislature, which officially chartered their new company in March 1887.  Judge Schenck, however, was not content to let his company’s crusade remain the isolated enterprise of a few wealthy locals—he wanted to expand it into a statewide effort.  Accordingly, the company offered stock at $25 a share to encourage people of more modest means to contribute, and also sent out a circular letter that both advertised the GBGC’s mission and entreated its many recipients to purchase stock.  When the revenues generated from the sale of stock proved insufficient, the General Assembly stepped in, granting the company an annual appropriation of $200 in 1887.  Lawmakers 

119.  Whether or not the rubble that Schenck identified actually belonged to the courthouse cannot be determined, for he could have easily confused it with the vestiges of another Martinville structure.  Furthermore, no additional reference has been found in the historical record to confirm the existence of a coppershop in Martinville.  In the early-1970s, however, archeologists uncovered scatterings of copper scraps within the structural remains of an early-nineteenth-century dwelling excavated near present-day Tour Stop 6.  While this discovery lends credence to Schenck’s claim, suggesting that the unearthed building may have been the residence of a coppersmith, the evidence is too inconclusive to afford a final determination.  See Schenck, Memorial Volume, 9; David Schenck, North Carolina 1780-1781, Being a History of the Invasion of the Carolinas (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Pub., 1889), 317-318; Ward and Coe, “Preliminary Archaeological Tests: Guilford Courthouse,” 31-32. 

120.  David Schenck Papers, Collection #652, Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, vol. 11: 21; David Schenck, Report of the President, November 15, 1887 (Greensboro: Reece & Co., Power Job Printers, 1887), 6.

121.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 7n19; David Schenck, Report of the President, October 22, 1888 (Greensboro: Reece & Elam, Book & Job Printers, 1888), 6.

122.  Schenck, Memorial Volume, 9; Schenck, Report of the President, November 15, 1887: 6; Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 7.  Schenck’s interpretation, or rather misrepresentation, of the third line’s location—currently marked by the Third Line Monument (erected 1910) on the cleared elevation below the pull-off at Tour Stop 7—continued to hold sway for nearly three-quarters of a century following the federal government’s acquisition of the park in 1917.  But members of the GUCO staff—including Ranger Don Long and Historian John Durham, who promoted a new theory in the early-1980s—now contend that the third line’s left flank actually stood on the ridgeline between Hunting Creek and Tour Stop 6.  (GUCO Historian John Durham, personal communicant, 28 March 2001; Durham, “Historical Marking of the Third Line of Battle,” passim; Baker, Redeemed from Oblivion, 7, particularly n20.) 

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later raised this subsidy to $500 in 1893 and then to $700 in 1913.123  

According to the GBGC’s charter, Judge Schenck and his business partners founded their corporation expressly for the “benevolent purpose of preserving and adorning the grounds on and over which the battle of Guilford Courthouse was fought.”  This charter conferred a number of specific prerogatives upon the non-profit organization.  First and foremost, it endowed the company with the “power to acquire [battlefield] lands...not exceeding one hundred acres” and extended it the right to “erect houses thereon for use or ornament;” as well as to “erect monuments, tombstones or other memorials.”  In addition, the legislature gave the GBGC license to “adorn the grounds and walks; supply the grounds with water; plant trees, flowers and shrubs and do any other like things for the improvement and beautifying of the property”—just the sort of battlefield treatment that David Hunter Strother had tacitly deplored three decades before.124

The newly incorporated company held its organizational meeting on 6 May 1887 in the parlor of the Benbow House hotel in Greensboro.  The stockholders present selected Schenck and his four original partners to constitute the board of directors, and the board, in turn, elected Schenck the company’s first president, an office he would hold until his death in 1902.125   

In a promotional letter that he sent out shortly after the corporation’s first meeting, Schenck informed potential subscribers that “with little cost” the battlefield could “be restored exactly as it was in 1781.”126  When one reviews the actions of company officials over the course of their thirty-year tenure, it becomes increasingly obvious that they never truly intended to accomplish a rigorously researched and accurate restoration of the landscape to its battle-period appearance.  Instead, 

they—and Schenck in particular—were more interested in adorning and beautifying their portion of the battlefield in order to transform it into a pleasure ground, where respectful citizens could go to honor the sacrifices of the Revolutionary generation, while also enjoying restorative leisure activity in a park-like atmosphere.  In essence, the GBGC strove to integrate commemoration with recreation at Guilford Battle Ground Park.  Schenck, moreover, hoped that his park would one day emerge as a sort of pastoral sanctuary, where the residents of Greensboro, particularly members of the upper strata, could come to momentarily escape the stresses associated with urban life.  “It is easy to foresee,” he maintained, “that so interesting and beautiful place as this, abounding in shade, and supplied with an abundance of the purest water, must in the future, become the park of the city, where its citizens can go for rest and recreation.”  He even predicted, “summer cottages will be built up around it [the park] where the families of the city can escape the heat and dust and enjoy the fresh air of a delightful country resort.”127  In this regard, Judge Schenck proved quite prescient and his dream would be at least partially realized in the mid-twentieth century.  Yet, instead of summer cottages, those fleeing the city’s urban core would build permanent single-family homes and multiple-occupancy apartment complexes around the scenic nucleus of the park.   

Guilford Battle Ground Company “Improvements”Not only did the GBGC’s executives subordinate accurate restoration to beautification, they also never intended to acquire and preserve the entire site of the engagement.  Their corporate charter, as previously noted, only permitted the acquisition of up to one hundred acres (or roughly one-tenth of the battlefield).  Moreover, after the company acquired an additional twenty-acre tract of woodland west of the railroad tracks in 1888, bringing the park up to seventy acres, Schenck declared, “I do not think we need anymore.”128  By that time, he already had his hands full with the extensive improvement of his initial land purchases.

In his inaugural year as the chief steward of Guilford Battle Ground Park (1887), President Schenck 

123.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 17-18, 21; Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 45n32.

124.  The chartering Act appears in Schenck, Memorial Volume, 138-140; also see, Joseph M. Morehead, ed., Charter and Amendments, By-Laws and Ordinances of the Guilford Battle Ground Company (Greensboro, 1906), enclosed in vol. 15 of the Schenck Papers. 

125.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 3-4; Schenck, Memorial Volume, 9-10; Schenck, Report of the President, November 15, 1887: 5.

126.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 21. 127.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 34. 128.  Schenck, Report of the President, October 22, 1888: 4. 

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wasted little time in putting his landscape beautification project into effect.  He hired a foreman as well as a crew of twelve African-American laborers and charged them with the arduous task of reclaiming the fields from succession so as to bring them back “to a state of cultivation.”  The reclamation process—which also involved the filling in of eroded areas and the removal of the understory from the park’s wooded tracts—continued for several years, but, by 1893, Schenck could boast that “every acre, not scarred by deep gullies” was “covered in a luxuriant crop of oats.”129  When insects blighted the oats a few years later, crimson clover was planted in their stead.130  Judge Schenck likewise put his grounds’ crew to work at reopening the Old Salisbury Road and other historic thoroughfares in the vicinity that had been abandoned earlier that century, presumably after the demise of Martinville.131

In addition to the grounds’ crew, the GBGC employed an on-site caretaker and built him a “keeper’s lodge” with “all convenient outhouses”.  Located in a grove of white oaks on the south side of the Old Salisbury Road, the lodge—or “handsome 

cottage” as Schenck referred to it—contained a reception room and a small museum where the company’s growing collection of artifacts was displayed.132  The keeper’s lodge, as figures 13 and 14 show, stood a mere 200 feet east of the Cape Fear-Yadkin Valley Railroad (CFYVRR) tracks, and was in clear view of the passing trains.  Today, most preservationists would lament the intrusion of a locomotive thundering through a landscape associated with a pre-industrial historic event, but Schenck, himself a general counsel for a major railroad, welcomed the CFYVRR’s presence and clearly found it expedient.  In fact, the GBGC developed a beneficial working relationship with the railroad, which allowed “free transport of materials” (such as monuments) to the battlefield.  The railroad also split with the GBGC the passenger fares of those who attended the park’s annual celebrations.  So successful were these events in drawing crowds, Schenck would have us believe, that thousands consistently thronged to the festivities, which were held on or near the sixth of May (the anniversary of the company’s founding) for the first few years, before being permanently switched to the fourth of July.133 

129.  Schenck, Memorial Volume, 9-10; Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 34.  

130.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 109. 131.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 51; vol. 15: 54; Schenck, 

Memorial Volume, 9-10. 132.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 7. 133.  Schenck, Memorial Volume, 10-18. 

FIGURE 13. Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1889.

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Although the GBGC did not stage a grand celebration on the fourth of July in the year of the park’s establishment (1887), Schenck and his associates did use this red-letter date as the occasion for a more modest but significant ceremony.  On this day, they unveiled the first of over twenty monuments that would be raised on the battlefield during the corporation’s proprietorship.  This monument was dedicated to Arthur Forbis, a local militia captain who had received a mortal wound while engaged in the fighting on the first line.  It was originally placed near the keeper’s lodge, only to be moved to its present location (the putative site of Forbis’ wounding) a few months later.134

During the company’s second year of operation, improvement projects included the construction of a speaker’s stand and yet another cottage, both of which went up near the railroad tracks.  The speaker’s stand, Schenck boasted, was “capable of seating one hundred persons comfortably.”  The judge had the second cottage, dubbed the “President’s Cottage”, erected for his own personal use.  It stood diagonally across the Old Salisbury (New Garden) Road from the keeper’s lodge.  A chronically ill man, Schenck would spend many days convalescing in his “dear little Battle Ground Cottage.”135  Also that year, the company cleared the vegetation from around the springs in the area of the 

park known as Spring Vale and placed a basin of granite blocks in the spring named after Major Joseph Winston, a North Carolinian who participated in the battle and lent his name to the western piedmont town of Winston, which later merged with Salem.136

Some of the most significant developments affecting the appearance of the park took place during the final decade of the nineteenth century, as Judge Schenck held true to his promise that his “labors” would be “incessant and unyielding until” the GBGC had “beautified the spot and dotted it with historic monuments.”137  Not only did company officials attend to the monumental adornment of the battlefield, but they also endeavored to improve the appearance of their pleasure grounds by erecting structures that would add an element of architectural charm.  By the summer of 1890, gazebo-sized pavilions had been raised over two of the springs in Spring Vale (fig. 15).  These springs were named Clyde and Leonidas, after the benefactors who provided the construction funds.  In June 1891, the company put up a separate museum building (fig. 16) to house its artifact collection, which had outgrown the capacity of the room provided in the caretaker’s lodge.  That same month the following year, a restaurant building measuring “sixty by thirty feet was erected on the grounds,” Judge Schenck noted, for the purpose of providing refreshments “to the vast throngs who attend the 134.  See William G. Gray, The Monuments at Guilford 

Courthouse National Military Park (U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1967), 29-32, passim; Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 61. 

135.  Schenck, Report of the President, October, 22, 1888: 6; Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 152, 165; vol. 15: 116. 

FIGURE 14. A train thunders through Guilford Battle Ground Park, circa 1893.  Note the locations of the Old Salisbury (New Garden) Road (marked by the arch), the museum, the keeper’s lodge, and Schenck’s personal cottage.

136.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 122.137.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 49.

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celebrations” (see fig. 17, showing the park’s composition in 1892).138  

The construction of new park roads, or “avenues” as Schenck styled them, also figured prominently into the GBGC’s designs.  In his annual report for 1891, Schenck informed stockholders that the company had opened “Nannie Avenue, a circuitous drive to the Clyde and Leonidas Springs.”  The grounds’ crew lined both sides of this carriage road with sugar maples, which the judge extolled as “the finest shade tree on the American continent.”139  Likewise, in the early-1890s, the company laid out “Holt Avenue,” named for Thomas M. Holt, one-term Governor of North Carolina (1891-1893) and park benefactor.  This avenue, shown in Figure 17, traversed the southern sector of the park, running along an approximate east-west line between Battle Field Road (later Old Battleground Road) and what Schenck called the New Salisbury Road.  As with the other tree-lined lanes in the park, Schenck transformed Holt Avenue into a sugar maple allée.140  In 1895, the GBGC placed a life-sized, bronze statue 

of Major Joseph Winston on top of a granite-monument base situated at the eastern end of Holt Avenue.  (Both the base, erected in 1893, and the Winston bronze were donated by Governor Holt).  The Winston Monument, which essentially served as Holt Avenue’s eastern terminus, sat “in the middle of the vista” afforded to those passing by the park on the trains.  So proud was Schenck of Holt Avenue that he proclaimed: “in time, when they [the sugar maples] grow up, it will be the very finest avenue in the State.”141  Thus, the judge clearly envisioned the Holt Avenue-Winston Monument vista as a signature component of the GBGC’s designed landscape.   

Aside from the ubiquitous sugar maples, the company also “set out...some magnolias, French poplars and other varieties of ornamental trees” in addition to establishing an orchard of one hundred fruit trees (type unknown) near the keeper’s lodge.142  Ever determined to improve the grounds, Judge Schenck, in 1892, initiated an improvement project that led to one of the GBGC’s most profound alterations of the battlefield landscape.  The company’s charter may have empowered it “to supply the grounds with water,” but Schenck took this liberty to its aesthetic extreme when he resolved “to make a picturesque lake in Spring Vale.”  To construct this artificial pond, named Lake Wilfong in honor of his wife’s maiden name, a crew of laborers impounded a branch of Hunting Creek (fig. 18).  The dam itself, most likely constructed of earth excavated from the lakebed, measured 175 feet in length, 58 feet in width, and stood 18 feet high.  A small canal was also dug around one side of the lake to allow the branch to flow by unimpeded.  Lake Wilfong was primarily spring-fed, but, if its level dropped too low, supplementary water could be drawn from the canal.143 

In 1895, Guilford Battle Ground Park received a “useful and scientific improvement,” in Schenck’s words, when the local telephone company extended its wires out to the battlefield and installed two units there.  In addition to the phones, the GBGC also added two new structures to the park that year, 

138.  Schenck, Memorial Volume, 12, 14-15, 17. 139.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 47. 

FIGURE 15. The Clyde and Leonidas Springhouses, circa 1893.

FIGURE 16. Guilford Battle Ground Park (circa 1893), showing the first museum building (left), the pyramid or Battle Monument, and the entrance arch astride New Garden.

140.  In 1894, a locust blight took a heavy toll on Schenck’s beloved sugar maples, prompting the company to replant all of its avenues anew with the same tree the following year.  See, Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 109.

141.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 109-117. 142.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 34. 143.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 58, 65. 

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constructing an observation tower and an immense, sixty-by-ninety-foot pavilion.  The observation tower rose up above the battlefield from a high point north of New Garden Road, while the pavilion, which could accommodate up to 2,000 people, stood in the vicinity of the present-day visitor center.  The last major improvement of Schenck’s era was completed two years later, when safety concerns led the company to replace its wooden museum building with a fireproof brick structure.144      

Despite the amount of attention that he devoted to the park’s beautification, Judge Schenck still found ample time to pursue the commemorative element of his “preservation” work.  In 1891, he proposed to further consecrate the battlefield by turning it into “one common State Revolutionary Cemetery” where posterity “could draw holy and patriotic inspirations from communion with” North Carolina’s “noble dead[,] whose deeds they might seek to emulate.”145   Schenck prevailed upon lawmakers in Raleigh for assistance, but the state legislature elected not to back his cemetery scheme.  Although Schenck never realized this aspect of his vision, the GBGC succeeded in having the remains of ten Revolutionary veterans and statesmen reinterred in the battlefield park between 1888 and 1906.  These reburials included such notable personages as Continental Brigadier General Jethro Sumner as well as William Hooper and John Penn, two of North Carolina’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence.146  These three 

FIGURE 17. Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1892.

FIGURE 18. Lake Wilfong, circa 1893.

144.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 109, 120. 145.  Schenck Papers, vol. 15: 48.

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individuals doubtlessly made invaluable contributions to the war effort; however, none of them actually participated in the battle.  Thus, as former Park Historian Tom Baker has observed, their reinterment on the field of Guilford set “an unfortunate precedent...whereby the park was viewed as an acceptable venue for the commemoration of a variety of individuals and events having no discernible connection to the battle.”147 

The GBGC in the Twentieth CenturyJudge Schenck grew increasing frail in the closing years of the nineteenth century and died after a lengthy illness in 1902.  (Figure 19 shows the park’s layout one year after his death.)  Major Joseph M. Morehead, whom Schenck had once regarded as the company’s “most zealous trustee”, succeeded him as president.  The change in leadership, however, did not occasion a shift in the GBGC’s mission or management policies as Major Morehead clearly intended to perpetuate Schenck’s vision for the park.148  Under his direction, the company 

continued to adorn and “beautify” the landscape, adding other monuments, such as one honoring the North Carolinians who fought at the Battle of King’s Mountain and another celebrating Clio, the muse of history.149  Yet, the most dramatically incongruous monuments to be erected in the park were a pair of federally funded Romanesque arches, completed in 1905.  Raised to commemorate the Revolutionary service of Brigadier Generals Francis Nash and William Lee Davidson (neither of whom fought at Guilford), these colossal stone arches stood over thirty feet tall, straddling New Garden (Old Salisbury) Road, with one situated just west of the railroad tracks and the other, east (fig. 20).  Congress had given Governor Charles B. Aycock the discretion to select the site where the arches would be constructed.  The fact that he chose Guilford Battle Ground Park—even though other North Carolina communities offered more legitimate arguments as to why they should receive them—

146.  Schenck Papers, vol. 12: 121. 147.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 8. 

148.  Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 57-58. 

149.  Erected in 1903 and 1909 respectively, the King’s Mountain and Clio Monuments were both dismantled and removed in 1937. 

FIGURE 19. Guilford Battle Ground Park, 1903.

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testifies to how successful the GBGC had been in transforming the battlefield into the state’s general-purpose Revolutionary War memorial.150

Another change in the company’s executive leadership occurred after Major Morehead died in early 1911.  Paul Schenck, the son and former law partner of the deceased judge, took the reins of the GBGC in what would prove to be a banner year in the history of the park’s federalization process.  He would serve in that capacity for six years and would also oversee the transfer of the park’s ownership to the United States Government in 1917.

Federal Custodianship of the Guilford Battlefield

The Road to Federalization: The Greene Monument CampaignAs early as 1887, the year of the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s inception, Judge Schenck had entertained the prospect of someday offering his park to the federal government, provided that it first erect a suitable monument to General Greene.151  Yet Schenck, perhaps skeptical of the government’s receptiveness, never actively pursued the park’s federalization during his lifetime; he left this herculean challenge to his successor, Major Joseph Morehead, who accepted it out of necessity, having realized that the upkeep of the park would 

eventually outstrip the company’s meager resources.  In 1904, Morehead persuaded North Carolina Congressman William W. Kitchin to put before the House of Representatives a resolution calling for the creation of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  Inundated with a myriad of similar requests from other sites, the cost-conscious Congress declined to act on Kitchin’s proposal, as it did when he reintroduced it in 1905 and 1907.152  Since their direct approach had met with repeated failure, the GBGC and its political supporters thought it advisable to attempt a less overt strategy: they would revive their time-honored crusade to convince Capitol Hill to subsidize a monument in honor of General Greene.  Although thirteen bills soliciting funds for such an undertaking had been rejected between 1888 and 1908, lawmakers finally voted in favor of one presented late in 1910, officially enacting the legislation in February 1911.  Unfortunately, Joseph Morehead, the company’s “most zealous trustee,” died a few weeks before the bill’s final approval.  Paul Schenck then assumed the presidency of the GBGC.153 

By means of the Greene Monument Act (36 Stat. 899), the legislature appropriated $30,000 for the memorial’s construction and requested the GBGC to donate “free of cost to the United States” the site on which it would be erected—an important first step on the road to federalization.  The GBGC gladly complied, deeding a third of an acre (in two parcels), located south of New Garden (Salisbury) Road and a few yards west of the second American line’s position (fig. 21).  Congress also entrusted the Secretary of War with the responsibility to render the final decision regarding the monument’s “plans, specifications, and designs.”  The sculptor Francis H. Packer won the commission, and executed an imposing, bronze equestrian statue surmounting a meticulously tooled, white-granite base.  Dedicated in July 1915, the Greene Monument quickly became a local landmark and remains the monumental centerpiece of the park today (fig. 22).154

150.  Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 59-60; Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 9. 

151.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 51. 

FIGURE 20. The Nash & Davidson Arches (erected 1905, dismantled 1937).

152.  Congressional Record, Fifty-eighth Congress, Second Session, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), vol. 38: 903; Ibid., Fifty-ninth Congress, First Session, 1905 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), vol. 40: 115; Ibid., Sixtieth Congress, First Session, 1907 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907), vol. 42: 185.  

153.  Baker, “Redeemed From Oblivion,” 11; Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 63-64. 

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The Establishment of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1917As one historian has asserted, the land donated for the Greene Monument “provided a Federal toehold at Guilford and perhaps inclined Congress to respond favorably” when Representative Charles M. Stedman, who sat on the GBGC’s board, introduced yet another bill requesting the establishment of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO) in 1916.  Signed into law on 2 March 1917, thirty years after the GBGC’s chartering, the Guilford Act (39 Stat. 996) stated that the new national park had been created “in order to preserve for professional and military study one of the most memorable battles of the Revolutionary War.”155  It is perhaps fitting that Paul Schenck—the son of the 

man who had resolved to “redeem” the battlefield “from oblivion”—oversaw the conveyance of Guilford Battle Ground Park to the United States Government.  The park, at the time of the transfer, consisted of 125 acres of land (25 more than the company’s charter had originally permitted), twenty-nine monuments and gravesites, as well as numerous other structural “improvements.”  Placed under the stewardship of the War Department, the Guilford site became the first Revolutionary War battlefield to be elevated to the status of a national park and the only national military park established between 1900-1925.156

Just before the park’s transfer to the War Department, a writer named Ernest Peixotto visited the battlefield, which, to his chagrin, he beheld with “extreme annoyance.”  In his 1917 book A Revolutionary Pilgrimage, he informed his readers 

154.  Hillory A. Tolson, comp., Laws Relating to the National Park Service, Supplement II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963), 264; Guilford Courthouse National Military Park Deeds, Deed 1, June 1911; Deed 2, December 1914, Land Records File, GUCO Files (also on microfilm); Gray, “Monuments at Guilford Courthouse NMP,” 35-43.

FIGURE 21. Guildford Courthouse Land Acquisition Map, 1911 - 1970s.

155.  Tolson, comp., Laws Relating to the National Park Service, Supplement II, 265.

156.  Gray, “Monuments at Guilford Courthouse NMP,” passim; Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 11-12.

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that “[a] group of patriotic citizens, animated by the very best intentions, acquired the [Guilford] battleground some years ago.”  “They have since,” Peixotto continued, “decorated it lavishly with granite tents, boulders, pyramids and triumphal arches until it now resembles a suburban cemetery.”  Expressing his distaste for the presence of such inappropriate adornments, he went on to remonstrate: “[b]ronze figures of Clio and statues of former presidents of the Battle Ground Company—no matter how public spirited these citizens may have been—seem sadly out of place upon this historic field.”  Peixotto, nevertheless, withheld his criticism from the Greene monument, opining, “[h]ad it stood alone, dominating the landscape, the impression would have been noble and effective.”157  

While it is easy for those with hindsight to agree with the essence of Peixotto’s indictment, the context and sincerity of the GBGC’s now-discredited treatment excesses should not be forgotten, as the company’s officials did not have the benefit of the Secretary’s standards.  Ironically, it is likely that Judge Schenck, had he lived to see Peixotto’s remarks, would have found some vindication in the comment that his park resembled a suburban cemetery; he had, in fact, attempted to transform it into the state’s official Revolutionary War burial ground. As the content and tone of his journals demonstrate, Schenck, who was born in 1835, was clearly a product of the sentimental culture that helped to shape the Victorian worldview.  This sentimentalism, to a large extent, infused cultural attitudes about death and the subject itself emerged as a popular theme in the art and literature of the period.  Particularly pervasive were romanticized 

and heroic representations of death, wherein the sacrifice of the “virtuous” dead served to favorably transform the living.158  In this context, Schenck’s desire to gather the bones of deceased Revolutionary War heroes and rebury them in his park, so as to awe and edify visitors, appears more understandable.  The fact that he succeeded in obtaining the remains of ten individuals shows that many sympathized with his efforts.  Interestingly enough, Schenck chaired Greensboro’s city cemetery committee and may have even derived some of his battlefield-landscaping ideas from the vast catalog of cemetery design.159  Furthermore, his desire for the park to emerge as a sort of bucolic retreat, where Greensboro’s residents could escape the travails of the city, seemed to hearken back to the “rural” cemetery movement of the mid-nineteenth century.  During this movement, elaborately designed burial grounds were built on the outskirts of cities to function as park-like counterbalances “to the social, psychological, and visual tensions engendered by urban life”—places where both the living and the dead could find quiet repose.160

The War Department’s Tenure, 1917-1933Ernest Peixotto’s unfavorable impression of the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s treatment philosophy reflected, in the emerging professional core of the historic preservation movement, a deepening (yet still roughhewn and uncodified) respect for what modern practitioners call the integrity of historic sites.  With the War Department’s congressional mandate “to preserve” the battlefield “for professional and military study,” it appeared that the heavily ornamented Guilford “pleasure grounds” had entered into a new era—one guided by a sounder approach to cultural resource management.  But, unfortunately, stagnation, combined with a generally indifferent attitude, would characterize this period, and the War Department’s managers would prove far more adept at maintaining the status quo than bringing the battlefield up to a new standard.  

157.  Ernest Peixotto, A Revolutionary Pilgrimage (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 309. 

FIGURE 22. Greene Monument, 1924.

158.  For an excellent analysis of the ethos behind Victorian sentimental literature, see Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” Glyph 8 (1981). 

159.  Schenck Papers, vol. 11: 23, 27, 33. 160.  Thomas Bender, “The “Rural” Cemetery Movement: 

Urban Travails and the Appeal of Nature,” in ed. St. George, Material Life in America, 516. 

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Soon after the establishment of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO), the War Department elected to place the battlefield’s administration in the hands of a tripartite commission.  A Guilford-County resident was to serve as the commission’s chairman, while the states of Maryland and Delaware—both of which had furnished troops that acquitted themselves well at Guilford—were selected to fill the two remaining slots.  Along with overseeing the park’s routine operations, the commission’s major responsibilities included opening and repairing “such roads as may be necessary for the purposes of the park” as well as accurately identifying and marking the battle lines and other points of historic significance “with historical tablets or otherwise.”  Additionally, the War Department authorized the commission to allow any state, whose troops had participated in the battle, to permanently mark their positions in the park.161

An impractical bureaucratic courtesy, the three-member commission never coalesced into a functioning directorial body.  In fact, a Maryland representative was not appointed until 1922, while the Delaware position was apparently never filled.162  The chairman, or resident commissioner, therefore, clearly functioned as the site’s foremost administrator, and the first person to serve in that capacity was Paul Schenck, former president of the Guilford Battle Ground Company (GBGC).  While still chief executive of that non-profit entity, Paul Schenck, breaking with the tradition of his father, had written that the Guilford site “should be preserved as a Battle Field rather than a Park,” but never quite put this philosophy into practice.163  As the initial resident commissioner of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, however, he hired a landscape gardener to produce a comprehensive development plan.  Unfortunately, it cannot be determined if this plan proposed “undoing” or mitigating any of the GBGC’s improvements because it was never approved.164

When his first term ended in 1922, Schenck, a Democrat, became a political casualty of the Republican Harding administration, which replaced 

him with Edward E. Mendenhall, a traveling salesman and active local member of the Republican Party.165  Although Mendenhall had no prior connection to the GBGC, his management approach seemed to derive directly from that organization’s previous mode of operation rather than from the War Department’s protocols.  The second resident commissioner essentially summed up his philosophy in a letter written to Congressman Stedman: ”[w]hile this is a military park and the War Department could use it for military activities at any time it is hardly necessary or likely for several generations; hence, it can be made a place of beauty for the on-coming generations.”166  Over the course of his eleven-year tenure as resident commissioner, Mendenhall continued the GBGC’s practice of keeping the park’s woodlands open by eradicating the undergrowth.  In an effort to augment the park’s manicured appearance, he directed his maintenance crew to construct concrete walks around Lake Wilfong, and further beautified the grounds with parkwide plantings of flowers, shrubs, and turf grass.167  He reserved the most formal of his design treatments for area immediately surrounding the Greene Monument, where laborers put in a system of concrete walks lined with sheared arborvitae and partially covered with rose trellises, while also planting both privet hedge and rows of Deodar cedars behind the equestrian memorial (fig. 23).168 The park also received additional commemorative adornment during Mendenhall’s term of office, with the D.A.R. and private citizens raising a total of five new monuments, all of which still stand today.169  

The resident commissioner apparently gave precedence to the park’s cosmetic enhancement, because the task of permanently marking the battle lines, complained the Secretary of War, had still not been completed as late as September 1929.170  

161.  National Military Park, National Park, Battlefield Site and National Monument Regulations (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1931), 62-63.   

162.  Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 69. 163.  Schenck Papers, vol. 16: 34. 164.  Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 70. 

165.  Ibid., 72. 166.  Edward E. Mendenhall to the Honorable Charles M. 

Stedman, 10 January 1930, War Department Records, GUCO Files. 

167.  Edward E. Mendenhall, Activities of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park for year 1926, 15 August 1926; Edward E. Mendenhall, Annual Report of Park Activities, 1927, 12 July 1927, War Department Records, GUCO Files. 

168.  Frederic A. Fay, “Final Report to Chief Architect, Project FP-441: Improvement of Grounds and Forests” (typewritten document, August 1937, GUCO Files), 2, 10; Virginia B. Douglas to E. E. Mendenhall, 26 September 1926, War Department Records, GUCO Files. 

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Although he neglected that primary responsibility, he did manage to devote a little time to the maintenance of the park’s roads, which he periodically had top-surfaced with granite dust to make them more passable.     

Not one to tolerate the patina of age on cultural resources, Mendenhall ordered the painting of certain weatherworn and verdigrised monuments.  

By the summer of 1930, he had gilded the Greene Monument, covered the park’s remaining bronze statutes in a veneer of black, and even painted alternating white and black stripes on one of the granite monuments.171  Mendenhall’s conduct, however, did not go unnoticed by War Department officials.  The resident commissioner specifically incurred the ire of the Quartermaster General, J. L. DeWitt, who denounced his frivolous practices in a letter to the adjutant general.  Mendenhall’s “tendency,” General DeWitt reported, “has been to do too much in the way of ornamentation and too little in the way of marking [the] historical sites of the park, outlining the points of battle, et cetera.”  He went on to warn that the resident commissioner required “close supervision,” lest he “destroy features of the landscape connected with the battle, with a view of attempting to turn the park into a merely beautiful site, in other words he is inclined to look upon the park as a picnic ground, not as a historical monument.”172

By all accounts, most of the aging GBGC structures lapsed into disrepair during the War Department’s custodianship.  In the late-1920s, Edward Mendenhall informed his superiors that damage to Lake Wilfong’s dam had necessitated its reinforcement with concrete.  He also asked for supplementary funds with which to repair the decaying keeper’s lodge.173  Signs of deterioration among GBGC structures reflected the park’s budgetary constraints and had been previously documented during Paul Schenck’s tenure as resident commissioner.  In 1920, Schenck had written to the Depot Quartermaster in Washington to apprise him of the decaying state of the speaker’s pavilion as well as the twin structures covering the Clyde and Leonidas Springs.  For the next fiscal year, he appealed to the government to double his annual budget (to approximately $19,000) so that he 

169.  The memorials erected during the War Department era include the Washington’s Visit (1925), the George Reynolds (1928), the Martha McFarland McGee-Bell (1929), the Edward Stevens (1931), and the Griffin Fauntleroy (1931) Monuments.  Both Edward Stevens, a brigadier general in the Virginia militia, and Griffin Fauntleroy, a Continental cavalry captain, fought at Guilford, where the latter was mortally wounded.  Little is known, however, about George Reynolds other than that he reportedly served with General Greene at some point during the Revolution.  The Washington’s Visit Monument commemorates President George Washington’s visit to the battlefield during his southern tour of 1791, while the Bell Monument celebrates the heroism of its namesake.  For detailed information on each of these monuments, see Gray, “The Monuments at Guilford,” passim.

170.  James W. Good, Secretary of War, to Senator Furnifold M. Simmons, 12 September 1929, War Department Records, GUCO Files.    

FIGURE 23. View of Green Monument landscape (circa 1936), showing the formal treatments of the War Department era.

171.  R. D. Douglas, Greensboro, to Captain Gwynne Conrad, Washington, DC, 12 January 1930, Records of the National Park Service (Record Group 79), War Department Records, GUCO, National Archives, microfilm (see frames 709-710 in “Selected Documents Related to Guilford Courthouse National Military Park,” Roll 2, GUCO Files). 

172.  J. L. Dewitt, Quartermaster General, to Adjutant General, 20 August 1930, Records of the National Park Service (Record Group 79), War Department Records, GUCO, National Archives, microfilm (frame 680 in “Selected Docs”, Roll 2, GUCO Files). 

173.  Mendenhall, Annual Report of Park Activities, 1927; Mendenhall, Park Activities for the year 1926, War Department Records, GUCO Files. 

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could carry out the requisite repairs.  Schenck’s request, however, was denied and Congress allowed him no more than he had received the previous year ($9,200), which more or less remained the park’s standard annual appropriation until the National Park Service took over in the early 1930s.174  With only this modest budget to cover the costs of operations and salaries, it is easy to understand why little changed at Guilford under the War Department’s watch.  

The changes within the park during this period were far less dramatic than those that took place outside its boundaries on unprotected portions of the battlefield.  In 1923, the City of Greensboro more than quadrupled in size, swelling from a mere four square miles to over seventeen.  As a result of this vast expansion, the city limits pushed to within three miles of the park.  Two years later, the state paved present-day Old Battleground Road (then Battleground Avenue), and, soon thereafter, officials in Washington incorporated the thoroughfare into the federal highway system, designating it Highway 220.175 

Greensboro’s growth contributed to two other significant, battlefield-area developments, which occurred in the early-1930s.  First, in 1930, the city established Forest Lawn Cemetery south of Holt Avenue, over the position held by the left flank of the second American line.  Roughly two years after the establishment of the cemetery, the Civil Work’s Administration, an offshoot of the New Deal, commenced construction on Greensboro Country Park, a 79-acre recreational area located in the southeastern sector of the battlefield, adjacent to both the national park and the cemetery.  Completed in 1934, this park—currently a Greensboro Parks and Recreation facility—encompasses and indirectly protects a portion of the ground over which the American left and British right fought after detaching from their main battle lines.  At the time of its opening, Greensboro Country Park consisted of three man-made lakes—formed by the impoundment of Hunting Creek—an “all weather sand clay” road traveling around the lakes, and several recreational and maintenance facilities.176  The city added a small zoo, which stood on GUCO’s southeastern boundary for decades.

In the summer of 1933, while the Civil Work’s Administration proceeded with the construction of Greensboro County Park, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6166, thereby transferring all national military parks, including Guilford Courthouse, to the National Park Service.177  (Figure 24 shows the park’s existing conditions around the time of the transfer.)  Back in 1917, the Guilford Battle Ground Company passed the torch to the War Department, which ended up doing little more than preserving its dying embers.  These embers would be finally extinguished, notwithstanding a few small re-ignitions, during the era of the National Park Service. 

The Era of the National Park Service

New Deal Improvements, 1933-1939With the installation of President Roosevelt’s administration, Edward Mendenhall’s days were numbered at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO).  In October 1933, James H. Roane, a Greensboro stockbroker, replaced him as resident commissioner.  Roane came on board just before one of the most dynamic periods in the park’s physical transformation. Budgets had been tight, if not parsimonious, during the War Department’s tenure, but, ironically, a generous infusion of funds received during the midst of the Great Depression provided Park Service officials with the means to begin bringing Guilford “up to the national level.”  As part of a greater initiative designed to speed the nation’s economic recovery by putting the unemployed back to work, the Public Works Administration (PWA) subsidized a myriad of extensive improvements projects in various national parks in the early-1930s.  In 1933, the PWA 

174.  Ingram, “Preservation of Guilford Battleground,” 71-72. 

175.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 22, 24. 

176.  Arnett, Greensboro, 370; C. W. Smedburg, “A Description of Greensboro Country Park as Developed by the Civil Works Administration, 1933-1934” (typewritten report, c. 1934, in files of Greensboro Country Park, Greensboro, NC). 

177.  Thomas A. Sullivan, comp., Laws Relating to the National Park Service, Supplement I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1944), 203-207.  For more on the transfer and significance of Executive Order 6166, see Harlan D. Unrau and G. Frank Williss, Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Denver: National Park Service, Denver Service Center, 1983). 

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awarded $97,000 to GUCO for its internal amelioration.178  

The park’s improvement program was in full swing by the summer of 1934, when PWA laborers began installing a sewage disposal system.  Construction commenced concurrently on several new buildings, including an administration building, a superintendent’s residence (also known as Quarters No. 1), and utility facilities, all of which had been completed by June of the following year.  Park Service Architect Joseph J. Sawyer designed the new structures in the Colonial Revival style, incorporating Moravian architectural details into their programs to impart regional, vernacular flavor.  The architect, in fact, found an aesthetic paradigm 

in the surviving late-eighteenth-century homes and workshops of Salem (now part of modern Winston-Salem), a Moravian town situated about thirty miles west of Guilford at the time of the battle.  The 33’ x  84’ administration building and its parking lot (both demolished in 1975) stood on the north side of New Garden (Old Salisbury) Road, across from the Greene Monument.  Containing the park’s museum, library, and administrative offices, this structure consisted of a one-and-one-half story, brick central block, flanked by one-story weatherboarded end wings, and a side-gabled roof with dormer windows (fig. 25).  The superintendent’s residence and the utility group—the latter of which comprised a central utility building and a brick inflammable storage unit—were erected just east of the first American line’s position, in the northwestern quadrant created by the intersection of New Garden and Old Battleground (then US 220) Roads.  Located about one hundred 

178.  “Guilford’s Historic Site Will Be Brought Up To National Level,” Greensboro Daily News, 19 October 1933; “Program at Battleground Is To Start In Next Few Days,” Greensboro Daily News, 15 March 1934. 

FIGURE 24. Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1933 (annotations by author).

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yards southeast of the utility building, the superintendent’s residence, measuring 30’ x 51’, was of similar construction to the administration building, but possessed only one wing, featured less elaborate fenestration, and donned a classic Moravian “hood” over its entrance door (fig. 26).  The L-shaped utility building, in contrast, was of yellow-pine frame construction, with an exterior of white-pine weatherboards, which were painted white.  A fence fashioned of black locust posts and heart cypress rails enclosed the building’s service 

court.  It too received a coat of white paint, as did the diminutive inflammable storage unit (fig. 27).179   

Both the superintendent’s residence and the utility group shared the same entrance off of New Garden Road.  About halfway down the curving entrance road, which ran roughly south-to-north toward the utility building, a short drive branched off to the right, terminating in a tear-shaped turnaround in front of the residence (fig. 28).  A few years later, the island within the turnaround’s compass was planted with oaks and cedars.

As former Park Historian Tom Baker has maintained, the extant superintendent’s residence and utility group derive their significance from the fact that they reflect “an evolving...ethos regarding appropriate architectural styles for national park areas.”180  In the 1930s, the Park Service may have deemed these Colonial Revival buildings more appropriate than the decaying Guilford Battle Ground Company facilities that they replaced, but like those older structures, the new ones still stood within the core of the battlefield, directly in the path of the fighting, and consequently compromised the historic scene.  Furthermore, they borrowed liberally from the Germanic Moravian tradition, 

FIGURE 25. Administration Building, 1935.

FIGURE 26. Superintendent’s Residence, 1935.

FIGURE 27. Utility Building and Inflammable Storage Unit, 1935.

179.  “Preliminary Work Is Begun on Battleground Buildings,” Greensboro Daily News, 23 August 1934; “Guilford Battleground Now Has Three New Structures,” Greensboro Daily News, 5 May 1935; Joseph J. Sawyer, “Final Construction Report: Administration Building, Superintendent’s Residence, Utility Building, Inflammable Building,” (typewritten document, 27 June 1935, GUCO Files), passim; Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1936, 600-01 GUCO, Record Ground 79, National Archives, Cartography Branch (copy in GUCO Files).  

180.  Thomas E. Baker, “Superintendent’s Residence and Utility Area: A History” (typewritten document, 1992, GUCO Files), 4. 

FIGURE 28. Superintendent’s Residence - Maintenance Complex, 1935.

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whereas the Guilford Court House community had chiefly consisted of Scots-Irish settlers.   

Without a doubt, the most formidable task before the National Park Service at Guilford involved the rehabilitation and partial restoration of the battlefield landscape.  The park’s 1936 “Master Plan” described the existing conditions:

Under the jurisdiction of the War Department the area underwent considerable development but very little of a worthwhile aesthetic nature was done.  Planting of exotics, both trees and shrubs, and a gardenesque treatment with bulbs, arranged in rows, circles and crescents, was the order of the day.  A systematic program of raking of both lawns and wooded areas has finally resulted in a degeneration of the wooded areas, there being practically no undergrowth on the area and the woodland floors are now absolutely bare red clay.181

Judge Schenck might have “redeemed the battlefield from oblivion”, but Edward Mendenhall had been close to taking it back.  Landscape Architect Frederic A. Fay, brought in to direct the landscaping project otherwise known as Project FP-441, further remarked that the inveterate practices of raking the woods and mowing the open meadows had led to critical erosion problems throughout the park.  As disclosed in the 1936 Master Plan, the goal of Project FP-441 was not only “to remedy [such] conditions” but also “to restore the area as much to its original condition at the time of the battle as possible.” 182

The purging of the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s improvements was a fundamental priority of the restoration project.  In addition to demolishing the company’s structures and sowing grass in the bare spots where they had stood, the Park Service also leveled the Lake Wilfong dam, thereby eliminating the artificial pond, which “had become badly silted, and was little more than an unsightly mudhole,” according to Resident Commissioner Roane.  PWA laborers also “obliterated,” to use the term favored in the Master Plan, and then reseeded the circuitous GBGC roads that led to and circumscribed the drained lakebed.  They likewise did away with the North Loop Road, which arced out of New Garden, traversing the field 

formerly interpreted as the site of the action at the third line of battle (i.e., the open area below the pull-off at Tour Stop 7).  The park, however, retained a few of the company’s other avenues, namely Holt Avenue, Southeast Boundary Road, which connected Holt Avenue to New Garden (Old Salisbury) Road, and West Loop Road, which provided access to the first line area.  At the junction of Holt Avenue and the Southeast Boundary Road, a roads’ crew put in a circular drive around the Winston Monument.  All of these routes were partially regraded and paved with bituminous macadam, including the stretch of New Garden Road that traversed the park.183 

As work progressed on New Garden Road, a 350-foot segment, located between the Maryland and Stuart Monuments, was realigned to its “original roadbed.”184  The improvement of this historic highway also necessitated dismantling the Nash and Davidson arches, as their narrow passageways only provided enough berth for one vehicle at a time.  When attempts to donate the arches to other sites foundered, the park’s maintenance staff cut their massive granite blocks into more manageable pieces and used them for various purposes, such as lining park roads to prevent parking on their shoulders.185

But the visual impact of these changes paled in comparison to the colossal magnitude of the grounds’ improvements (Project FP-441) accomplished in 1937.  Under Architect Frederic Fay’s direction, laborers pulled down three other monuments—namely, the Battle, or Cannonball (erected 1888), the King’s Mountain (1903), and the Clio (1909)—and moved the Schenck (1904) and Morehead (1913) memorials to their present locations north of the Greene Monument.  Fay’s landscaping crew, however, spent the majority of its time engaged in planting and reforestation efforts (fig. 29), as well as in an attempt to rid the park of its exotic plant species, which were largely concentrated in the designed landscape associated with the Greene Monument. Fay reported that a 

181.  Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse NMP, 1936: 3.182.  Fay, “Final Report to Chief Architect, Project FP-441,” 

2; Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse NMP, 1936: 3.

183.  James H. Roane, Narrative Report for March 1936; Roane, Narrative Report for June 1937; Roane, Narrative Report for September 1937; Roane, Narrative Report for October 1937, in Narrative Report File, Nov. 1935-Dec. 1940, GUCO Files; Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1936: 5-6; Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1939, 600-01 GUCO, Record Ground 79, National Archives, Cartography Branch (copy in GUCO Files), 2-3.  

52  Cultural Landscape Report:  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

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FIGU

RE 29.

Gen

eral Plantin

g Plan

, 1936.

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great many of the surrounding property holders would gladly exchange large amounts of native material for each exotic shrub. The workers not only removed the exotics from the Greene Monument landscape, but they also removed Mendenhall’s formal design elements (e.g., the concrete walkways and rose trellises) from the site and then seeded their footprints with grass.  The area’s nonnative plants were replaced with an indigenous scattering of southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora), tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera), sugar maples (Acer saccharum), oaks (Quercus spp.), and redbuds (Cercis canadensis).  Furthermore, Fay’s crew tore down an old springhouse and two storage sheds, which stood between the Greene Monument and the railroad tracks, and afterwards established a screen of three oak species over and around their former sites.

In the open area east of the Greene Monument, workers reforested Lake Wilfong’s drained bed and the surrounding meadowland with over 20,000 hardwoods made up of five native species: chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), southern red oak (Quercus falcata), tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis).  This stock of trees was principally procured from the forest nursery of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Fay judged these specimens to be “of very superior quality,” and 

believed that the forestry service of the Great Smokies deserved special commendation.  

To the west of the railroad tracks and south of New Garden Road, Fay rehabilitated the existing woodlands by establishing an understory of over 3,000 trees and saplings.  The plantings here included glossy privet (Ligustrum lucidum), Chickasaw plum (Prunus angustifolia), dogwood (Cornus florida), red chokecherry (Aronia arbutifolia), blackhaw (Viburnum prunifolium), and highbush blueberry (Vaccineum corymbosum), in addition to several hundred oak saplings and acorns.  

The landscape architect further believed that the administration building as well as the superintendent’s residence and utility group needed to “be more closely ‘tied in’ to their sites.”  Accordingly, he directed his crew to sow a mixture of grasses around the administration building and embellish its immediate surroundings with an assortment of ornamental shrubs and trees.  Perhaps because he saw the administrative area as an operational, rather than a strictly interpretive, component of the battlefield landscape, Fay elected to incorporate a few introduced species, such as English ivy (Hedera helix) and crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica), into the planting scheme.  In addition, he instructed his labor force to plant two vegetative screens of mixed hardwoods interspersed with flowering trees and shrubs.  One of these screens was established between the building and the railroad tracks, and the other between its parking lot and New Garden Road. 

At the superintendent’s residence, laborers installed 300 lineal feet of gravel walkways to connect the house to both the garden and the utility building.  Originally, planners intended the garden, which was laid out on axis with the utility building, to be subdivided lengthwise into two distinct plots.  In this configuration, the east-west gravel walkway would bisect the garden and parallel the dividing line between the two plots.  Vegetables would be cultivated in the northern plot (the larger of the two), while roses would be grown in its thinner neighbor to the south (fig. 30).  Architect Fay, however, implemented only part of the garden design plan.  As photographs accompanying his final report reveal, the southern, or “rose”, plot was never installed, and thus the east-west walkway ended up 

184.  Sometime between 1903 and 1928, the course of New Garden Road stretching between the Maryland and Stuart Monuments was shifted a little south of its original roadbed to incorporate a short section of one of the GBGC’s sugar maple-lined avenues.  Compare the 1903 plan “Sketch of Guilford Battle Ground Park,” NPS 316.1023 (see fig. 19) with the War Department-era plan “Guilford Court House National Military Park: Guilford Gounty [sic], North Carolina,” dated July 16, 1928.  A facsimile of the latter plan resides in GUCO’s map collection, but the location of the original is unknown.  Although the facsimile’s quality was too poor for legible reproduction in this report, the pertinent details are also depicted in fig. 24, a 1933 plan that predates the realignment work.  Also see GUCO Plans for Proposed Construction, Reconstruction, and Improvements of Park Roads, Project 1A1, 1935, sheets 1, 6, and 7, in the 1930s drawer of GUCO’s map collection.

185.  Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1939: 2-3; Roane, Narrative Report for March 1937; Roane, Narrative Report for June 1937, Narrative Report File, Nov. 1935-Dec. 1940, GUCO Files; Dennis F. Daniels, “Guilford Courthouse National Military Park: The Early Years With a Concentration on the 1930s and 1940s” (M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1994), 46-47.

54  Cultural Landscape Report:  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

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FIGU

RE 30.

Sup

erinten

den

t’s Resid

ence A

rea Plantin

g Plan

, 1936.

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delineating the garden’s southernmost boundary line.  To further define the garden space, craftsmen constructed a wooden post-and-rail fence around it, thereby tying it together aesthetically with the utility building.  Measuring 175 lineal feet in length, this fence was identical in appearance to the one that enclosed that structure’s service court and was perhaps made of the same types of wood.  Next, workers masked the fence with an informal hedge composed of the exotics Vanhoutte spirea (Spiraea vanhouttei) and nandina (Nandina domestica).  Spirea was likewise planted around the house, with a dogwood and a crepe myrtle planted nearby.  Furthermore, a few American elms (Ulmus americana) and sugar maples (Acer saccharum) were moved from the complex’s perimeter to more conspicuous locations near the residence, while over two-dozen lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) were placed behind the garden and at the foot of the yard.  To soften the stark appearance of the service court, a southern magnolia was planted on each side of its entrance.  Finally, Fay’s crew enhanced the existing woods to the east with understory plantings and began the process of establishing a “woods fringe” between the complex and New Garden Road.  The park continued this process after Fay’s departure, establishing additional hardwoods and shrubs to the south and west of the superintendent’s residence 

and utility group to produce the vegetation buffer that presently insulates the complex.186

Project FP-441 officially came to an end in May 1937, but only nine months after its completion the park received an additional subsidy for yet another landscape improvement.  In February 1938, Region One’s resident landscape architect, R. A. Wilhelm, arrived at Guilford with news that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) had appropriated $25,000 expressly for the construction of an outdoor amphitheater in the lawn adjoining the western side, or front, of the Greene Monument (fig. 31).  The amphitheater project had been proposed in an early draft of the park’s 1936 Master Plan, but then subsequently rejected.  Junior Historian William Brandon, who became acting superintendent in August 1938, opposed the site designated for the structure on account of its close proximity to the second American line’s position.  Together, he and Wilhelm selected an alternative location; however, the Washington office refused to 

186.  Fay, “Final Report to Chief Architect, Project FP-441,” passim; Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse NMP, 1939; Planting Record, Winter of 1940-41, in GUCO Archives Box No. 1—GUCO: Park Construction, 1935, GUCO Files.  

FIGURE 31. General Development Plan, 1938.

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accommodate them and ordered construction to commence in the predetermined spot. 187

Utilizing a daily average of thirty-six laborers, the project lasted nearly nine months and required extensive grading, earth displacement, and contouring.  Completed in February 1939, the fan-shaped amphitheater consisted of a speaker’s pavilion, a system of sodded terraces, brick walkways, and two sets of brick entrance steps leading up from New Garden Road, as well as drainage lines and catch basins (fig. 32).  The speaker’s pavilion—a brick stage sheltered beneath a white wooden portico—sat at the structure’s apex, roughly seventy yards west, of the Greene Monument (fig. 33).  From the speaker’s pavilion, the terraces undulated up toward the Greene 

Monument, which served as the amphitheater’s eastern finial.  These grassy terraces accommodated 1,200 spectators, who would sit on specially designed collapsible benches.188

In his administrative history, former Park Historian Tom Baker labeled the amphitheater “a throwback to the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s discredited philosophy of preservation by ornamentation.”189  Its construction seems all the more inexplicable and inconsistent given the fact that the cardinal goal of the 1936 Master Plan was “to restore the area as much to its original condition at the time of the battle as possible.”  Ironically, the Park Service went to great lengths to purge the Greene Monument landscape of Mendenhall’s formal designs, only to turn around a few months later and replace them with landscaped terraces, brick walks, and a porticoed speaker’s stand.  Granted, the amphitheater may have been less obvious than the former resident commissioner’s treatments, but its alteration of the landscape’s 

187.  Roane, Monthly Narrative for May 1937; Roane, Monthly Narrative for February 1938; Roane, Monthly Narrative for March 1938; William P. Brandon, Monthly Narrative for August 1938, in Narrative Report File, Nov. 1935-Dec. 1940, GUCO Files; William P. Brandon, Historian’s Report for February 1938; Brandon, Historian’s Report for March 1938, in Historian’s Reports File, GUCO Files; R. A. Wilhelm, “Final Report: Project LD 14, Outdoor Theatre” (typewritten report, 29 August 1939, GUCO Files), passim.

FIGURE 32. Outdoor Amphitheater Plan, 1938.

188.  Brandon, Monthly Narrative for February 1939; Plan of Outdoor Theatre, 316.1020.5, GUCO Files (in 1930s drawer of GUCO’s map cabinet); Wilhelm, “Final Report: Project LD 14, Outdoor Theatre.” 

189.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 24.  

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fabric in that area was far more extreme and by no means as easily reversible.

Apart from receiving extensive internal improvements, GUCO also expanded by nearly twenty percent during the 1930s.  Between 1934 and 1937, the park acquired an additional 23.5 acres through seven land transactions, bringing it up to almost 149 acres (refer to fig. 21).  One of the most notable additions was an 8.5-acre tract, which surrounded two smaller parcels acquired in July 1934.  Located on the north side of New Garden Road and about 300 yards east of the park proper, this satellite tract embraced the reputed site of the original Guilford Court House (at present-day Tour Stop 6) and a portion of the town of Martinville.  (Archeological investigations conducted at the traditional courthouse site in the mid-1970s uncovered the structural vestiges of a post-in-the-ground building, but it is doubtful, as explained in endnote 96, that these remains were those of the courthouse.)  The so-called “courthouse” tract was joined to the rest of the park in 1937, after the State of North Carolina deeded to the Federal Government the 11.5-acre stretch of New Garden Road (and right-of-way) that passed through the park, connecting it with the detached property.190 

Another significant road development occurred in 1941, when the North Carolina State Highway and Public Works Commission realigned the stretch of U.S. 220 that bisected the park to its current, more-western location (Battleground Ave).  The old course then became State Road 2340, which was locally dubbed “Old Battleground Road.”  Possibly because an attempt to secure this road’s right-of-

way had previously failed in the mid-1930s, the National Park Service made no further effort to acquire it after its downgrading from a federal highway to a state road.  In more recent years, Old Battleground Road has evolved into a heavily traveled north-south connector, interrupting circulation through the park and greatly inhibiting the visitor’s ability to visualize the historic scene between the first and second battle line locations.191

Guilford in the 1940s and 1950sBoth disquieted by encroachment and spurred on by local proponents of the park’s expansion, Superintendent William P. Brandon developed a land acquisition program for Guilford in 1940.  Brandon set his sights on preserving more of the battlefield’s core, while also filling in and rounding off the park’s irregular boundaries.  Toward these ends, he advocated the addition of nine adjacent tracts, which together totaled over fifty unprotected acres.  A one-acre inholding, situated at the northern corner of Holt Avenue and Old Battleground Road, deserved the most pressing attention in Brandon’s estimation.  Containing a two-story frame dwelling, a brick country store, and other dilapidated outbuildings, this privately owned parcel greatly altered the historic scene in the area between the first and second American lines (fig. 34).  Another piece of non-contributing private property, the homeplace of the Webb family, also figured prominently into the superintendent’s land acquisition plan.  The Webb parcel sat on the north side of New Garden Road, between the park proper and the satellite “courthouse” tract, and consisted of a frame residence with a detached garage and miscellaneous outbuildings (fig. 35).192  The United 

FIGURE 33. Amphitheater stage and portico, circa 1939.

190.  See GUCO Deeds 4-10, Land Records File, GUCO Files, also on microfilm.  191.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 24. 

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States’ entry into World War II, however, put the fetters on Brandon’s designs for expanding Guilford.  Following the war, a more conservative approach to the park’s management assured that no new acreage would be added until the late-1950s. 

While GUCO’s expansion remained dormant throughout the 1940s and most of the 1950s, the pace 

of suburban development accelerated around its perimeter, consuming unpreserved chunks of battlefield land.  One developer was Charles O. Martin, who owned a large tract of land south of New Garden Road, opposite the Webb property and the traditional courthouse site.  In 1949, he cut a “trespass road” from his holdings through the federally owned right-of-way bordering New Garden Road (fig. 36).  This trespass road was essentially an extension of Nathanael Greene Road, a north-south route located in neighboring Country Park.  Superintendent Raleigh C. Taylor, who had taken the park’s reins in 1945, promptly barricaded the connector with concrete bollards to deny Martin access to New Garden.  Martin, in turn, defiantly destroyed the barrier with heavy machinery and reopened his illegal road.  This act of provocation, which would be repeated several times in the ensuing years as subsequent barricades fell to similar fates, precipitated a decade-long legal battle over the road’s legitimacy.  Despite an initial victory in the courts for the government, Martin ultimately prevailed and his road would remain open until 1967, the year in which the park finally acquired property.  Today, it is paved in asphalt and serves as a pedestrian link between GUCO and Country Park.193  

The so-called “trespass road,” however intrusive, was a mere scratch on the face of the battlefield compared to the development that followed in its wake in the early-1950s.  Upon land that once belonged to Martinville’s East Square, Charles O. Martin constructed an entertainment complex, featuring a drive-in movie theater, a barbecue restaurant, and a figure-eight go-cart track (fig. 37).  During grading operations for the drive-in’s parking lot, bulldozer operators reportedly plowed up the remains of old building foundations and other material culture.194 

Mission 66, Bicentennial Developments, & Continuing Efforts, 1956-PresentDuring the mid-1950s, Guilford’s staff  began planning for Mission 66, a ten-year initiative aimed at upgrading outmoded and inadequate facilities in 

192.  William P. Brandon, “A Land Acquisition Program for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park,” 9 May 1940, microfilm (frames 491-514 of  “Selected Docs,” Roll 5 at GUCO). 

FIGURE 34. The Anderson inholding, circa 1940.

FIGURE 35. The Webb property, no date.

FIGURE 36. Intersection of Martin’s “Trespass” and New Garden Roads, circa 1949.

193.  For a full and insightful treatment of the Martin Trespass Case, see Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 43-56. 

194.  Ward and Coe, “Archeological Investigations at the Site of Guilford Courthouse,” 47. 

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the parks for the fiftieth anniversary (1966) of the National Park Service’s establishment.  At Guilford, planners noted, the suburbanization of the battlefield’s immediate environs, especially the unwelcome increase in the volume of local traffic on the park’s roads, was taking a heavy toll on the visitor’s experience.  To mitigate the impact of outside intrusions, management not only advocated permanently closing and restoring New Garden Road, but also recommended the planting of vegetative screens to conceal incompatible development along the perimeter.  The creation of a one-way automobile tour route was also prescribed to enhance interpretation by better directing the visitor through the park.  Other notable proposals included establishing a walking trail system and building a new residence to house proposed staffing additions.  Although the key components of the Mission 66 blueprint would not be achieved by the targeted year, one aspect was at least partially realized early on in the planning stages.  Instead of erecting a new house, the park’s leadership, in 1956, decided to purchase an existing one (and the 0.69-acre lot on which it sat) located in the Green Acres 

subdivision, adjacent to the park’s western boundary.  Currently, this one-story, brick structure with an attached carport, known as Quarters No. 2, doubles as a storage facility and lodgings for seasonal employees.195

In May 1957, roughly half a year after the purchase of the Green Acres property, the park annexed the one-acre inholding on the corner of Holt Avenue and Old Battleground—the very parcel that former Superintendent Brandon had singled out as the chief land-acquisition priority back in 1940.  Shortly after the transaction’s completion, the buildings on the lot were demolished and the site was released to natural succession.196  

FIGURE 37. Detail of a 1957 aerial photograph of the park (annotations by author).

195.  “Mission 66 for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park” (typewritten document, n.d., GUCO Files), passim; “Guilford Military Park Improvement Move Seen,” The Greensboro Record, 10 September 1959; “Damaged Road Reopens Today in Military Park,” The Greensboro Record, 2 August 1960; GUCO Deed 11, December 1956, Land Records File, GUCO Files.

196.  GUCO Deed 12, May 1957, Land Records File, GUCO Files; Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 57.

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As the 1950s came to a close, a natural disaster struck the park, resulting in the elimination of Lake Caldwell, the northernmost of Greensboro County Park’s three artificial ponds.  CWA laborers, as previously mentioned, had created these water features in the early-1930s by erecting dams at intervals along Hunting Creek.  But, in October 1959, Hurricane Gracie surged inland and saturated the North Carolina piedmont with violent downpours.  As a result, Hunting Creek flooded, rupturing Lake Caldwell’s dam and carrying away a 26-foot section of New Garden Road, which traversed the impoundment’s spine.  When city officials elected not to refill the lake, the land reverted back to its owner, Charles O. Martin, who had granted it to the municipality, under easement, for recreational usage.  In 1960, the National Park Service, at the behest of inconvenienced local residents, built a temporary bridge over the gap in the obsolete dam, then later filled-in the washed-out section with earth and repaved the road above.  GUCO’s leadership had sought to use the storm damage as an excuse to make good on its intention to close New Garden Road within the park, but instead acquiesced before public hostility to the plan.197

When GUCO expanded by nearly 45 percent in the late-1960s, the northern half of the old city lakebed was added to the park, as were many other crucial pieces of battlefield property.  Land acquisition activity had been virtually nonexistent at Guilford since the 1930s, but this changed dramatically in 1966, when the park bought a thirty-acre tract situated along its north-central boundary.  Additional purchases followed in quick succession.  In 1967, the park obtained the balance of Charles O. Martin’s holdings (24.4 acres) as well as the 12-acre parcel embracing the site of the drive-in theater, which the developer had bestowed on his son-in-law Raymond Farrar.  Also that year, the park secured the title to the Webb property adjoining the west side of the traditional courthouse site.  Finally, in 1969, the city agreed to exchange its 11.76-acre zoo property, located in County Park between the park’s Southeast Boundary Road and the drained lakebed, for a 16.84-acre parcel of the recently acquired 

Martin tract.  Thus, by the end of the decade, the park had netted over 65 acres, absorbing some of the most incompatible adjacent properties.  GUCO reached its current size of 220.25 acres in the 1970s with the addition of three small tracts totaling a little over four acres.198 

The land-acquisition boom of the late-1960s coincided with a period of intensive planning at the park.  In preparation for the Bicentennial (1976), GUCO’s staff developed a new Master Plan in 1968, and then revised it the following year.  This document refined and expanded the largely unimplemented Mission 66 blueprint, citing as its principal priorities the closure and restoration of New Garden Road and the installation of a one-way vehicular tour route.  Another plan of note called for expanding the administration building, which had become inadequate for the park’s interpretive and operational purposes.  This venture, however, was later rejected in favor of constructing an entirely new facility.199

The 1969 Master Plan also prescribed restoring the historic character of the recently acquired zoo and drive-in tracts.  In a 1971 interview, Superintendent Willard Danielson informed a local newspaper reporter that the park was “letting the zoo property recover to its natural condition.”  Despite intentions “to restore the historic field setting” of the drive-in parcel, it was treated in a similar fashion.  As late as 1983, the park was still removing “[r]ubbish, debris, and excess vegetation” from the drive-in site.200 

Following the completion of requisite archeological surveys, work began in the early-1970s on the other improvements endorsed in the Master Plan (fig. 38).  One of the smaller projects involved moving the graves of William Hooper and John Penn (two of North Carolina’s three signers of the Declaration of 

197.  Eugene McKeown to Regional Director, 6 February 1960; Eugene McKeown to Regional Director, 21 May 1960, GUCO Files; “Damaged Road Reopens Today In Military Park,” The Greensboro Record, 2 August 1960. 

198.  See GUCO Deeds 13-22, Land Records File, GUCO Files.

199.  Master Plan: Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1969), 43-46, see especially the “General Development Plan” map on p. 53; “Park Master Plan To Be Shown,” The Greensboro Record, 13 March 1969; “Park Visitor Center Is Funded,” The Greensboro Record, 29 January 1973. 

200.  Master Plan (1969): 46, 53; “Park Popularity Growing,” The Greensboro Record, 6 September 1971; Willard Danielson, Annual Report for 1983, Superintendents Annual Narrative Report File, A2621, GUCO Files. 

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FIG

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.D

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973.

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Independence) and the monument commemorating their statesmanship.  Originally situated at the southwest corner of Old Battleground and New Garden Roads, the Hooper-Penn Monument created a dangerous blind spot for motorists and was therefore relocated, along with the graves that it marked, to its current site adjoining the amphitheater’s south walk.201  

By the fall of 1975, contractors had erected a new visitor center, designed in the modern style, and had laid out a 40-car parking lot close to the site of the old Guilford Battle Ground Company (GBGC) pavilion.  The day after the new facility opened, a demolition crew razed the old administration building, along with its parking lot.  The construction of a one-way tour route also occurred in time for the Bicentennial.  This 2.4-mile asphalt loop road consisted of six (later increased to eight) interpretive stops and/or “pull-offs”, four of which boasted multimedia wayside exhibits.202 Two separate entrances provided access to the tour route, with one located at the visitor center and the other at the intersection of Old Battleground Road and the former Holt Avenue, which was incorporated into the loop.  For the visitor’s convenience, the park also erected a comfort station at Stop 6, across New Garden Road from the traditional courthouse site.  Finally, the park installed over two miles of supplemental walking trails to make key points on the battlefield more accessible.203 

While the tour route required 1.77 miles of newly cut road, it also integrated sections of three GBGC-era avenues and assimilated the short segment of New Garden Road that passed over defunct Lake Caldwell’s earthen dam.204  The establishment of the tour loop allowed the park to obliterate Winston Circle, which had allowed traffic to travel between GUCO and Country Park.  To further control access, especially to prevent vehicles from entering 

the park after hours, gates were installed at entrances and exits.  

Perhaps the park’s greatest Bicentennial-era accomplishment was the internal closure of New Garden (Old Salisbury) Road.  To accommodate area residents, however, the National Park Service had to construct a short by-pass through GUCO’s western section to connect the public portion of New Garden to Old Battleground Road.  The by-pass terminated into Old Battleground opposite the northern course of the tour route, thereby completing the tour loop.  The restoration of the historic highway within the park entailed tearing up the pavement and then top-surfacing the roadbed with brown crushed stone.  The restored route generally followed the course of the previous paved route except in the area between the Maryland and Stuart Monuments (just west of the open field previously interpreted as the site of the third line).  Here, engineers realigned a short section of the road in favor of an alternate dip in its course. 205  This dip had been established in the early-twentieth century, but then subsequently corrected when the park upgraded the road in the mid-1930s.  The western half of the dip included a vestigial section of an old sugar maple-lined avenue established by the GBGC.  Originally, this avenue had continued on sharply to the south; however, it was redirected back into New Garden Road to form the aforementioned dip sometime between 1903 and 1928 (see endnote 182 for more details).      

Although the appearance of the park’s contemporary landscape largely resulted from internal improvements accomplished during the 1930s and the 1970s, other significant developments have occurred in recent years.  Circa 1981, the Southern Railway Company abandoned the old Cape Fear-Yadkin Valley line and right-of-way, allowing GUCO to eliminate yet another intrusion.  By 1984, the same year in which the city of Greensboro officially absorbed the park, the tracks had been pulled up, the route leveled and regraded, and the current overflow parking lot established over a section of the railroad bed located above the juncture of the tour loop’s northern course and Old Battleground Road.  Roughly a decade later, the old railroad bed was incorporated into the Bicentennial 

201.  Master Plan (1969): 27; Don Long, Park Ranger, GUCO, personal communicant, 28 March 2001. 

202.  The park, however, is in the process of installing a new and more comprehensive system of interpretive waysides along the tour road and walking trails.

203.  Baker, Redeemed From Oblivion, 79. 204.  The three GBGC-era roads incorporated into the tour 

loop are 1) West Boundary Road, which was realigned to link up with 2) Holt Avenue, which was, in turn, reconfigured to curve seamlessly into 3) Southeast Boundary Road, thus permitting the elimination of the Winston Circle. 

205.  Don Long, Park Ranger, GUCO, personal communicant, 28 March 2001.

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Greenway, a recreational corridor that runs through northwestern Greensboro.206  

In the mid-1980s, residents from neighboring apartment complexes and housing subdivisions began cutting unauthorized footpaths into the park.  This activity, coupled with increasing vandalism—a side effect of the area’s residential and commercial development—compelled the park to install chain-link fences along its boundary lines.  Sixty percent of the perimeter was enclosed by 1989, and efforts continue today.  One final significant development to occur during the 1980s involved the amphitheater.  By 1987, the wooden portico sheltering the structure’s speaker’s platform had deteriorated so badly that it required demolition.207 

To enhance interpretation and the visitor’s experience, the park completed several projects in the 1990s.  First, in 1993, a concrete trailer pad (equipped with city water, sewage, and electrical connections) was constructed west of the utility building in an effort to bring Volunteers in the Parks (VIPs) to Guilford.  In 1997, the park established four new exposed-aggregate walking trails to tie together the existing system and thereby improve visitor circulation.  That same year, GUCO’s staff, now under the direction of Superintendent Robert A. Vogel, prepared a revision of the park’s General 

Management Plan (GMP).  The most ambitious change envisioned in the GMP is the closure and reforestation of the Old Battleground Road.  Other plans for rehabilitating the historic scene include redirecting and revegetating the greenway corridor as well as replacing the comfort station at Tour Stop 6 with lower-impact facilities. 208  

Because Guilford Courthouse National Military Park is a nationally significant historic site that possesses “exceptional value or quality in illustrating and interpreting the heritage of the United States,” the Secretary of the Interior designated it a National Historic Landmark in November 2000.  The park actually serves as the core of a larger Guilford Court House Battlefield landmark district, which likewise encompasses nearby Tannenbaum Historic Park, a portion of Greensboro Country Park, as well as adjacent private holdings.  Because urban encroachment threatens the few remaining parcels of undeveloped, or minimally developed, battlefield land, acquisition efforts are also ongoing at Guilford.  The park is currently in the process of securing four small tracts, totaling about eight acres.209

206.  Willard Danielson, Annual Narrative Reports for 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984; Mark H. Woods, Annual Narrative Report for 1995-1996, Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Reports File, A2621, GUCO Files.

207.   Willard Danielson, Annual Narrative Reports for 1980-1989, GUCO Files.  

208.  Mark W. Woods, Annual Narrative Report for 1993, GUCO Files; Stephen Ware, Chief of Visitor Services, GUCO, personal communicant, 11 April 2001; General Management Plan Environmental Assessment: Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (Atlanta: National Park Service Southeast Regional Office, 1997), 13-15.  

209.  Robert A. Vogel, Superintendent, GUCO, personal communicant, 28 March 2001.   

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Existing Conditions

The following discussion, and accompanying plan  document the existing conditions of the cultural landscape at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park1 (fig. 39). 

Topographical OverviewLying in the piedmont region of North Carolina, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO) encompasses over 220 acres of undulating and occasionally broken terrain.  The steepest gradients rise from the banks of the park’s two shallow watercourses: Hunting Creek and a smaller unnamed tributary.  Cutting a path through GUCO’s eastern half, Hunting Creek runs roughly south to north, while its tributary meanders from the southwest to the northeast, spilling into the former at an oblique angle near the park’s northern boundary.  The park’s landscape displays about ninety feet of change of elevation, consisting of well-rounded hills, lobated ridges, narrow ravines, and even some relatively level ground, in addition to the aforementioned creek beds.  The highest points rise subtly in the west near the visitor center and the Greene Monument, where elevations exceed 870 feet (above sea level).  In contrast, elevations drop as low as 780 feet at the confluence of Hunting Creek and its tributary.  The cluster of hills and ridges—situated immediately west, between, and east of these two streams—generally attain heights of roughly 850 feet.  A forest of mixed hardwoods, composed predominantly of oaks, covers approximately ninety percent of the park.  These woodlands, however, are also interspersed with sizable concentrations of evergreens, chiefly pines.

Circulation

Public RoadsOld Battleground Road.   This two-lane road, which carries a daily volume of traffic in excess of 10,000 vehicles, bisects the park on a north-south line, thereby dividing it into two disproportionate sections.2  The road runs between the visitor center and the Greene Monument, as well as between the positions held by the first and second American lines.  Moving south to north through the park, Old Battleground Road first intersects the southern course of the one-way tour road and then divides the restored section of New Garden Road, before finally crossing over the tour loop’s northern route.  Split-rail fences line the road’s grassy shoulders between its two intersections with the tour road (fig. 40).  A rectilinear overflow parking lot, also partially enclosed in split-rail fencing, stretches northward from the eastern corner of Old Battleground Road’s junction with the northern course of the tour road (fig. 41).  This lot’s entrance and exit points are located on Old Battleground Road. 

The number of cars traveling Old Battleground Road daily distracts visitors by interrupting the 

1. Although GUCO’s twenty-eight monuments and gravesites are integral components of the commemorative landscape, it is beyond the scope of this report to document the exact locations and contexts of these feataures.  However, the monuments and gravesites are graphically represented on the existing conditions plan.

2.  General Management Plan and Environmental Assessment: Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (Atlanta: National Park Service, 1997), 4.

FIGURE 40. Looking northward up Old Battleground Road from a point just south of its intersection with the restored New Garden trace (middle ground). 

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park’s interpretive flow, as the road bisects the battlefield.  Furthermore, north and south of the park’s boundaries, residential and commercial development adjoins both sides of Old Battleground Road, affecting the automobile approach sequence.  This is especially true to the south, where an incompatible strip of commercial development, including a self-storage facility and the Southern Foods distribution center, crowds along the eastern margin of Old Battleground.  From within the park, the northern segment of this commercial strip—particularly the S & ME (an environmental engineering company) office building, which stands on a lot adjacent to the park’s southern boundary—can be clearly seen through the scattering of trees bordering the tour road (fig. 42). 

New Garden Road and Bypass.   New Garden Road is the contemporary correlate of historic Salisbury Road—the principal axis of the Guilford Court House battlefield.  In 1975, all but a short segment of this historic highway was restored, within the 

confines of the park, to a semblance of its 1781 appearance.  Consequently, the two-lane paved road, heading eastward from its intersection with U.S. 220, enters the park from the west and travels up to the visitor center’s divided entrance, where a 200-yard bypass (constructed in 1975) redirects it into a more northerly junction with Old Battleground Road.  The restored roadbed, conversely, continues along its original course on the east side of the main entrance.  A crescent-shaped row of two-foot-tall pine bollards prevents vehicles from accessing the restored road (fig. 43).  The New Garden bypass merges into Old Battleground Road opposite the northern route of the tour loop, and thus may be considered part of the latter.  It also subdivides the western division of the park (the land lying west of Old Battleground Road) into northern and southern sections.  As with Old Battleground, the public route of New Garden Road has become a heavily traveled, commuter connector.  Developers have also found this strip of road exceedingly attractive. Only seven acres belonging to the city’s Tannenbaum Historic Park,  at the corner of U.S. 220 and New Garden, remain undeveloped along this approach to the park.

The Restored Section of New Garden RoadFrom its origin on the east side of the visitor center’s entrance drive, the restored course of New Garden (Salisbury) Road, which is currently covered in brown gravel, extends roughly eastward through the length of the park before terminating at Lawndale Drive.  Directly north of the visitor center, this historic highway passes through the wooded area 

FIGURE 41. View of the rectilinear Overflow Parking Lot (middle ground), as seen from the southern corner of the tour loop’s northern route and Old Battleground Road.

FIGURE 42. The intersection of Old Battleground Road and the tour road’s southern route, showing the S & ME office building and parking lot to the southeast.

FIGURE 43. View of the confusing transition between New Garden Road’s modern and historic courses, as seen from the island situated between the visitor center’s divided entrance drives.  Note the close proximity of the paved bypass (shown curving into the background) to the restored trace (the beginning of which is blocked by bollards).

WinstonMonument

StuartMonument Third Line

Monument

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Parking

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ound

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ay

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tingCree

k

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Sumner Monument

Joseph MoreheadMonument

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Guilford CourthouseNational Military ParkGreensboro, NC

Existing Conditions MapAugust 2003

Purgason Tract

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Lake CaldwellDam

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AmericanFirst Line

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Figure 39

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EXISTING CONDITIONS

known as “Monument Row”—where five memorials stand on the south side of the road and three, two of which mark gravesites, on the north.  Next, the New Garden trace crosses over Old Battleground Road (fig. 44), traverses the Greene Monument lawn, and then plunges into an area of dense hardwood forest.  Approximately 750 feet east of the Greene Monument, the road deviates from its original bed near the Delaware Monument, bearing southward to pick up a portion of an old sugar maple-lined avenue originally laid out by the Guilford Battle Ground Company.  At the point of deviation, a grassy corridor continues on straight through the woods, delineating the path of the original roadbed (fig. 45).  An exposed-aggregate foot trail, which passes throuogh the sugar maple allée, intersects the grassy corridor and then proceeds northward, passing between the Delaware and Maryland Monuments.  This foot trail follows the bed of historic Bruce Road for a short distance, 

but then veers off to the east.  Still following the route of the GBGC’s sugar maple-lined avenue, New Garden Road gradually descends toward the ravine located in “Schenck’s field,” previously thought to be the site of the third American line.  At its sharpest point of descent, the gravel road is stepped down by a series of brick retainers, which create a sort of terraced effect.  Once in Schenck’s field, New Garden rejoins its original roadbed and, shortly thereafter, enters hardwood forest once again (fig. 46).  

About 800 feet west of the parking lot at Tour Stop 6, New Garden merges with the park’s tour road and proceeds over the top of former Lake Caldwell’s earthen dam (fig. 47).  Here, a culvert allows Hunting Creek to pass beneath the dam and the tour road.  New Garden and the tour route diverge approximately 200 feet below Tour Stop 6’s parking lot.  The historic highway then continues on through the Martinville townsite, past the “traditional” courthouse site, before crossing over the tour road 

FIGURE 44. The New Garden trace intersecting Old Battleground Road as it heads east toward the Greene Monument lawn.

FIGURE 45. Looking eastward down New Garden’s restored course at the point where the road deviates southward from its original bed and incorporates the remnant section of the sugar maple allée (left, middle) that the Guilford Battle Ground Company originally installed in the 1890s.

FIGURE 46. View of the New Garden trace exiting the woods, while traveling eastward, and traversing “Schenck’s field” (the field previously interpreted as the site of the third line), showing the Stuart Monument (left, middleground) and the taller Third Line Monument (far left, background).

FIGURE 47. The convergence of the New Garden trace and the paved tour road.

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and passing through the woods toward Lawndale Drive.  Pine bollards obstruct all vehicular-entry points onto New Garden along the tour road in the Tour Stop 6 vicinity and at its junction with Lawndale Drive.  

Interpretive Tour RoadThe one-way, paved tour road that loops through the park measures twenty feet in width and travels a total distance of 2.4 miles.  A yellow stripe divides the road into two lanes: the eight-foot-wide inner lane serves as a bicycle route, while the larger outer lane is reserved for automobile traffic.  Soon after the tour road’s opening in the mid-1970s, pedestrians appropriated the bicycle lane for the purposes of walking and jogging—this recreational trend has only intensified in recent years as a result of northwestern Greensboro’s sustained growth.  

The tour route directs motorists through the park in a counterclockwise manner, beginning and ending at the visitor center entrance off of New Garden Road.  Visitors, however, may also access the tour road at the intersection of Old Battleground Road and the former Holt Avenue (now part of the southern route of the tour loop).  Once on the tour road, visitors have the option of pulling off at any of eight interpretive stops along the way.  These stops provide access to the three lines of battle and other points of interest in the park.  A comfort station stands at Tour Stop 6, lying across the restored New Garden Road from the “traditional” courthouse site (fig. 48).  All of the tour stops, with the exception of Stop 7, are equipped with small paved parking lots accommodating from four to twenty vehicles.  Stop 7, in contrast, provides a grassy pull-off (enough room for three cars parked end to end) on the road’s left shoulder.  The majority of the tour stops feature 

interpretive waysides dating from the mid-1970s; however, these will soon be removed and replaced with a new, more comprehensive system of exhibits.

The tour road follows a rather sinuous route through the park.  At one point or another, it passes over the positions held by the three American battle lines and intersects Old Battleground Road twice, once near the park’s southern boundary and again south of the overflow parking lot.  In the western and southern reaches of the park, the tour road integrates portions of three old Guilford Battle Ground Company avenues.  The most notable among them is former Holt Avenue, originally a sugar maple allée, which stretches between Old Battleground Road and Tour Stop 4.   Several sugar maples planted in the 1890s still stand on both sides of the road between Tour Stops 3 and 4 (fig. 49).  

The tour road’s relationship to New Garden Road also merits attention. It incorporates a 600-foot segment of New Garden Road as it traverses the old Lake Caldwell dam just west of Tour Stop 6.  After the two routes split on the eastern end of the dam (fig. 50), the tour road loops around the comfort station, intersecting the restored course of New Garden Road, before swinging back to the east.  Stone-lined drainage ditches flank the tour road at various points.  

Bicentennial Greenway, Pedestrian Access Points, and the Park’s Trail System The Bicentennial Greenway follows the abandoned railroad bed of the old Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley 

FIGURE 48. The  comfort station at Tour Stop 6, as seen from the “traditional” courthouse site.

FIGURE 49. Looking eastward, down the former “Holt Avenue” stretch of the tour route, toward the Winston Monument at Tour Stop 4.  As living testaments to the Guilford Battle Ground Comapany’s tenure at Guilford, several withered and century-old sugar maples line both sides of the road here.

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EXISTING CONDITIONS

line through northwestern Greensboro.  Entering the park from the south, after skirting the western boundary of Forest Lawn Cemetery, the greenway corridor runs roughly parallel to and several yards east of Old Battleground Road (fig. 51).  It crosses over both the southern and northern arcs of the tour road, as well as the restored course of New Garden in between, before continuing north through the overflow parking lot.  Between the two sections of the tour road, the greenway is covered with mulch.  

In addition to the Bicentennial Greenway, several other pedestrian/bicycle paths provide access to the park.  Two of these lie in the woodlands between GUCO and Greensboro Country Park.  The largest, a paved extension of Nathanael Greene Road (once known as the Martin Trespass Road), runs south-to-north between the two parks and terminates at the tour route south of Stop 6 (figs. 50 & 52).  A three-foot metal post, situated in the middle of this path, near its junction with the tour road, denies 

access to automobiles.  The second corridor between the two parks is a gravel trail that runs east-to-west past the Winston Monument at Tour Stop 4.

Four other “dirt” footpaths enable residents from neighboring developments to enter the park at their discretion.  Along the park’s northern boundary, paths lead down from The Hamptons (formerly Marchwood) apartment complex and the Battle Forest subdivision.  The remaining two paths are located on the western boundary, connecting both the Green Acres subdivision and the Park Place condominiums to the park.  

An extensive network of exposed-aggregate walking trails, which total nearly two linear miles, weaves through the woodlands of the park’s interior.  These trails lie entirely within the compass of the tour route and provide access not only to the sites of the three battle lines, but also to a number of the park’s monuments and gravesites.  Aside from the foot trails, an off-road bicycle path loops out of New Garden Road about 300 feet west of the visitor center entrance.  Heading southward, this path crosses over the tour road and then passes through the first line forest, before forking near the southeast corner of visitor center parking lot.  One fork continues on to the north around the eastern face of the visitor center and links up with the Bicentennial Greenway’s northern extension at the overflow parking lot, while the other travels due east, connecting with the Greenway corridor’s southern route.

FIGURE 50. The divergence of the New Garden trace and the tour road.  The row of bollards marks the point where the restored historic trace resumes its course independent of the tour road.  The paved trail linking GUCO to Greensboro Country Park (left, middle) terminates into the tour road opposite the bollards.

FIGURE 51. View of the Bicentennial Greenway, as seen from a point located about thirty yards south of its intersection with the New Garden Road trace (middle ground).

FIGURE 52. Looking south from the tour road down the length of the “Martin Trespass” path, which connects GUCO to Greensboro Country Park.

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Visitor Center and Other Park Facilities

Visitor Center AreaStanding roughly 125 feet west of Old Battleground Road, the visitor center, constructed in 1975, is situated within a generally wooded setting (fig. 53).  In addition to housing the park’s administrative offices, it contains an exhibit hall, a theater, a library, and a small curatorial facility.  Motorists reach the visitor center by turning from New Garden Road onto the park’s main entrance drive, which is essentially part of the tour loop.  The parking lot lies less than 100 feet southwest of the structure itself and provides spaces for up to forty cars and two buses. 

An exposed-aggregate footpath leads north from the visitor center’s front entrance and turns eastward, paralleling the New Garden trace for a short distance as it travels through Monument Row—an area shaded by many mature hardwoods.  After passing four monuments, this path terminates at New Garden Road (fig. 54).  One other paved walking trail can be accessed from the visitor center.  It begins on the western edge of the parking lot and loops through the forested area associated with the fighting at the first line.  Across the entrance drive from the visitor center, a short dirt path leads into the woods to a small opening where interpretive programs are sometimes held.    

Superintendent’s Residence-Maintenance ComplexLocated in the park’s northwestern quadrant, as defined by the intersection of New Garden and Old Battleground Roads, this woods-buffered area embraces about an acre of open ground (mown turf) interspersed with a half dozen, well-spaced broadleaf trees (American elms and maples).  The brick superintendent’s residence (Quarters No. 1), wooden utility building (maintenance), and brick inflammable storage unit were all constructed in the Colonial Revival style during the Park Development Era of the 1930s (figs. 55 & 56). Two maintenance sheds stand directly behind the utility building, a concrete trailer pad lies a few feet west of it, and a brown dumpster sits several feet south of the structure’s service court, on the west side of the entrance drive.  

An asphalt service road, running north from New Garden Road, provides access to the superintendent’s residence-maintenance compound.  This road bifurcates about 225 feet 

FIGURE 53. The park Visitor Center (erected in 1975) as seen from its parking lot.

FIGURE 54. View of Monument Row, looking westward down the exposed-aggregate path that links the New Garden trace to the visitor center hardscape.

FIGURE 55. The Superintendent’s Residence (Quarter’s No. 1)

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north of New Garden, with one fork continuing north into the utility building’s service court, and the other branching eastward to form the elliptical drive that loops in front of the superintendent’s residence.  A substantial white oak and red cedar rise up from the island situated in the center of the loop drive.  Rhododendrons border the superintendent’s residence, while spirea partially screens the chain link fence surrounding the utility building’s service court.  A sizable magnolia stands on the east side of the service court’s entrance.  

The rectangular garden plot (established in the 1930s) that adjoins the utility building’s eastern end is now grassed over and no longer utilized for horticultural purposes.  But the T-shaped system of walkways (also installed in the 1930s) that partially frames it, connecting the superintendent’s residence to the maintenance area, remains largely intact, though the original gravel surface has been replaced with a mixture of solid and hollow (i.e., three-hole) brick pavers.  Grass has grown up between the joints and holes of the bricks giving the walkways a neglected appearance.  Furthermore, a pile of bricks, possibly remnants from the demolished administration building, sits behind the superintendent’s residence at the point where the north-south walkway terminates into the only surviving section of the post-and-rail fence that once enclosed the garden (fig. 57).  A row of nandina lines the east-west walkway.

Quarters No. 2Occupying a .69-acre lot in the Green Acres subdivision, Quarters No. 2 stands at the corner of Green Acres Lane and Greenhurst Drive (fig. 58).  This one-story brick house with a flanking carport was built in the 1950s and currently doubles as 

lodgings and a storage facility.  Shrubs border the front facade and a scattering of hardwoods shades the front yard.  Despite a thin strip of deciduous trees located along the eastern shoulder of Greenhurst Drive, Quarters No. 2 and a good portion of the Green Acres subdivision can be clearly seen from the tour road.

General Vegetation PatternsApproximately ten percent of the park is unforested.  This estimate not only considers the larger, more distinct clearings (such as fields, lawns, and service areas), but also takes into account  road corridors that are clearly discernible in aerial photographs.  These open clear areas contrast with the second growth, oak-hickory-pine forest, which covers roughly 200 of the park’s 220 acres.  Hardwoods predominate in these maturing woodlands, but considerable stands of evergreens (chiefly shortleaf, loblolly, and Virginia pines) cluster at various points 

FIGURE 56. The Utility Building (Maintenance) and Inflammable Storage Unit.

FIGURE 57. The remnant walkways and garden plot between the Superintendent’s Residence and Maintenance.

FIGURE 58. Quarters No. 2.

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in the eastern sector of the park.  These pine concentrations are most conspicuous at Lake Wilfong’s drained bed, around the former “third line” field, and on the site of the former drive-in theater (i.e., across the tour road from the comfort station at Tour Stop 6).   

Among the broadleaf specimens, the oaks are the most numerous.  In fact, several species of the genus Quercus are found in the park, including the white, southern red, black, chestnut, and scarlet oaks.  Other hardwoods add diversity to the forest’s canopy.  The most prevalent among them are the shagbark and pignut hickories, the red and sugar maples, the tulip poplar, the sycamore, and the sweet gum.  Redbuds and dogwoods are the most prominent understory trees.  In addition to the native species, a number of exotics—such as ailanthus, bamboo, and Chinese wisteria, to name a few—have established an unwelcome presence throughout the park.  Efforts, however, are ongoing to eradicate these invasive, non-native species.   

Within the park’s bounds, the positions held by the three American battle lines lie largely in thickly forested settings.  The westward extent of the vegetation in the area associated with first line, however, significantly belies battle-era land-use patterns.  Here, hardwoods completely envelop the site of the American position, whereas the troops that composed the first line’s center actually stood behind a split-rail fence, overlooking open fields to the west, with their backs to the woods.  Furthermore, sylvan growth dominates the immediate environs of the third line’s revised site (located just east of Hunting Creek and northwest of Tour Stop 6).  The extensive distribution of the vegetation here also deviates from historical patterns because the battlefield’s largest clearing stretched west and south of the ridgeline occupied by the third line (fig. 59).  The inverse, incidentally, holds true for the ground located between the first and second lines, where openings created by visitor service and commemorative areas, as well as by Old Battleground Road and the Bicentennial Greenway, would have been forested at the time of the battle.  Two other commemorative areas located between the second and revised third line positions—i.e., the circular clearing in which the Winston Monument stands and “Schenck’s” field—would have likewise exhibited forest cover in 1781.  

Boundaries and Buffering Chain-link fencing encloses roughly sixty-five percent of the park’s boundaries.  Except for breaks at two points where pedestrian footpaths lead into the park from adjacent residential developments, these fences extend for the entire length of the northern border.  On the western periphery, only the stretch along Greenhurst Drive and a short gap for the “Park Place” footpath remain open.  The park’s southernmost boundary line, located on the west side of Old Battleground Road, is also protected by chain link, as is the southern perimeter paralleling the “Holt Avenue” section of the tour road.

Vegetation buffers most of the park’s boundaries and generally serves to mask adjacent development.  At a few places along the tour road, nevertheless, the wooded growth either lacks the density or the species composition to sufficiently screen visual intrusions.  This is particularly true at the intersection of Old Battleground and the southern route of the tour loop, where commercial properties are visible along the public road to the south, and also at points along the former Holt Avenue, where Forest Lawn Cemetery appears behind the thin strip of hardwoods and red cedars bordering the south side of the road.  Situated beneath the taller hardwoods, the shade-intolerant cedars have become leggy and therefore fail to adequately fulfill their screening functions.  Also, at certain spots along the northern border, neighboring apartment buildings and single-family houses can be seen through the buffer of deciduous trees and pines, especially during the winter.  The final area of visual intrusion is located on the park’s western border where the tour road passes a few yards east of the junction of Green Acres Lane and Greenhurst 

FIGURE 59. The wooded area encompassing the revised site of the Third Line, near Tour Stop 6.

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Drive.  Here, a footpath leading into the park creates a gap in the thin screen of hardwoods, which opens a view of Quarters No. 2 and other houses located in the Green Acres subdivision.   

Open AreasThe elongated clearing (“Schenck’s” field) that stretches between Tour Stops 5 and 7 constitutes GUCO’s largest open area, encompassing about four-and-one-half acres of hilly ground covered in low herbaceous vegetation (see figs. 60 & 61).  The park maintains its grass cover by clearing away successional growth with a bushog twice annually.  New Garden Road bisects the field on an east-west line, and three monuments stand in it as well.  These memorials were erected during the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s tenure to commemorate the fighting at the third line.  The Stuart and Third Line Monuments stand on the hillside north of the road, while the Cavalry Monument is situated south of the historic thoroughfare, near the summit of the elevation that slopes down to New Garden from 

Tour Stop 5.  Since Judge Schenck, as recent research has shown, misidentified the site of the third line, these monuments were inaccurately placed on the field.  (Authorities now argue that the third line actually stood east of “Schenck’s field, on the opposite side of Hunting Creek.)  Apart from the monuments, two pairs of six-pounder cannon, mounted on reproduction gun carriages, also stand on the field.  These artillery pieces, which denote the two American batteries that buttressed the third line position during the battle, are all positioned north of the restored road trace, on the brow of the elevation located at the eastern edge of the clearing. 

Two smaller open areas, situated on either side of Tour Stop 6, are managed in a similar fashion to the former third line field.  The first area, a half-acre clearing that includes the “traditional” courthouse site, is located directly across the restored course of New Garden Road from the comfort station.  The structural remains excavated here in the early-1970s, however, are now believed to have belonged to a privately owned Martinville-era building.  A pin oak, planted by the D.A.R. in the 1930s, stands in the clearing near the remains of the building.  Diagonally across the tour road from the “traditional” courthouse site lies an acre of relatively open, grassy ground interspersed with thick stands of pines.  This field adjoins the site of the old drive-in theater, which the Park Service acquired and then razed in the late-1960s.  A split rail fence, extending along the right shoulder of the tour road, encloses its northern side (fig. 62).  Since the park uses this field for military encampments during living history events, it receives more frequent mowing than the two previously discussed clearings.   

FIGURE 60. The former Third Line (or “Schenck’s”) field, as seen from Tour Stop 5, showing the Cavalry Monument (right).

FIGURE 61. “Schenck’s” field, as seen from Tour Stop 7, showing the Third Line Monument.

FIGURE 62. Looking across the tour road, in the direction of the site of the former drive-in theater, from the comfort statio at Tour Stop 6.  Note the split-rail fence lining the road.

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In addition to these less manicured clearings, the park features three other areas of open ground that are managed as lawns.  These areas include the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex and the two commemorative, component landscapes associated with the Winston and Greene Monuments respectively.  Circular in configuration, the Winston Monument clearing (Tour Stop 4) encompasses one-acre of closely cropped fescue turf.  The monument stands in the center of the circle beneath the overarching branches of a white oak, as well as a younger red oak and tulip poplar.  A gravel path, linking GUCO to neighboring Greensboro Country Park, cuts through the circle leading up to the Winston Monument, where it forks to Stop 4’s parking lot.  The gravesites of Joseph Winston and Jesse Franklin lie beneath a maple on the western edge of Winston circle.  Situated side-by-side, the gravesites, marked by headstones, are contained within a square chain enclosure.  A ground cover of periwinkle (Vinca minor) grows above the graves, within the bounds of the chain border.  A bicycle pull-off, equipped with wooden stands, is also located on the western side of the circle, a few yards west of the graves.  From the bicycle pull-off, a gravel path leads northeastward to Stop 4’s parking lot, passing the maple and gravesites on the north. 

Greene Monument-Amphitheater Component LandscapeThe Greene Monument area is the most frequented commemorative space in the park. This commemorative area contains about one-and-one-half acres of fescue lawn. New Garden Road cuts across the lawn on an east-west axis, while a gravel path running south from Tour Stop 8 intersects the historic roadbed at a right angle (fig. 63).  Both the equestrian monument honoring General Nathanael Greene (erected in 1915) and the terraced-earth amphitheater (completed in 1939) occupy the gently rising ground on the south side of the New Garden trace.  To the north, several mature hardwoods (oaks and elms) shade the lawn through which the gravel 

path runs.  Visitors find this piece of shaded greenspace well suited for picnicking and other recreational pursuits.

Brick steps, situated on New Garden’s southern shoulder at the western edge of the lawn, ascend the slope to the amphitheater and Greene Monument, making them more easily accessible (see fig. 63, far right, middle).  The amphitheater’s brick stage sits about 70 yards west of the Greene Monument and is axially aligned with it.  Located twenty feet  east of the stage, the amphitheater’s brick parquet sits nearly ten feet lower than the monument.  Thus the equestrian memorial, which sits atop the highest point in the vicinity, is the focal point of the commemorative space (fig. 64).  

Four interrelated brick walkways, shaped like a wedge with a truncated tip, connect the amphitheater’s parquet to the monument and facilitate pedestrian access from New Garden (see fig. 32).  From the parquet, two radial walks extend eastward along the subtly rising terraces, running at about a 45× angle to one another.  The northern 

FIGURE 63. The gravel path from Tour Stop 8 terminating into the New Garden trace before the Greene Monument.

FIGURE 64. The Greene Monument, as seen from the amphitheater’s stage.

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radial walk extends past the Greene Monument, turning sharply to the north to effect a junction with the New Garden trace.  The southern radial walk terminates on axis with the Greene Monument.  Two concentric crosswalks arc between the radials, completing the system.  Lying about halfway between the stage and the monument, the central crosswalk runs south from the brick entrance steps on New Garden and intersects with the northern radial walk before terminating into the southern radial.  The second, or easternmost, crosswalk closes off the top of the wedge and incorporates the Greene Monument’s platform base into its course.  Visitors, who repeatedly step off of the walks to view the monument from the front, have worn a bare spot in the grass in front of the smaller pedestal crowned by the statue of Athena.  Conversely, grass has grown up between the joints at various places along the brick walks (fig. 65).  

Except for a solitary longleaf pine, the grassy area inside the amphitheater’s walkways is devoid of woody vegetation.  Other notable trees, however, stand near the Greene Monument, on the south side of New Garden Road.  These include a mature magnolia, located several yards northeast of the monument, and a row of junipers serving as a backdrop directly behind it.  The magnolia has seeded the forest immediately to its east and saplings can be seen growing up amid the understory—a phenomenon that is particularly noticeable in the winter months.  

Another memorial, the Hooper-Penn Monument, serves as the vertex of an invisible triangle, which includes the Greene Monument and the amphitheater stage as endpoints.  This monument, which stands above the graves of two of the men it 

honors, lies in the fringe of the woods adjacent to the amphitheater’s southern radial walkway.

Newly Acquired ParcelsThe park is in the process of acquiring at least four adjacent parcels of battlefield land, totaling approximately eight acres.  Only one of these parcels is undeveloped. The rest contain non-contributing, single-family houses and miscellaneous outbuildings.  

Kotis TractThe Kotis tract is the largest of the park’s new parcels.  Containing close to four acres, this roughly rectangular strip of rising ground fronts Battleground Avenue (U.S. 220), adjoining the south side of the Greene’s Crossing townhome community, and extends eastward, where its northeastern tip intersects the park’s southwestern corner. The Kotis tract includes a number of modern intrusions, notably a single-family brick residence situated in the property’s northwestern corner.  (Note: as a condition of the land transaction, the house will be demolished and its rubble removed before the tract’s title is officially conveyed to the park.)  From Battleground Avenue, a steep concrete driveway runs east to the house and continues to a corrugated-metal carport.  A short cinderblock retaining wall lines the back of the driveway.  Other modern features include a row of power lines paralleling Battleground Avenue along the property’s western border, a small storage shed located a few yards north of the residence, as well as a streetlight and a bird house attached to the top of an old telephone pole, both of which stand behind the house.  Furthermore, a pile of debris, presumably the remains of another outbuilding, sits in the field to the southeast of the residence.  

The Kotis tract primarily consists of open turf  with most of its vegetation concentrated around the residence.  Pines and red cedars buffer Battleground Avenue to the north of the driveway’s entrance.  Stands of pines likewise extend along the tract’s northern perimeter.  Azaleas border the house, while several mature ornamental trees shade its front and backyards.  Some of these trees, although native to North America, exceed the limits of their natural range and would not have been found in the 

FIGURE 65. Grass growing up between the brick joints on the amphitheater’s northern radial walk.

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oak-hickory-pine forest that dominated the North Carolina piedmont at the time of the battle.  The most obvious among these species are the two sizable firs standing in front of the house, but the half-dozen pecans located in the backyard also fall into this category.  One final plant treatment of note is a grape arbor, which stands in the shaded lawn behind the house. 

Andrews TractThe three-acre Andrews tract, the second largest of the four new parcels, lies directly across Old Battleground Road from the park’s overflow parking lot.  This property contains a one-story residence of frame construction and three outbuildings, all in disrepair.  A short gravel driveway provides vehicular access to the property from Old Battleground.  The driveway runs west to an old airplane hanger (a holdover from the time when the area was an airstrip) that has been converted into a garage.  Two additional outbuildings—a gambrel-roofed barn and another structure of undetermined function—stand in the wooded area behind the house and hanger-turned-garage.  Nearly overgrown, both of these structures lie in a state of disuse.  (Note: the barn is slated for demolition and removal before the park formally takes possession of the tract).  Finally, a pair of outdoor post lanterns adorns the residence’s backyard. 

With the exception of a strip of lawn bordering Old Battleground Road and small grassy clearings behind the house, the Andrews tract is largely wooded.  The property features a variety of broadleaf shade trees, evergreens, and ornamentals 

of both native and exotic origins.  Among the naturalized species, ailanthus has established the most conspicuous presence, especially in the rear of the residence.

Piedmont Land Conservancy TractThe Piedmont Land Conservancy (PLC) tract fronts Greenhurst Drive and adjoins the piece of park-owned property on which Quarters No. 2 stands.  The wooded PLC tract is not only the smallest of the park’s new additions, embracing a third of an acre, but it is also the only one that remains undeveloped.  The tract consists of a native hardwood canopy and dense understory growth.  A small wooded parcel containing a dilapidated and overgrown building separates the PLC tract from the Purguson tract on Greenhurst.   

Purguson TractThe Purguson tract, situated at the corner of New Garden Road and Greenhurst Drive, encompasses a little less than one acre of land.  Like the Kotis and Andrews tracts, the Purguson property contains a single-family residence dating to the mid-twentieth century.  The house, a ranch-style structure with a combination of brick and wooden exterior cladding, fronts New Garden, but its short gravel driveway is located off of Greenhurst. Grass, most likely fescue, comprises the lawn surrounding the residence; however, plantings of lily turf (Liriope sp.) are used in the front and backyards as well. Several mature hardwoods stand in the front yard in the company of a few smaller ornamental trees, while the side and backyards are relatively open.

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Analysis of Integrity

This section compares the findings of the site history with the existing conditions in order to identify which extant landscape characteristics and associated features have historical significance. The integrity of each characteristic is evaluated within the context of the landscape as a whole. This process is the groundwork for establishing the period of significance, and for identifying a framework against which all changes in the landscape can be compared. It is an important step for developing appropriate and relevant treatment strategies.

The National Register of Historic Places has identified seven defining qualities of integrity, namely: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.  A property with a level of integrity sufficient to warrant its inclusion in the National Register will satisfy most of these criteria, provided they are applicable.  For instance, design, materials, and workmanship, are more appropriate to designed properties and are thus less relevant to the rural, vernacular landscapes that hosted the majority of Revolutionary War battles, including Guilford Court House.  Accordingly, the four remaining qualities—location, setting, feeling, and association—will be used to evaluate the integrity of the present Guilford landscape in relation to its condition at the time of the battle in 1781, its primary period of significance.  Although Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (GUCO) is already listed on the National Register and is also the key component of a National Historic Landmark district, this exercise provides the evaluation of the battlefield’s extant historic features that will be used to devise treatment recommendations.  

In addition to the analysis of the battle-era layers, this section also includes a separate integrity appraisal of the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s designed memorial landscape to determine if its associated era (1887-1917) qualifies as a second period of significance.  Finally, two character areas associated with subsequent commemorative periods, namely the Greene Monument landscape 

and the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex, will be evaluated to see if they warrant nomination as separate, component landscapes.

Guilford Court House Battlefield: Evaluation of Landscape Integrity 

LocationConstituting the central core of the Guilford Court House Battlefield, the park embraces roughly one-fourth of the total estimated area over which the opposing armies clashed on 15 March 1781.  The corroborative findings of historical research, comparative terrain study, and archeological surveys have conclusively demonstrated that the park contains the center positions of the first two American lines and a portion of the ground defended by the left flank of the third line, though the exact location of the latter remains somewhat debatable.  Since the American troops did not fortify their lines with fieldworks or trenches, they left no enduring evidence of their transitory presence above ground other than the military artifacts that gradually decayed or left the field in the hands of relic hunters.  The historic Salisbury (New Garden) Road, however, left a more lasting impression in the landscape and its restored trace is the most readily identifiable, battle-era feature surviving in the contemporary landscape.  Although archeology has thus far proven inconclusive in pinpointing the site of the courthouse that lent its name to the battle, evidence suggests that the remains of the first Guilford Court House lie in the eastern extremity of the park (see site history).  It logically follows then that the origin of the Reedy Fork Retreat Road, which ran north from its perpendicular junction with the Salisbury Road, is located in the same general area by virtue of its historical proximity to the courthouse (see fig. 4). 

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Significant portions of the battlefield, on the other hand, remain outside the park’s boundaries.  For instance, the battle’s staging area, which centered on the 150-acre farmstead of Joseph Hoskins, lies to the immediate west of GUCO.  It was across Hoskins cornfields that the center of the British line advanced to attack the North Carolina militia positioned behind the split-rail fence that bordered the eastern edge of the clearing.  Located at the corner of New Garden Road and U.S. 220, Tannenbaum Historic Park (administered by Greensboro’s Parks and Recreation Department) currently preserves seven acres of the original Hoskins’ farmstead, though the majority of the historic property has fallen victim to residential development.  Greensboro County Park, a city-operated recreational area located south of the park, indirectly protects (but does not interpret) the site of the intense fighting that took place between the American left and the British right.  Also to the south, residential and commercial development, along with Forest Lawn cemetery, has bitten off the ends of the first and second lines’ left wings as well as most of the land embracing their positions.  Finally, above the park’s northern perimeter, apartment complexes and subdivisions have claimed the extensive swath of ground over which the British left engaged the right flanks of the three successive American lines.  Despite the loss of these significant tracts, integrity of location remains high because the park incorporates the core and best-preserved remnant of the Guilford Court House Battlefield.

Setting Synthesizing various eyewitness accounts of the battle, a contributor to the British Annual Register of 1781 produced a succinct description of the contested landscape’s rural, agricultural character.  “The country in general,” he wrote, “presented a wilderness, covered with a tall woods, which were rendered intricate by shrubs and thick underbrush; but which was interspersed here and there, by a few scattered plantations.”1  At the time of the battle in 1781, probably no more than a dozen families lived in the immediate environs of the first Guilford Court House.  The 220-acre nucleus of greenspace that currently constitutes the park, however, is now virtually surrounded by some form of residential or 

commercial development.  This suburban encroachment has consumed key, unprotected portions of the battlefield, while grading for foundations and parking lots has irreparably altered the landscape’s natural contours.  The one major exception to this rule is Greensboro Country Park, which adjoins GUCO’s southeastern boundary and preserves a semblance of the battlefield’s sylvan and ruggedly hilly character in that area.

Within the park itself, the most subversive manifestation of northwestern Greensboro’s rapid growth is the traffic that often chokes Old Battleground Road and the New Garden bypass.  The multitudes of commuting motorists passing through the battlefield not only disturb the site’s solemnity by emitting noise and air pollution, but they also frequently interrupt the visitor’s movement through the park, even imperiling the safety of pedestrians attempting to cross Old Battleground Road.  The park’s non-contributing infrastructure (the tour road, the visitor center, etc.) also compromises the 1781 scene, though to a lesser extent than the public roads.  This is most obvious at Tour Stop 6, where the comfort station and the 20-car parking unnecessarily intrude upon the Martinville townsite. Although the park’s infrastructure lies in the battlefield’s central core, it does not severely detract from the overall integrity of setting because its presence is a fundmentally reversible condition. The size of the park and the dispersed nature of the non-contributing structures within it minimizes their impact in the overall landscape, especially since the buildings themselves are all at least partially surrounded by woods.  The same forest cover that internally buffers most of GUCO’s infrastructure likewise helps to insulate the park from the visual imposition of incompatible neighboring development.  As noted in the prior section, however, the vegetative screen breaks down at certain points along the park’s perimeter, most notably so between the tour road and the Forest Lawn Cemetery and along the northern boundary line. 

Over the course of the park’s evolution, certain internal improvements have necessitated an appreciable amount of grading as well as excavation and mounding (for dams) in the case of Lakes Wilfong and Caldwell.  Furthermore, many of the tracts (such as the former drive-in theater and zoo parcels) that the park acquired in the mid- to late-

1.  The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1781 (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1782), 66. 

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twentieth century had later land uses—histories in which bulldozers and other earth-moving machines played a significant role.  Another agent of surface alteration in the park has been erosion, which has occurred along the creek beds and hillsides.  But on the face of the park’s greater landscape, these localized changes appear only as occasional, and often barely discernible, scars, while the geological lay of the land remains largely intact, a condition that bolsters its integrity of setting.  

Perhaps the greatest single change to the character of the battle-era landscape occurred during the nineteenth century and resulted from the clearing of expansive tracts of the first-growth, oak-hickory-pine forest.  Thanks to the reforestation efforts of the National Park Service, this generally denuded condition has been ameliorated and the prevailing woodland setting largely “restored.”  It should be noted, nonetheless, that the present patchwork of clearings punctuating the park’s forest resources does not directly or even loosely correspond to 1781 patterns.  The majority of the clearings associated with the park’s commemorative and visitor service areas (e.g., the Greene Monument area, the former third line field, and the immediate vicinity of the visitor center), for instance, would have been vegetated at the time of the battle.  The reverse holds true for a few other areas, such as the one just west of the newly interpreted site of the third line, where thick second and third growth forest now covers ground that would have been open in 1781. 

The historic New Garden (Salisbury) roadbed is the strongest tangible link to the battle-era layers of the landscape.  This historic highway served as the battlefield’s axis, astride which the first two American lines deployed and up which the British army marched to reach the battlefield.  Therefore, it is arguably the most notable cultural feature associated with the Revolutionary setting, without which orientation, scale, and a palpable connection to the past would be lost.  As the major artery of the area’s eighteenth-century road network, New Garden also influenced settlement and field patterns, and certainly figured prominently into the decision of where to erect the first Guilford Court House.  

A backcountry landmark both during and subsequent to the Revolutionary War, the courthouse was torn down sometime in the mid-

nineteenth century. Its absence from the comtemporary landscape does not negatively affect the integrity of the park’s setting, but the fact that archeology has yet to definitively identify its exact site has proven problematic.  In addition to posing an interpretive challenge, the elusiveness of the courthouse’s site also confuses the setting by adding an element of ambiguity.  One has to have knowledge of a landscape’s historic composition and the spatial relationships between its defining features to truly appreciate the significance of its setting.  While the general vicinity in which the structure stood is known, the enigma of its exact location complicates efforts to rehabilitate the historic scene in the vicinity of the third line because the courthouse served as the battlefield’s easternmost structural anchor, around which the tactically important and expansive, boot-shaped clearing was centered (see fig. 4). 

Feeling A property that possesses integrity of feeling conveys a sense of the aesthetic or historic character that typified its landscape during the selected period of significance.  At Guilford, the park’s landscape generally evokes the essence of the heavily forested, battle-era setting.  This sense of feeling is palpably the strongest in the woodlands encompassing the second American line’s position.  In this area, one can easily appreciate the tactical advantages that the broken, thickly vegetated terrain conferred upon the American defenders as well as the difficulties that the British soldiers faced as they executed their attack through an environment decidedly ill-suited for formal linear tactics.  Walking along the second-line trails, amidst the dense labyrinth of trees and undergrowth, the visitor can also gain an understanding of how obscured lines of sight promoted confusion during the fighting, causing many soldiers (including the British commander himself, General Cornwallis) to lose their orientation.

Integrity of feeling, however, breaks down in the areas embracing the first and third American lines.  In the first line’s vicinity, integrity of feeling is compromised by the visible intrusion of single-family homes and townhouse communities, which have cropped up along the park’s western periphery on land that supported cornfields at the time of the battle.  Within the park itself, the extent of the vegetation in the first-line area further detracts 

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from integrity of feeling.  Currently, forest cover completely engulfs the first line’s position, reaching all the way to the park’s western perimeter.  But in 1781, cornfields overlapped what is now the park’s western boundary and the militiamen, who composed the first line’s center, overlooked them while ensconced behind a split-rail fence.  This condition is lost in the present landscape, impeding the visitor’s ability to mentally visualize the scene in which the battle’s opening action took place. 

The issues surrounding the third line are even more complex.  For several years, the park has been in the process of instituting a major revision in the interpreted location of the last battle line.  The revised site lies immediately east of Hunting Creek, or roughly 350 yards east of the previously interpreted location at Tour Stop 7 (i.e., “Schenck’s” field).  As with the first line’s position, the third’s is also currently situated in woods, the wide distribution of which conflicts with battle-era patterns.  In fact, the third line, which occupied the western face of an elevation located just west of the courthouse, dominated the larger of the battlefield’s two areas of open ground (see fig. 4).  Yet this clearing—the site of the battle’s culminating melee—has given way to succession and is now covered in second and third growth oak-hickory-pine forest.  Here, the dense stand of trees reduces visibility, obscuring the contours of the area’s dissected topography—topography which played a critical role in dictating the location of troop deployments and the drama of the ensuing action at the third line.  To further exacerbate the confusion in the third line’s vicinity, the paved tour route temporarily incorporates the restored course of New Garden Road as it passes over the spine of the defunct Lake Caldwell dam. The juxtaposition of modern and historic elements here clearly undermines the historic scene, while the dam, which spans Hunting Creek’s floodplain, greatly detracts from the visual impact of the ravine. When combined, all of the above factors diminish integrity of feeling. 

AssociationSince the park contains the central core of the Guilford Court House Battlefield, it obviously boasts a specific and inextricable connection to the engagement fought there on 15 March 1781, as well as a broader association with the United States’ struggle for independence from Great Britain.  As one of the most hotly contested battles of the 

Revolutionary War, the clash at Guilford Court House represented the high-water mark of British success in the southern campaigns of 1780-81.  The British army’s narrow tactical triumph over the Americans at Guilford, however, was tantamount to a strategic defeat—a defeat that tipped the scales of victory back in favor of the rebellious colonists and their French allies.  Although General Charles, Earl Cornwallis’ 1900 redcoats outfought and forced the retreat of Major General Nathanael Greene’s 4400 troops, the British general not only failed in his objective to destroy (or even materially degrade) his opponent’s army, but he also sustained such prohibitive losses to his own force that he had no alternative but to momentarily withdrawal to the safety of the North Carolina coast.  In doing so, Cornwallis conceded both the interior and the initiative to the defeated Greene.  Since the outcome of the Battle of Guilford Court House influenced Cornwallis’ fateful decision to later invade Virginia (where a combined Franco-American army compelled him to surrender his reinforced army at Yorktown in October 1781), the engagement fought in the North Carolina backcountry on 15 March 1781 may be viewed as one of the final links in a chain of events that led to American victory in the Revolutionary War.  The battle also resonates with broader instructional significance in the annals of military history because it serves as a textbook example of how a costly success on the battlefield can result in a strategic reversal for the victor.  On the other hand, it also demonstrates, in the case of General Greene, that a commander may still win the campaign in spite of losing a battle.    

Such was the hallmark of Greene’s career as an independent army commander in the South.  An adroit, innovative, and daring strategist, Greene nonetheless never achieved brilliance as a battlefield tactician; in fact, he technically lost every pitched battle in which he served as field commander. Turning tactical defeats to his strategic advantage, he managed to redeem a disastrous situation in the South and thereby greatly contributed the ultimate outcome of the war.  Thus, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park also stands as an enduring testament to the Revolutionary service and vision of Major General Nathanael Greene. In November 2000, the park was designated a National Historic Landmark.

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ANALYSIS

ConclusionThe analysis of Guilford’s landscape demonstrates that the park retains a significant portion of the features that contributed to its historic identity at the time of the battle in March 1781.  Be they natural landforms, such as tactically important elevations, or cultural resources, such as the Salisbury (New Garden) Road trace, the extant historic features serve as tangible reminders of America’s struggle for independence.   

While continuity has been a notable theme of Guilford’s evolutionary development, so too has change, and certain alterations have had a decidedly unfavorable impact on the battlefield resource.  In addition to the presence of several disruptive intrusions within the park’s boundaries, among which Old Battleground Road is the most visible, the recognizable lack of congruence between contemporary and historic vegetation and field patterns also compromises the historic scene.  Such deviations from the historic lineaments of the landscape not only restrict the visitor’s ability to fully comprehend the tactical significance of certain topographical features, but they also affect the degree to which one can connect with the resource. Rehabilitation and partial scene restoration will help to mitigate these problems by eliminating unnecessary intrusions and by clarifying historic land-use patterns. These improvements, in turn, will augment the effectiveness of interpretation and thereby enhance the visitor’s experience.

The Guilford Battle Ground Company’s Commemorative Layer

AnalysisSeeking to create an environment conducive to both contemplation and recreation, the Guilford Battle Ground Company (GBGC) transformed 125 acres of core battlefield land into a memorial park during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  The company’s designed landscape, as finally constituted after nearly thirty years of beautification and commemoration, bore a strong aesthetic resemblance to a suburban cemetery.  At the time of its transfer to the Federal Government, the park 

consisted of an artificial lake (Wilfong); a circuitous network of sugar maple-lined avenues; numerous decorative, recreational, and operational structures (such as springhouses, pavilions, cottages, and a museum); an orchard; and, of course, nearly thirty strategically placed monuments and gravesites, most of which were concentrated along New Garden Road between the present-day visitor center and the Greene Monument.

Nearly all of the features that characterized the GBGC’s commemorative landscape survived, albeit in various states of repair, through the War Department’s tenure.  But soon after the National Park Service inherited the park in 1933, efforts to restore a semblance of Guilford’s historic scene led to a great purging of superimposed design elements.  During the mid-1930s, the new stewards not only obliterated Lake Wilfong and most of the GBGC’s avenues, but they also demolished all of the company’s structures that were still standing.  Due to the deforestation of the battlefield’s core in the nineteenth century, most of the area east of present-day Old Battleground Road was managed as open, meadow-like land during the GBGC’s tenure, a treatment that persisted through the War Department period.  The Park Service’s extensive reforestation project of the 1930s, however, fundamentally changed the view sheds and open vistas that were hallmarks of the GBGC-era landscape.  Other improvements undertaken during the same decade involved the removal of six monuments, including the massive Nash and Davidson arches, and the relocation of two others, namely the Schenck and Morehead memorials.  In preparation for the Bicentennial, one other GBGC-erected monument, the Hooper-Penn, was moved to its current location near the Greene Monument.  

ConclusionAt present, the material legacy of the GBGC’s memorial landscape consists of twenty-three monuments and gravesites, some of which have been moved from their original locations; the archeological sites of certain razed company structures; the now-forested footprint of Lake Wilfong’s bed; as well as the truncated vestiges of a few company avenues, most of which have been integrated into the tour road and, to the uninitiated eye, are quite indistinguishable from it.  Divorced from the nexus of their original design context, these disparate features, or the combination of 

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them, cannot compensate for the commemorative landscape’s loss of overall integrity.  The contemporary GBGC layer is merely a vague shadow of its historic predecessor and as such falls far short of being able to convey its significance.  Accordingly, it fails to satisfy the requirements necessary for meriting its designation as a second period of significance for the park’s landscape.  The GBGC’s efforts to preserve and commemorate the battlefield, however, are vital to Guilford’s story and will undoubtedly remain conspicuous themes in the park’s interpretative programs.  Although the field that Judge Schenck originally identified as the site of the third line is no longer believed to have served in that capacity, the misplaced GBGC-era monuments marking the previously interpreted location provide the park with an excellent opportunity to interpret the craft of history and the practice of historic preservation as ongoing processes.    

Character AreasAs a result of over one hundred years of preservation, commemoration, and stewardship at Guilford, portions of the battlefield landscape have acquired distinctive character and secondary levels of significance based on the addition of certain post-battle features.  The park recognizes the need to protect and interpret its secondary cultural resources as integral pieces of the property’s developmental history, and, consequently, has requested independent evaluation of two component landscapes—1) the Greene Monument area, and 2) the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex—to find out if either one (or both) deserves nomination as a separate landscape of significance.  The Greene Monument itself possesses exceptional artistic and commemorative value and has served as the park’s memorial centerpiece since its unveiling in 1915.  As such, it has been the focal point of extensive landscaping over the years.  The superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex, a designed landscape constructed in the Colonial Revival style in the 1930s, is significant for its connections to the Park Development Era and the evolution of historic preservation philosophy.  

Greene Monument Component LandscapeAnalysis.   The Greene Monument area ranks as the most visible and frequented memorial space in the park.  Nevertheless, it is less reflective of any particular period of stewardship than it is representative of the commemorative continuum at Guilford.  Erected in 1915 on the highest point in the park, the Greene Monument originally commanded the expanse of clear, meadow-like land located east of present-day Old Battleground Road.  In essence, the Greene Monument served as the crowning finial of the GBGC’s designed landscape.  During the War Department’s tenure (1917-1933), the area immediately surrounding the memorial received formal landscape treatments, featuring a system of concrete walks lined with sheared arborvitae and partially covered by rose trellises.  The Park Development Era of the 1930s also had a decisive impact on the character of the component landscape.  In 1935, the park erected a Colonial-Revival administration building and parking lot across New Garden Road from the monument, purposely positioning it so as to exploit the view of the park’s most imposing memorial.  A few years later, an extensive, parkwide planting project began, during which all of the monument’s formal treatments were removed and the cleared land beyond it completely reforested, thus eliminating the expansive open backdrop of GBGC and War Department days.  Furthermore, in 1939, the park completed the extant terraced-earth amphitheater adjacent to the Greene Monument.  By the mid-1970s, the administration building, an integral component of the Park Development Era layer, had been demolished and the Hooper-Penn Monument had been re-erected at its current location adjoining the amphitheater’s southern radial walkway.  

Conclusion.   As the above inventory of change reveals, the Greene Monument area is perhaps best described as a composite of selected features and treatments dating from different commemorative layers.  Since its associated landscape lacks integrity to any specific design or historic period of memorialization at the park, it does not warrant nomination as a separate landscape of significance. 

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Superintendent’s Residence-Maintenance ComplexLocation.   This historic residential and service area is situated in the midst of a wooded, seven-acre tract, which is bounded on the east by Old Battleground Road, on the north and west by the park’s boundary lines, and on the south by the paved New Garden Road and its bypass.  Reached via a forking entrance drive, which runs north from the public section of New Garden, the complex lies within the battlefield’s core and is located directly east of a segment of the first American line’s position.  The brick superintendent’s residence and the utility group (which consists of a weatherboarded maintenance building, brick inflammable storage unit, and storage sheds) still stand on their original sites and the complex proper has neither been enlarged nor reduced in size since its installation.

Design.   The component landscape’s principal design features (i.e., the residence, the utility group, and the garden plot between them) were constructed and laid out in the Colonial Revival style during the Park Development Era (1933-1942).  In selecting the Colonial Revival genre of design, planners at Guilford disclosed their desire to make the complex appear aesthetically and historically compatible with its battlefield setting.  The local architect who designed the main buildings looked to examples of regional, eighteenth-century architecture for inspiration.  Perhaps due to the paucity of extant local models, he ended up drawing heavily from historic structures located in the former Moravian town of Salem (founded 1766), which had merged with the neighboring community of Winston in 1913.  (At the time of the battle, Guilford Court House lay about thirty miles east of Salem).  As the spatial relationships between the buildings suggest, the complex was intended to simulate a farmstead, with the brick superintendent’s residence posing as the dwelling house, the weatherboarded utility building serving as the barn, and the brick inflammable storage unit perhaps mimicking a well- or springhouse.  The establishment of the garden and its appointments further accentuated the illusion of domesticity.    

A central tenet of Colonial Revival design stressed the propriety of connecting together separate landscape features (i.e., dwellings, gardens, and/or dependencies) in such a manner as to create a 

unified and visually coherent whole.  This often involved organizing space into compartments—a task that could be accomplished by using a variety of landscape treatments, including, but not exclusive to, plantings of shrubs and trees, walkways, fences, and/or walls.  Colonial revivalists also typically rejected the curvilinear forms of the Victorian taste, favoring a more classically inspired vocabulary of design in which simple, straightforward lines predominated and axial relationships existed between buildings and gardens.2    

Such design characteristics found clear expression in the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex’s landscape.  Not only was the rectangular garden plot laid out on axis with the utility building, but a rectilinear system of gravel walkways and post-an-rail fences was also employed to compartmentalize transitional spaces and establish a unified connection between the residence and its pseudo-dependencies.  Plantings of shrubs and trees further related the structures to one another as well as better tied them into their surroundings.  Although the garden plot is now covered with grass and only one linear section of its original post-and-rail enclosure remains standing (along its northern border), its bounds are defined by the walkways that connect the utility building’s service court to the residence.  These walks, however, have been repaved with bricks, but still follow their original courses.  For security reasons, the post-and-rail fence that once enclosed the utility service court has been replaced with chain link.  Surviving elements of the planting program include a few mature specimen trees, a row of nandina bordering the southern edge of the garden plot, as well as the “woods fringe” that buffers the complex.  Design, therefore, is clearly evident in the contemporary composition of the component landscape.

Setting  .   The maturation of extant specimen trees and the continued generation of the woods fringe established during the Park Development Era have imparted a decidedly more shady and thickly vegetated appearance to the component landscape, which was much more open, particularly to the south and west, at the time of the complex’s installation.  This condition, however, was an intended outcome of the area’s overall design, for 

2.  See Susan Lee Hitchcock, “The Colonial Revival Gardens of Hubert Bond Owens” (M.H.P. thesis, University of Georgia, 1997), Chapter 3, passim.    

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the landscape architect who conceived the planting plan sought to screen the complex from New Garden Road while also adding interest (in the form of specimen trees) to the lawn contained within the vegetative buffer.  Furthermore, the survival of the majority of the landscape’s defining architectural features, coupled with the fact that only a few non-contributing intrusions (i.e., the dumpster, the concrete trailer pad, and the sections of chain link fence surrounding the service court and the park boundaries) have been added to the complex proper, ensures that it retains a high degree of integrity.  

Two developments, nevertheless, warrant mentioning for the mildly adverse impact that they have had, and continue to have, on the area.  First, the closure and restoration of New Garden Road within the park in the mid-1970s necessitated the construction of the existing bypass, which cuts through the woods buffer and consequently reduces its insulative effect.  Secondly, in the late-twentieth century, developers built the Lincoln Green apartment complex adjacent to GUCO’s northern boundary, clear-cutting most of the forest that previously bordered the park in that area.  The thin strip of deciduous trees that currently stands between the superintendent’s residence-maintenance area and the apartment buildings is too thin to effectively screen the view of the incompatible development.  The visual intrusion of the apartments is especially acute during the winter when the hardwoods are bare.

Materials.   The superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex retains a considerable amount of its original fabric.  The building materials employed were, and still are, of exceedingly high quality.  The specifications, in fact, called for the “best grade of materials” so as to achieve a degree of permanence in the construction.3  The residence’s exterior boasts over-sized handmade brick, stonework of native North Carolina granite, and ceramic tile shingles.  The utility building features a frame of longleaf pine and white pine exterior cladding.  Although the architect’s report does not disclose the types of wood used for the construction of the fence that enclosed the garden plot, it was identical to the one that originally bounded the service court, which itself combined black-locust 

posts with heart-cypress rails.4  Thus, the remaining section of the garden fence might be fashioned of the same materials.  (This speculation could either be substantiated or debunked by someone with knowledge of dendrology.)  The original gravel surface of the walkways, on the other hand, has been replaced altogether with a curious assortment of solid and hollow bricks.     

With regard to plant material, most of the exotics incorporated into the 1930s-planting plan have either died or have been removed.  This includes the specimen crepe myrtle originally planted beside the residence as well as the two-dozen lilacs established both in the rear of the garden and at the foot of the yard.  Only the row of nandina, which borders the southern edge of the garden plot, and a few spirea remain of the original ornamental plant species.  As for indigenous plant material, the imposing American elm currently standing in the lawn a few yards west of the residence can be traced to the original planting plan, as can the Southern magnolia situated on the eastern side of service court’s entrance.  Many of the trees composing the woods buffer to south of the complex probably date to the Park Development Era as well.    

Workmanship.   Soon after the completion of the superintendent’s residence and utility group, a reporter for the Greensboro Daily News declared: “[i]t is generally agreed that the job has been executed quite capably and the results are regarded as decidedly pleasing.”5  Since the construction of the buildings was a Public Works Administration (PWA) project, the labor force that so “capably” performed the work had been secured from Greensboro’s re-employment office.6  The Great Depression ironically presented GUCO (and numerous other national parks) with a unique opportunity, as they made available a corps of local talent that, in times of economic prosperity, would have been beyond the park’s resources.  The workforce, as the merit of the complex’s construction bears out, consisted of highly skilled craftsmen, including masons, carpenters, joiners, 

3.  “Preliminary Work Is Begun On Battleground Buildings,” Greensboro Daily News, 23 August 1934.  

4.  “Preliminary Work Is Begun On Battleground Buildings,” Greensboro Daily News, 23 August 1934; “Guilford Battleground Now Has Three New Structures,” Greensboro Daily News, 5 May 1935. 

5.  “Guilford Battleground Now Has Three New Structures,” Greensboro Daily News, 5 May 1935.  

6.  “Preliminary Work Is Begun On Battleground Buildings,” Greensboro Daily News, 23 August 1934.

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and tile roofers.  The patterned Flemish-bond brickwork and the intricately laid tile roof of the superintendent’s residence exemplify the superlative quality of Depression-era workmanship evident throughout the complex.  Moreover, the buildings as a whole embody a level of technical competency and artistry not commonly seen in modern construction.  Although all of the complex’s structures have begun to show signs of their age, one would expect as much after nearly seventy years of constant occupation and use.  Despite the normal wear and tear, the buildings remain structurally sound and in an admirable state of repair. 

Feeling.   This component landscape essentially captures the essence of what its designers were hoping to accomplish—that is to mitigate the intrusion of additional infrastructure by creating a complex that seemed to belong in or derive from its cultural milieu.  Consequently, the superintendent’s residence-maintenance area evokes a particular phase in the development of the historic preservation movement, particularly highlighting the evolution of attitudes concerning appropriate architectural styles for national park settings.  

Association.   The selection of the Colonial Revival style for the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex reflects the emergence of a professional sensitivity, within the National Park Service, toward achieving a measure of compatibility between architectural genres and their cultural/historic contexts.  Judging by today’s standards, one could easily argue that the park’s leaders erred in their decision to incorporate Moravian architectural details into a landscape that was historically inhabited by settlers of Scots-Irish 

and English descent.  Nevertheless, they did demonstrate a respect for regional, vernacular style that was wholly lacking in the park’s prior periods of custodianship.  

The superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex draws additional significance from the fact that it is one of only a few Colonial Revival designed landscapes in existence in the National Park Service’s Southeast Region, and the only one for that matter that bears a Moravian influence.  Furthermore, the complex possesses direct association with the Park Development Era.  Made possible by a generous infusion of funds from the PWA, the Park Development Era arose out of the New Deal concept of combating the Great Depression by putting the unemployed back to work on internal improvement projects.  The myriad of projects conducted during the Park Development Era has left a lasting impression on many parks, and particularly so at Guilford, where the residence and utility group stand as a testament to the PWA’s efforts to help speed the nation’s economic recovery.

Conclusion.   This self-contained, Colonial-Revival-style landscape possesses integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.  Based on its satisfaction of all of the National Register criteria for the evaluation of designed landscapes and its broader historical associations, the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex should be nominated separately as a component landscape of significance, with its period of significance defined by the Park Development Era years (1933-1942).

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Treatment Recommendations

The following treatment recommendations are based on intensive research and analysis of the landscape’s evolution, particularly taking into consideration how each of Guilford’s developmental periods affected the Revolutionary War-era scene.1  Although a host of historically significant post-battle resources (located both above and below ground) remain in the park, none of the subsequent “strata” retain sufficient integrity to warrant establishing an additional period of significance for the greater landscape.  The battle era, therefore, remains its sole period of significance.  Accordingly, the principal aim of this section is to provide recommendations that will enable the park’s managers to both preserve significant resources and rehabilitate the battle-era landscape.  

Sensitive to the principle that a cultural landscape should be respected as a continuum and its valuable secondary features protected and interpreted as well, this part of the report likewise furnishes guidance on how best to treat Guilford’s commemorative layers.  It specifically focuses on the conspicuous commemorative areas associated with the Greene Monument and the visitor center.  Management strategies for dealing with the park’s modern non-contributing features may also be found below.  In addition, this section includes a separate set of recommendations for the character area embracing the superintendent’s residence-maintenance complex, since it merits nomination to the National Register as a component landscape of significance.  The report concludes with treatment proposals for the park’s recently acquired parcels.  All treatment recommendations are illustrated on the accompanying plans located at the end of this chapter (figs. 66-69). 

The 1781 plan of the battle attributed to British Lt. Henry Haldane serves as the principal primary source informing the recommendations for the battle-era layer’s rehabilitation (refer to fig. 4).  When consulted in the field along with participant accounts of the battle, existing topographical features, and the findings of various archeological surveys2, this historic map clearly reveals the need for a more accurate representation of the battlefield landscape.  This is particularly the case in the areas encompassing the first and recently revised third battle lines, both of which fall far short of reflecting their battle-era character.  In these areas, a confusing overlay of historic and more recent features, both natural and cultural, compromises the visitor’s capacity to fully understand the tactical dynamics of the battle and the considerable role that the landscape—with its tapestry of fields, fences, woodlands, creeks, roads, and other structures—played in governing them.  Consequently, to enhance the overall quality of the visitor’s experience, rehabilitation efforts will focus on delineating the landscape’s historic land-use patterns and spatial organization and the removal of certain modern intrusions.  A wholesale restoration of the battlefield is impossible given the lack of definitive data and the need to retain most of the park’s existing infrastructure for interpretation, circulation, and visitor comfort.  Should additional information come to light in the future that would 

1.  In addition to the author, the committee that devised treatment recommendations consisted of the following individuals: SERO Historical Landscape Architect Lucy Lawliss; GUCO Superintendent Bob Vogel; GUCO Ranger Don Long; Independent Historical Landscape Architect Susan Vincent; as well as John Robinson and Peter Callahan, both professors of landscape architecture at North Carolina A&T University.  

2.  During the mid- to late-1990s, archeologists from the Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) conducted a series of remote-sensing surveys at GUCO.  The park’s intention to construct additional walking trails prompted the initial archeology, which subsequently expanded into a larger effort to determine the accuracy of the interpreted locations of the three battle lines.  The team of investigators, which included professionals as well as volunteer metal-detector operators, succeeded in finding confirmatory concentrations of Revolutionary War-era artifacts lying in rough correspondence with interpreted sites of the first and second lines.  No material evidence, however, was discovered to confirm the third line’s revised site.  The final reports of the principal investigator, John E. Cornelison, Jr., were still in draft at the time of this report’s preparation, but the germane projects bear the following accessions: SEAC Acc. 1189, GUCO Acc. 56; SEAC Acc. 1309, GUCO Acc. 57. 

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allow for a more authentic depiction of the battle-era landscape, the CLR should be amended to include these findings and the treatment recommendations revised accordingly. 

Treatment Recommendations for the Battle-era LandscapeBefore getting into specifics, a few general observations and recommendations are in order.  First, it should be restated that all of the land lying inside the park’s boundaries is considered core battlefield.  Thus, current park facilities, such as the visitor center and the paved tour route, represent modern intrusions in the historic setting, but are accommodated within visitor service zones according to the 1997 General Management Plan (GMP).  It is the recommendation of this report that, until these facilities can be relocated off of the battlefield proper, they should neither be enlarged nor expanded.  If, in the future, the park determines that the realignment or relocation of a visitor service element is required to further rehabilitate the battle-era landscape, then additional planning and compliance should precede action.  Secondly, while the treatment plans focus principally on the area located within the park’s perimeter, the boundaries themselves should not be neglected, for screening the visual intrusion of adjacent development is of paramount importance.  The treatment plans identify specific points along the perimeter where the vegetation buffer breaks down and requires bolstering with a native mix of hardwoods and shade-tolerant evergreens (see Appendix). 

Individual treatment areas and features of the battlefield landscape are addressed in greater detail below; nevertheless, one feature, namely Old Battleground Road, stands out as deserving special attention.  The park should make the internal closure of this overtaxed commuter connector its highest priority. As long as it remains open, the traffic cutting between the first and second battle lines will continue to affect the visitor’s experience.  This report, therefore, endorses the 1997 GMP’s call for the removal and revegetation of Old Battleground Road.

CirculationNew Garden Road.   As the spine of the battlefield landscape, New Garden Road is one of the park’s primary historic features and the most important cultural resource to have survived from the Revolutionary War era.  When visitors walk along this historic highway, they are interacting with physical evidence of the past, with one of a few extant pieces of the battle’s material legacy.  Thus, it is imperative that the historic character of this road trace be maintained through the length of the park for visitors to understand the engagement’s movement and scale as well as to heighten their ability to mentally recreate the historic scene, despite the interruption of modern infrastructure.  Toward this end, New Garden not only requires further differentiation from the modern roads with which it comes into contact, but it also needs to be realigned to its historic roadbed in certain areas.  The road’s present alignment largely follows the path of its paved correlate, which the park “restored” in the mid-1970s, in time for the Bicentennial.  Several compelling anomalies identified during a recent ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey, however, indicate that certain sections of New Garden’s “restored” course may run several feet south of their original roadbed.  More definitively, research contained in this report shows that the existing route deviates from its historic alignment at several points. First, between the Maryland Monument and the former third line (or “Schenck’s”) field, where it dips southward, picking up a remnant section of a maple allÈe installed during the Guilford Battle Ground Company’s tenure, and second, where it joins with the paved tour loop to cross Lake Caldwell dam.  The following recommendations address New Garden’s treatment in greater detail:

• Use the results of recent research and the GPR survey (if the latter proves conclusive) as the basis for realigning all errant sections of New Garden to their historic roadbed.  This specifically includes the section located between the Maryland Monument and “Schenck’s” field and the alignment north of Lake Caldwell dam. In the former’s case, remove the gravel from the abandoned sections and revegetate them with an appropriate assortment of trees found in the oak-hickory-pine forest that covered the area in late-eighteenth century (see Appendix A for plant 

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list). In the latter case, establish a route that matches the width and treatment of the historic trace. Allow the vegetated edges to grow in and narrow the trace width to 8-10 ft. 

• Separate New Garden from the modern tour road where their courses conjoin atop the defunct Lake Caldwell dam, which spans historic Hunting Creek’s floodplain.  (Encouraging GPR data suggests that the historic trace’s original route may have followed a line located a few feet north of the dam.)  

• Eliminate the dam and redirect the tour route further to the south to partially restore the view shed in this area. This recommendation, however, will require additional compliance, extensive planning (including the preparation of a Development Concept Plan), and considerable expense, as it will necessitate “scraping” away the dam and disposing of a considerable amount of in-fill, in addition to constructing a new stretch of paved road and an automobile-bearing bridge over the creek. 

• The desired surface treatment for the historic road traces (New Garden, Reedy Fork, and the Bruce Road) is a stabilized soil, which can be achieved with a product such as PolyPavement (see www.PolyPavement.com). Before applying this treatment to the entire length, it is recommended to test this product in selected sections, such as the areas to be to be relocated. If the result proves successful, complete application. If the treatment is not successful, use a small stone aggregate to interpret the historic road conditions.  

• New Garden’s historic course intersects with Old Battle Ground Road and the tour loop. At each point of contact, the modern paved road not only physically interrupts, but also visually dominates the historic trace, with the consequence being a subordination of the historic resource to the modern infrastructure. To help remedy the confusion that attends this awkward relationship, visual priority must be placed on the historic trace at these intersections; that is to say, the divided sections of New Garden must be visually linked across the modern road.  This could be accomplished by rolling a “hyphen” of aggregate into the 

modern asphalt road, ensuring that it possesses the same color and width as the historic trace surface. Another option would be to remove a section of the asphalt and replace it with a band of concrete that is stained with a commercial pigment similar in hue to New Garden’s aggregate surface.

• At the entrance to the visitor center, New Garden Road splits.  A paved bypass continues on to the northeast, eventually intersecting Old Battleground Road, while New Garden’s historic course becomes a pedestrian route through the park.  This point of divergence is further complicated by a divided entrance drive with a raised triangular island created by the intersection of the road and drives.  In this muddled intersection, the paved routes supersede the historic trace of New Garden.  The park, therefore, should rethink the configuration and alignment of the modern circulation routes, with the goal of distinguishing New Garden’s historic alignment, including its paved section, from the divided entrance drives.  Until a more effective reorganization can be devised, use one of the treatments described in the preceding bullet.  See additional recommendations under “Visitor Center Landscape.”  

Reedy Fork Retreat Road.   Arrange for additional archeology to establish the location of this historic road.  If discovered, treat in the same material, width, and character as New Garden historic trace.  

Bruce Road.   Evidence suggests that the Bruce Road, the origin of which is defined by a park trail running north from New Garden Road between the Delaware and Maryland Monuments, may have been present or perhaps under construction at the time of the battle.  The earliest reference to its existence that has surfaced dates to November 1781, only eight months after the battle.  The park, however, should not attempt to restore the Bruce Road unless evidence can be found to conclusively corroborate its presence on the battlefield in March 1781.  In the meantime, use GPR to better determine its course and width and consider realigning the recreation trail off of the Bruce roadbed.  

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Hydrology• Reestablish the battle-era drainage courses to 

the extent possible, protecting wetland indicator species to highlight the difference between upland and lowland sites.  

• Integrate hydrology into park interpretation.  Focus specifically on the effects that Hunting Creek and its branch had on troop dispositions and the tactical progression of the battle.  Also, emphasize the broader role that watercourses in general played not only in shaping or impeding the eighteenth-century transportation network (stressing the significance of fords, ferries, and bridges), but also in dictating settlement patterns in the backcountry.   Newcomers, for instance, placed a premium on lands bordering rivers and creeks because of their rich bottomland soils and the potential for generating waterpower.

The Three Battle Line AreasA more accurate representation of the land-use patterns that characterized Guilford’s landscape at the time of the battle would add an important dimension to interpretation and greatly enhance the visitor’s ability to visualize the historic landscape patterns.  The sources unanimously agree that the battlefield consisted of two sizable areas of open ground, each of which was further subdivided into multiple fields.  The 1781 “Haldane” map provides the best contemporary depiction of the configuration and extent of these fields, as well as their relationship to other significant features, such as roads, buildings, and vegetation.  The smaller and westernmost of the battlefield’s two clearings embraced the crop fields of Joseph Hoskins, while the larger one cradled the southern and western faces of the eminence on which the courthouse stood.  Situated around the axis of New Garden (Salisbury) Road, these two clearings were separated by an expanse of hardwood forest, through which the historic thoroughfare ran, connecting them together.  The first and third lines overlooked the “Hoskins” and “courthouse” clearings respectively, while the second stood in the midst of the woodlands in between.  In their present conditions, the thickly forested areas associated with the first and third lines require opening up to better simulate battle-era field patterns.  The second line area, conversely, needs further 

replanting to close inappropriate gaps in the woodland setting.  

A welcome by-product of the land-clearing process is the potential for enriching the park’s interpretive programs, as it affords the opportunity to discuss the domestic life and cultural practices of the area’s early settlers.  Since the task of removing vegetation was often a necessary component of establishing, maintaining, or even expanding farmsteads, the park can use the process to interpret various land-improvement techniques employed in the backcountry during the mid-to-late eighteenth century.  Of particular interest here would be to interpret the cultural significance of tree girdling and controlled burning, the former of which, perhaps, could be demonstrated during a living history program.          

First Line Area.   Archeology has confirmed the location of the first line within the park’s western boundary and the historical record makes it clear that this line’s center and a portion of its left flank stood behind split-rail fences, which bordered the eastern edge of Hoskins’s crop fields.  Split-rail fences,3 therefore, should be installed just in front of the first line’s position to delineate sections of the fields that overlapped the park’s western boundary.  The vast majority of federal land once plowed by the Hoskins family lies south of New Garden Road, where portions of two separate fields may be defined.  The configuration of the first field’s fence will loosely resemble a bracket with its arms pointing leftward.  Starting at the park’s western boundary, this fence should extend eastward along New Garden Road and then turn at a right angle, paralleling the first line.  It should run southeastward from the road for approximately 615 feet, at which point it should turn at a right angle; this time proceeding to the west and running 

3.  In 1771, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted a law that required every planter in Guilford, as well as in other counties, to erect fences around their “cleared Ground under Cultivation,” except in areas already protected by a prohibitive watercourse.  The Assembly deemed a fence sufficient if it consisted of closely spaced rails up to the height of three feet.  This legislation amended a prior act (passed in 1715), which had stipulated that fences must stand five feet tall.  One can infer from the language of the 1715 law that planters were permitted to achieve the height of five feet by adding “deer rails” to three-feet-high fences.  Thus, the 1771 amendment seems to have rescinded the “deer rail” clause.  See Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, vol. 23: 61, 854-856.          

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roughly perpendicular to the first line as it heads toward the park’s western boundary.  The second fence line should resemble a backwards “L” turned to the left and will delimit the park’s portion of Hoskins’ detached field.  According to the Haldane map, the northern edge of this field should be located about 535 feet south of its northern neighbor’s southern border.  The eastern extensions of these two separate sets of fences, that is to say the sections parallel to the first line’s position, should be axially aligned (see Treatment Plan) with each other.  Unfortunately, a few breaks in these fence lines will be necessary to accommodate the existing tour route.  On the north side of New Garden, the fence should extend eastward from the park boundary, turning at a right angle so as to parallel the first line, before fading into the woods.  (Note: Distances and configuration should be confirmed from the scale and spatial organization depicted on the “Haldane” map.)  

• To further enhance the impression of the battle-era field patterns at the first line, begin opening up the woodlands within the bounds of the fences, moving westward from the first line toward the park’s boundaries.  This process may begin concurrently with the installation of the fences, as it will be necessary to first clear paths in the existing vegetation for these structures.  The close proximity of the Williamsburg Square townhouses to the park boundary on the north side of New Garden makes it unadvisable to clear the land west of the fence line in this area.  Thus, extensive clearing efforts should be restricted to the interpreted zone south of the road.  As trees are removed from the designated area, the park should strive to achieve a native-dominant grass stand, eradicating to the best of its ability the invasive non-native species that will periodically infiltrate the clearing.  

• As the woods open up, establish screens of native hardwoods and evergreens, or bolster existing buffers with the same plant materials, to shield views of adjacent residential development (see plant list in appendix for recommended species).  When establishing or enhancing vegetation screens, avoid a uniform, hedge-like arrangement of plantings and strive for a more naturalistic appearance.    

• Since the tour route twice bisects the first line’s position as it travels through the western part of the park, consider a more easterly realignment of this paved road in the future so as to separate it from the historic features.  

• Remove Quarters No. 2 and pursue the acquisition of the remaining properties fronting Greenhurst Drive.  After having annexed these additional lots, remove all modern intrusions and non-native vegetation.  Concurrently with these projects, commence negotiations with the city to either close Greenhurst Drive or realign it further to the west.  The closure or realignment of this road will allow the park to continue its rehabilitation of the first line field patterns.  Efforts along these lines should include the obliteration of Greenhurst and the reseeding of its roadbed as well as the continuation of land clearing efforts, pushing to the west toward the park’s newly defined boundary.  Planting vegetation buffers (of mixed native hardwoods and evergreens) along the perimeter and the southern shoulder of New Garden will also be necessary to screen the visual intrusion of neighboring development.

Second Line Area.   

• As proposed in the 1997 GMP, negotiate the closure of Old Battleground Road within the park.  When accomplished, remove the pavement, prepare the roadbed, and reforest the right-of-way with native hardwoods and understory species (see Appendix A).

• As likewise proposed in the most recent GMP, redirect the Bicentennial Greenway onto existing trails and then replant the former railroad bed-turned-recreational corridor in the same manner as described above.

• Reforest the tree-shaded lawn area (i.e., the site of the former administration building) located directly north of the Greene Monument and amphitheater (see Appendix for appropriate species).  Ensure that a circle, with a radius not exceeding ten feet, is kept open around the Morehead Monument.  The memorial should serve as the circle’s midpoint.  Maintain the trail that runs southward from Tour Stop 8 and then terminates at New Garden.     

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• Eradicate non-native species in the existing woodlands between the first and third lines.  Replant with historically appropriate tree species (see Appendix A). 

• Remove the partially defoliated cedars and enhance the vegetative screen that lines the south side of “Holt Avenue,” between the park and Forest Lawn Cemetery.  The use of shade-tolerant evergreens is critical along the chain-link fence line here to provide year-round buffering.  Native hollies and wax myrtles would serve this purpose well.  Also, consider a native vine treatment for the chain link fence (see appendix B for appropriate species).

• Revegetate the circular clearing surrounding the Winston Monument (see Appendix A for appropriate species.)  Retain trails and maintain an open circle of turf grass around the monument, with its radius not to exceed ten feet.

Former Third Line (or “Schenck’s”) Field.   

• Release this field to succession, removing non-native species as they arise.  Supplement successional growth with historically appropriate species that fail to naturally germinate in the vegetative mix (see Appendix A). 

• Restrict vegetation from growing within a five- to ten-foot radius of the monuments (Third Line, Stuart, and Cavalry) and frequently mow the turf grass around them to maintain a manicured, commemorative appearance.

• Retain the area’s existing trail system in its current configuration. As the vegetation matures, install an additional foot path to provide access to the Stuart Monument. Start the footpath at Stop 7, extending its course southward to the Stuart Monument and then to the New Garden Road trace. The path could then resume on the trace’s south side, continuing to the Cavalry Monument before terminating at Stop 5.

Revised Third Line Area.   The park must surmount a number of obstacles before it can effectively rehabilitate the revised third line area.  One impediment is the fact that the sites of the first Guilford Court House and the Reedy Fork Retreat Road continue to elude definitive identification.  Furthermore, the park’s immediate need to retain existing infrastructure—including the dam and the paved tour route, as well as the parking lot and comfort station at Stop 6—poses a challenge to any extensive rehabilitation plans.  Attempting to remedy or reconcile these complex problems is beyond the purview of this report; therefore, it is recommended that the park prepare a Development Concept Plan (DCP) for the third line area.  The authors of this plan may recommend the realignment of the tour route to minimize its impact on historic features like New Garden Road.  Such action would also necessitate the removal of the dam as well as the relocation of the parking lot and comfort station at Tour Stop 6, both of which currently lie a few feet south of the historic New Garden trace and within the former town limits of Martinville.  The undertaking of a new DCP may be time-consuming, but the park can take several preliminary rehabilitative steps in the meantime: 

• Using the “Haldane” map as a guide, open up the woodlands to the west of the third line ridge, clearing back from both sides of New Garden Road.  (Note: A gradual process of vegetation removal is recommended, as rapid clear-cutting may require additional compliance due to its impact on a given area’s habitat and ecology.)  The extent of the cleared areas will be an approximation, so the park should use the best information available to determine the spatial organization of the third line fields.  This report, however, advises against the erection of fences along New Garden in this area, primarily because the visual impact of the dam will be all the more pronounced after the clearing process begins.  Consequently, placing fences on either side of New Garden along the length of the dam would only accentuate the contrast between it and the natural concavity of the ravine.  

• As the fields gradually open up and more light filters down to the forest floor, non-native species will tend to germinate and dominate the understory community. Eradicate non-native 

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plants as they arise, and encourage a native-dominant stand of herbs and grasses as the area opens.

• Arrange for additional archeology to pinpoint the locations of the retreat road and courthouse sites. 

• Maintain the existing comfort station and parking until a more suitable site is identified as prescribed in the 1997 GMP.  

• Maintain Liberty Oak and its associated lawn as a commemorative area.  New discoveries related to the sites of Guilford Court House and the Reedy Fork Road may necessitate a treatment change in the future.

General Treatment Recommendations for Commemorative Resources

CirculationTour Loop Road.   

• New Garden Road should be separated from the tour route where their courses currently merge above the former Lake Caldwell dam, just west of Tour Stop 6.  Furthermore, give precedence to New Garden by visually defining its course across the tour route at the point where the two roads intersect northeast of Stop 6 (see recommendations for New Garden, above, for more specifics).

• Remove the paved bicycle pull-off and wooden stands at Tour Stop 4.  Reseed the footprints with the same mixture of turf grasses currently covering the Winston Circle lawn.

• Continue using asphalt as the paving material for the tour route and the parking lots at the individual tour stops.  

Trails.   

• Visually distinguish park foot trails from historic routes by treating the former with materials that differ in character and texture from those used in the latter.  Trail widths should be consistent, not exceeding four feet, unless otherwise specified.  

VegetationFormal Plantings.   The remnant maple allée along the “Holt Avenue” section of tour route no longer possesses enough integrity to warrant its maintenance as a design feature. When the aging sugar maples expire, do not replace them.

Screen Plantings.   The existing conditions plan identifies several places where contemporary development compromises the view shed along the park boundaries.  Where possible, the vegetation buffer should be enhanced with native evergreens to enhance year-round screening.  See Appendix B for native evergreen suggestions.

Road Shoulder Plantings.   

• Ensure that woody vegetation along the tour route’s shoulders reflects the battle-era forest composition by eradicating non-native or inappropriate species.  

• Wherever practicable, do not mow road shoulders.  Where recreational walkers have trampled edge vegetation, improve the soil and replant with shade-tolerant native grasses and flowering herbs.  Erect a sign that reads “Native Plant Restoration” to discourage pedestrians from veering off the paved road.  

Monuments, Commemorative Markers, and Miscellaneous StructuresWhere applicable, mow and maintain an approach path of consistent width (4’) up to the monuments.  If an established ground cover has been in existence around a given memorial for some time, it should be watched vigilantly and prevented from spreading or escaping into adjacent woodlands.  Generally, all types of vegetation, with the exception of turf grass, should be kept a minimum of eighteen inches away from historic resources.

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Greene Monument-Amphitheater Landscape

Circulation• Maintain existing brick walkways and steps as 

primary circulation routes in the Greene Monument landscape.  Eliminate the grass growing between the brick joints, as it gives the area a neglected appearance.  This invasive growth may require pulling up segments of the walks, clearing and stabilizing their bases, and then relaying the bricks.  

• Establish a brick strip, or landing, laid flush with the ground, around the front of the Greene monument platform to accommodate visitors who step off the walks to read the inscription.  Because such a structure does not exist at present, these visitors have been wearing away spots in the turf before the monument.   The landing should be aesthetically compatible with the other walks leading up from the amphitheater, featuring the same brick pattern and color, and should not exceed the width of the monument’s platform.  

VegetationFormal Plantings.   

• Maintain the longleaf pine, the magnolia, and junipers in the vicinity of the Greene Monument but do not replace them after they expire.  The magnolia has been seeding the surrounding woodlands; monitor this germination and eliminate saplings as they arise to maintain the integrity of the forest’s historic composition.  

Woodlands.   

• Maintain the woodlands surrounding the Greene Monument-Amphitheater lawn and supplement them with appropriate native tree species that may have been lost over the years.  (See appendix for recommended species.)  Eradicate non-native and historically inappropriate species.

Open Areas.   

• As recommended in the “Second Line” subsection above, reforest the lawn area where the former administration building stood, located across New Garden Road from the Greene Monument.  The lawn and embankment associated with the monument and amphitheater on the south side of New Garden, however, should be mowed frequently and maintained in a manicured appearance befitting the commemorative space.

Visitor Center Landscape

SettingThe designed hardscape in which the visitor center stands was created as a part of the park’s Bicentennial-era improvements and reflects many elements of the Modern style.  Although too recent in origin to be eligible for the National Register, the visitor center landscape should be preserved as an appropriate setting for the building itself. 

CirculationEntrance.   The visitor center entrance lies at an awkward circulatory transition where the paved portion of New Garden Road splits into the bypass for vehicular traffic and the restored trace for pedestrian use.  The triangular island, created by the divided entrance drives and the bypass, further confuses this area.      

• Install a new curb along the eastern edge of the east entrance drive.  This curb should extend around the corner to a point along the paved bypass so that the existing wooden bollards can be removed.  

• Remove the directional arrow and the words “Visitor Center” from the main entrance sign on New Garden and relocate the sign to the park’s western boundary.  Erect a low-impact sign (not to exceed 30” tall) in the entrance island that can be read from both directions.  This new sign should display the NPS arrowhead and the words “Visitor Center.”

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• Since the visitor center parking lot intrudes on core battlefield land, it should not be enlarged in the future.

VegetationFormal Planting.   Because the planting plans for the building and parking lot are not historically significant, it is appropriate and in keeping with other NPS initiatives to replace the existing non-native plants (shrubs and ground covers) with native vegetation.  Introduced azaleas, small-leaf hollies, English ivy, liriope, etc. should be removed and replaced with native materials (see plant list in appendix for suggestions).

Woodlands.   The woodlands in this area should be treated in the same manner as all other forested zones in the park.  Eradicate non-native vegetation and, where necessary, supplement the existing woods with a representative mix of native species.  See appendix for appropriate species.

Open Areas.   There is no reason to maintain the lawn areas associated with the visitor center and its parking lot.  Since the entire visitor service area was wooded at the time of the battle, as much of it as possible should be returned to a vegetated state.  A small area of lawn or low ground cover may be maintained up to and around the visitor center flagpole.  Areas that need to be kept low for unobstructed line of sight should be planted with a mix of native grasses and/or herbaceous materials.  If a more formal treatment is warranted, a single species of indigenous ground cover should be selected (see Appendix B).  

Superintendent’s Residence-Maintenance ComplexThis complex is a National Register property and one of the best extant examples of Colonial Revival architecture in the Southeast Region of the National Park Service. These structures and setting should be preserved and kept in a state of good repair.  One suggestion for its adaptive use would be to convert it to a secondary interpretive center devoted to the park’s commemorative history.  The park might also consider adapting it for curatorial storage, a library, 

or additional office space.  Concerns have also been raised regarding the inadequacies of utility building for the current demands of park maintenance.  This historically significant structure may be expanded in the future, but such action will require the preparation of a Development Concept Plan as well as Section 106 compliance.  A better solution, however, would be to construct a new maintenance facility at a site off of the core battlefield.

Setting• Rehabilitate the overgrown and mismatched 

brick walks that connect the residence to the garden plot and the utility service court.  This will involve pulling up the bricks and stabilizing the bases, as well as eradicating the grass growing up in them.  For the sake of aesthetic uniformity, discard the hollow bricks and replace them with solid brick pavers identical in size and color to the existing ones.

• Replace the chain-link fence that currently frames the utility building’s service court (maintenance yard) to allow for the restoration of the historic post-and-rail enclosure.  If possible, move the yard and its accompanying chain-link fence behind the maintenance building. 

• Consider restoring the post-and-rail fence that once enclosed the garden plot.  The photographs and the textual description of its construction found in Architect Frederic Fay’s final report for Project FP-441 could serve as the basis for such work if undertaken.

Vegetation• Augment the failing deciduous screen, situated 

between the complex and the Lincoln Green apartments, with native evergreens (see plant list in appendix).

• Maintain the hardwood buffer that insulates the complex, while continuing to control invasive non-natives.  

• Enhance the screening effect of the largely deciduous strip of vegetation located between the residence and the New Garden bypass by planting shade-tolerant native evergreens and, if necessary, supplemental hardwoods (see plant list in appendix for appropriate species). 

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• Replant, in kind, the trees in the lawn as they die.  Maintain the row of nandina bordering the garden plot’s southern edge, but monitor for aggressiveness.  If it escapes into the surrounding woods, replace it with a compatible native material. 

• If the residence’s lawn becomes too shady to support a healthy stand of turf grass, the park could thin the trees in the area to increase the amount of light allowed in.  An equally viable treatment would be to replant the lawn with a shade-tolerant mixture of grasses and/or native ground covers. 

CirculationMaintain the historic entrance drive and repave it with asphalt when necessary.

Newly Acquired Tracts

General RecommendationsThe park should extend its comprehensive program of battlefield rehabilitation to these residential tracts, with the aim of reestablishing their battle-era conditions as closely as possible.  Toward this end, the park must first remove all modern intrusions, including houses, outbuildings, and other miscellaneous structures.  Another primary goal should be to eradicate all non-native or historically inappropriate vegetation.  The park may then begin the process of either replanting or removing vegetation; whichever treatment is consonant with recapturing a sense of each tract’s historic character.  

Specific RecommendationsKotis Tract.   

• Negotiate with local utility company to bury the power lines paralleling Battleground Avenue (US 220) along the property’s western boundary.

• Use the Haldane map as a guide to establish approximate boundaries for the detached field depicted about 200 yards south of Joseph Hoskins’ main fields.  This exercise will allow the park to determine the extent to which the locations of the detached field and the Kotis tract spatially correspond to one another.  Based on these findings, the park should either replant or remove vegetation accordingly to simulate historic conditions.  Given the likelihood that modern Battleground Avenue lies farther west than the site of the detached field’s westernmost border, it seems probable that, in any scenario, the western section of the Kotis property will require replanting with an appropriate forest mix (see Appendix for appropriate species).  The field itself should be managed in the same manner as prescribed for the first and third line areas. Split-rail fences should be added along the field boundaries.

Andrews Tract.   Considering its location between the first and second lines, this tract would have been covered in oak-hickory-pine forest at the time of the battle.  Therefore, the park, after removing non-native vegetation, should replant the tract’s open areas with appropriate hardwoods and understory species.  See plant list in Appendix for recommendation.

The Greenhurst Tracts.   Recommendations for the Greenhurst tracts are covered in the final bullet point of the “First Line Area” subsection above. 

WinstonMonument(1895)

StuartMonument (1895) Third Line Monument

(1910)

CavalryMonument(1909)

Hooper-Penn Monument(1897; moved c. 1974)

Greene Monument(1915)

Caldwell Monument(1909)

Tour Road(1975)

Schenck Monument(1904; moved 1937)

MarylandMonument(1892)

DelawareMonument(1888)

Visitor Center(1975)

TurnerMonument

(1902)

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A New Garden RoadA-1 Establish the historic alignment and width of New Garden

Road through battlefield and determine consistent treatment.(See Treatment Recommendations B & C)

A-2 Visually link New Garden Road historic road trace withmodern paved sections using an appropriate asphalt treatmentat Visitor Center Entrance, across Old Battleground Road, andwhere tour loop crosses historic trace at east end of the park.(Also see Treatment Recommendations B & C)

A-3 Do the necessary planning to eliminate Lake Caldwell damand redirect the tour loop south to recapture view from theThird Line. (See Treatment Recommendation C)

B Additional archeology required to locate Reedy Fork Retreat Road.When alignment established treatment to match New Garden Roadhistoric trace. (Also see Treatment Recommendation C)

C Separate recreation trail from the Bruce Road at its intersection withNew Garden historic trace. Width and treatment of Bruce Road tomatch historic trace road. (See Treatment Recommendation B)

D Reestablish battle-era drainage courses. (See TreatmentRecommendation C)

E First Line AreaE-1 Establish a north-south running split-rail fence along the

eastern boundary of the park, which approximates the locationof the Hoskins's Field.

E-2 Thin existing woodland in the first line area to interprethistoric field pattern. Maintain and enhance vegetative bufferon park boundary to restrict views to adjacent development.

E-3 Remove Quarters No. 2, modern intrusions, and non-nativeplant materials from this and adjacent lots on Greenhurst Driveas they are included in the park.

Notes:1. See GUCO-CLR (2003) for complete treatment

recommendation text. Reference to the TreatmentMap is to illustrate an approximate location andsize for each recommendation.

2. See GUCO-CLR (2003) appendices A and B forplant lists associated with treatment recommendations.

Treatment Recommendations (continued)M Visitor Center LandscapeM-1 Preserve the existing hardscape of the Visitor Center Landscape.

Replace existing non-native plants with native plantings of groundcovers and shrubs that are consistent with the intent of the originalplanting plan.

M-2 Entrance from New Garden Road-install a new curb (up to 10" tall)along the eastern edge extending around the corner to a point alongthe paved bypass so that existing wooden bollards can be removed.

M-3 Remove the existing directional arrow and the words "Visitor Center"from the main entrance sign on New Garden and then relocate thesign to the park's western boundary. Erect a low (not to exceed 30")identification sign in the entrance island that can be read from both sides.

M-4 Maintain Visitor Center parking in its current configuration becauseit can not be expanded without impacting the core battlefield.

M-5 Eradicate non-native plants from the surrounding woodland andsupplement with native trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants as necessary.

M-6 There is no reason to maintain the existing lawn at the Visitor Center.Where it is desirable to maintain a formal look, for example around theflagpole, a low native ground cover may be substituted.

N Superintendent's Residence - Maintenance ComplexN-1 Rehabilitate the brick walkways at the Superintendent's Residence.N-2 Develop an alternative security treatment around the maintenance

facility that would allow for the restoration of the post-and-rail fence.N-3 Consider restoring the post-and-rail fence that enclosed the garden plot.N-4 Supplement the inadequate vegetative buffer between the complex

and the Lincoln Green Apartments with evergreen trees and shrubs.N-5 Maintain the existing forested buffer around the complex, but eradicate

any non-native invasive plant species.N-6 Enhance the vegetative screen between residence and New Garden Road

bypass with evergreen trees and shrubs.N-7 Replace in-kind any trees that are lost from the lawn in the front of the

residence.N-8 Thin existing trees to increase the amount of light to the lawn in front

of the residence. Overseed with shade-tolerant grass mix.N-9 Maintain the existing residence/utility area drive. Repave with asphalt

as necessary.O Kotis TractO-1 Bury the power lines paralleling Battleground Avenue (US 220) and the

western boundary of the property.O-2 Establish approximate boundaries for the detached field depicted on the

Haldane maps. Plant or remove vegetation to interpret historic fieldpatterns.

P Andrews Tract lies in the forested area between the First and Second Lines.Remove all non-native vegetation and reforest with appropriate nativetrees and shrubs.

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Notes:1. See GUCO-CLR (2003) for complete treatment

recommendation text. Reference to the TreatmentMap is to illustrate an approximate location andsize for each recommendation.

2. See GUCO-CLR (2003) appendices A and B forplant lists associated with treatment recommendations.

F Second Line AreaF-1 Redirect Bicentennial Greenway trail onto existing park trails

and reforest railroad right-of-way.F-2 Reforest lawn area north of the Greene Monument and

Amphitheater (former administration building site). Maintaincircle of grass around the Morehead Monument. Maintainexisting trail from Tour Stop 8 to New Garden historic trace.

F-3 Eradicate non-native plants in the existing woodlands betweenFirst and existing Third Lines. Supplement forest with nativeplant species. (Also see Treatment Recommendations A & C)

F-4 Remove the cedars and replant native evergreens along HoltAvenue section between the road edge and the boundary fence

G Former Third Line (or Schenck's) Field (See TreatmentRecommendation A)

G-1 Release field from mowing eradicating non-native plants asthey appear. Supplement successional growth with native treesappropriate to the battle-era.

G-2 Maintain a mown circle of grass around the existing monuments.(Also see Tour Stop 4 on Treatment Recommendations A).

G-3 Maintain existing trail alignment. Add trail to Stuart Monument.(Also see Treatment Recommendation C)

I Remove paved bicycle trail pull-off and woodenstands at Tour Stop 4.

J Maintain park foot trails with materials that distinguishthem from the historic road traces. Most heavily usedroutes should continue to be asphalt with mulchedsurface on secondary foot trails. Widths should notexceed 4'. (Also see Treatment Recommendation A)

K VegetationK-1 The integrity of the maple allee along Holt Avenue is lost.

As maples expire, do not replace in-kind.K-2 Supplement existing planting along the park boundary in

locations as noted with native evergreen shrubs and trees.(Also see Treatment Recommendations A & C)

K-3 Eradicate non-native plants from woodlands that edgetour loop road. Supplement as necessary with speciescharacteristic of battle-era woodlands. (Also seeTreatment Recommendation C)

K-4 Remove areas of grass along tour loop road and plantnative ferns and shade tolerant plants. Replant bare areastrampled by foot traffic with same mix. (Also seeTreatment Recommendation C)

L Greene Monument - Amphitheater LandscapeL-1 Maintain existing brick walkways and steps in the Greene

Monument landscape. Eliminate grass in joints andrepoint as necessary.

L-2 Establish a brick strip around the base of the GreeneMonument (minimum width 16" or two bricks deep,not to exceed 24"). Brick to match color and size ofexisting brick and pattern should reflect existing walkways.

L-3 Maintain existing longleaf pine, magnolia, and junipers butdo not replace once they have outlived their use. Removemagnolia seedlings from adjoining woods.

L-4 Maintain the woodlands surrounding the Greene Monument-Amphitheater lawn and supplement with missing nativespecies characteristic of the battle-era

L-5 Open areas outside the Amphitheater lawn are within theSecond Line zone and should be reforested.See recommendation F-2

Treatment Recommendations

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Notes:1. See GUCO-CLR (2003) for complete treatment

recommendation text. Reference to the TreatmentMap is to illustrate an approximate location andsize for each recommendation.

2. See GUCO-CLR (2003) appendices A and B forplant lists associated with treatment recommendations.

H Revised Third Line AreaH-1 Gradually thin woodlands to the west of the revised

Third Line ridge.H-2 Eradicate non-native plants as they begin to appear as a

result of thinning trees.H-3 Additional archeology required to locate site of the retreat

road and the courthouse.

Treatment Recommendations

Figure 69

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National Park Service  107

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Unpublished Materials

Archival Records and Manuscripts.   

British Public Records Office, London.

Papers of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 30/11/76, Microfilm.  Select rolls owned by GUCO.

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, Greensboro, NC

GUCO Archives, 10 Boxes.

Historian’s Monthly Narratives.

Land Records.

Photograph Collection. 

Superintendent’s Monthly Narrative Reports.

Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Reports.

Unsorted and Miscellaneous Records.

War Department Records.

Guilford County Register, Greensboro, NC.

Guilford County Deed Books.

Guilford County Will Books.

National Archives, Washington DC.

Records of the National Park Service, Record Group 79. 

“Selected Documents Related to Guilford Courthouse National Military Park,”  Microfilm, 6 Rolls.  Copy in GUCO Files.

Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1936.  Copy in GUCO Files.

Master Plan, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 1939.  Copy in GUCO Files.

North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, NC.

Secretary of State, Granville Land Grants, Microfilm.

Guilford County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions Minutes, Microfilm.

Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Judge David Schenck Papers, Collection #652.

Unpublished Reports and Other Miscellaneous Documents.   

Fay, Frederic A.  “Final Report to Chief Architect, Project FP-441: Improvement of Grounds and Forests.”  TD.  August 1937.  Copy in GUCO Files.

“Mission 66 for Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.”  TD.  ND.  In GUCO Files.

Sawyer, Joseph J.  “Final Construction Report: Administration Building, Superintendent’s Residence, Utility Building, Inflammable Building.”  TD. June 1935.  Copy in GUCO Files.

Smedburg, C. W.  “A Description of Greensboro Country Park as Developed by the Civil Works Administration, 1933-1934.”  TD.  Circa 1934.  In Files of Greensboro Country Park, Greensboro, NC.

Wilhelm, R. A.  “Final Report: Project LD 14, Outdoor Theatre.” TD.  August 1939.  Copy in GUCO Files.

Newspapers and Periodicals.   

The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1781. London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1782.

Fayetteville Observer, 1855.

Greensboro Daily News, 1933-1934

Greensboro Patriot and Flag, 1857.

The Greensboro Record, 1959-1973.

National Park Service Plans.   (Housed at the Denver Service Center’s Technical Information Center, with duplicates in GUCO’s map collection.)  

 316/1023      Sketch of Guilford Battleground Park.  Scale: 1” equals 200’. 1903.

316/41005    Guilford Courthouse Battlefield National Military Park.  Scale: 1” equals  100’. 1933.

316/2000      General Planting Plan, GUCO. Scale: 1” equals 100’. 1936.

316/2000.1   Planting Plan: Superintendent’s Residence Area. Scale 1” equals 40’. 1936. 

316/1009      General Development Plan, GUCO. Scale: 1” equals 100’. 1939

316/1020.5   Outdoor Amphitheatre Plan, GUCO. Scale 1” equals 20’. 1938.

316/40004   Development Concept Plan, GUCO. 1973.

108  Cultural Landscape Report:  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Miscellaneous Unprinted Maps.   

“Guilford Battle Ground Park.”  Scale 1” equals 200’. January 1889.  Original in GUCO Archives.

“Guilford Battle Ground Park.”  July 1892.  Original In GUCO Archives.

“Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.”  Scale: 1” equals 100’. July 1928.  Copy in GUCO Map Files. 

Published Materials

Printed Maps.   

Collet, John.  “A Compleat Map of North-Carolina from an actual Survey.”  1770.  In North Carolina in Maps, ed. William P. Cumming.  Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1966, Plate VII.  

Price, Jonathon and John Strother.   “First Actual Survey of the State of North Carolina.” 1808.  In North Carolina in Maps, ed. William P. Cumming.  Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1966, Plate IX.  

MacRae, John.  “A New Map of the State of North Carolina.” 1833.  In North Carolina in Maps, ed. William P. Cumming.  Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1966, Plate X.  

U.S. Geological Survey.  “Lake Brandt, North Carolina Quadrangle.” Scale 1:24,000.  Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1951 (revised 1994).

Official Records, Government Documents, Journals, Histories, Travel Narratives.   

[Anonymous].  American Husbandry.  Edited by Harry J. Carmen.  London, 1775.  Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.

Byrd, William II.  A Journey to the Land of Eden.  In The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of Colonial Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1966.

Clark, Walter and William L. Saunders, ed.  The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina.  26 Vols.  Raleigh, 1886-1907.

Feltman, William.  The Journal of William Feltman, of the First Pennsylvania Regiment, 1781-1782.  Philadelphia, 1853.  Reprint, New York: New York Times & Arno Press, 1969.

Foote, William Henry.  Sketches of North Carolina, Historical and Biographical. New York: R. Carter, 1846.  Reprint, Raleigh, NC, 1965.

Fries, Adelaide L., et al, ed.  Records of the Moravians in North Carolina.  12 Vols.  Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Company, 1922-2000.

General Management Plan Environmental Assessment: Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  Atlanta: National Park Service Southeast Regional Office, 1997.

Lamb, Roger.  An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War.  Dublin: Wilkinson & Courtney, 1809.  Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Lawson, John.  A New Voyage to Carolina.  Edited by Hugh T. Lefler.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1967.

Laws Relating to the National Park Service, 6 Supplements.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1933-. 

Lee, Henry.  Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States.  Edited by Robert E. Lee.  New York: University Publishing Co., 1869.

Lossing, Benson J.  Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution. 2 Vols.  New York: Harper Bros., 1860.

Master Plan: Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1969.

National Military Park, National Park, Battlefield Site and National Monument Regulations.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1931.

Peixotto, Ernest.  A Revolutionary Pilgrimage.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917.

“Scotus Americanus,” Informations Concerning the Province of North Carolina (Glasgow, 1773).  In Some Eighteenth Century Tracts Concerning North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd, 429-451.  Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Co., 1927.

Seymour, William.  “A Journal of the Southern Expedition, 1780-1783.”  In Papers of the Historical Society of Delaware.  No. 15.  Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1896.

Showman, Richard K., et al, ed.  The Papers of General Nathanael Greene.  11 Vols.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976-.

Schenck, David.  A Memorial Volume of the Guilford Battleground Company. Greensboro, NC: Reece & Elam, Power Job Printers, 1893.

________.  Report of the President, November 15, 1887.  Greensboro: Reece & Co., Power Job Printers, 1887.

________.  Report of the President, October 22, 1888.  Greensboro: Reece & Elam, Book & Job Printers, 1888.

Stedman, Charles.  The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War.  2 Vols.  London, 1794.  Reprint, New York: The New York Times & Arno Press, 1969.

National Park Service  109

Strother, David Hunter [Porte Crayon, pseud.].  “North Carolina Illustrated: Guilford.”  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (July 1857): 161-164.

Tarleton, Banastre.  A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America.  London: T. Cadell, 1781.  Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Secondary SourcesArnett, Ethel S.  Greensboro, North Carolina: The County 

Seat of Guilford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.

Baker, Thomas E. Another Such Victory.  Eastern National, 1981.

________.  Redeemed from Oblivion: An Administrative History of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  National Park Service, 1995.

________.  “Superintendent’s Residence and Utility Area: A History.”  TD.  1992.  GUCO Files.

Bender, Thomas.  “The “Rural” Cemetery Movement: Urban Travails and the Appeal of Nature.”  In Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George, 505-518.  Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.

Brandon, William P.  “The Tarleton Map of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse: A Critical Study.” TMs. 1938.  File A-11, GUCO Files.

Bridenbaugh, Carl.  Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952.

Carson, Cary, et al.  “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies.” In Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George, 113-158.  Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.

Caruthers, Rev. Eli W.  Revolutionary Incidents, And Sketches of Character Chiefly in the “Old North State.”  2nd series.  Philadelphia, 1856.

________.  A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Rev. David Caldwell. Greensboro, NC: Swaim and Sherwood, 1842.

Corbitt, David L.  The Formation of the North Carolina Counties, 1663-1943.  Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1950.

Daniels, Dennis F.  “Guilford Courthouse National Military Park: The Early Years With a Concentration on the 1930s and 1940s.”  M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1994.

Delcourt, Paul A. and Hazel R. Delcourt. “Vegetation Maps for Eastern North America.”  In Geobotany II, 

ed. Robert C. Romans, 123-165.  New York: Plenium Press, 1981.

Durham, John L.  “Historical Marking of the Third Line of Battle.”  TMs.  Dated 9 April 1987.

Ekirch, A. Roger.  “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729-1776.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Gray, William G.  The Monuments at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.  United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1967.  

Hatch, Charles E. Jr.  Guilford Courthouse and Its Environs.  Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1970.

________.  The Battle of Guilford Courthouse.  Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1971.

Heikkenen, Herman J.  “Final Report: The Year of Construction of Hoskin[s’] House as Derived by Key-Year Dendrochronology.”  TD.  28 January 2000.  Copy on file at Tannenbaum Historic Park, Greensboro, NC.

Hendricks, Christopher E. “Town Development in the Colonial Backcountry: Virginia and North Carolina.”  Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1991.

Hiatt, John.  “The Southeast Square of Martinville.”  TMs.  August 1998.  Copy in GUCO Files.

Hilty, Hiram H.  New Garden Friends Meeting.  Davidson, NC: Briarpatch Press, 1983.

Hitchcock, Susan Lee.  “The Colonial Revival Gardens of Hubert Bond Owens.”  M.H.P. Thesis, University of Georgia, 1997.

Ingram, Oliver B.  “The Preservation of Guilford Battleground.”  M.A. Thesis, Wake Forest University, 1972.

Jurney, Robert C., et al. Soil Survey of Guilford County.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1923.

Kammen, Michael G.  Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture.  New York: Knopf, 1991.

Lee, Ronald F.  The Origin and Evolution of the National Military Park Idea. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1973.

Lefler, Hugh T. and William S. Powell.  Colonial North Carolina: A History.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Lowenthal, David.  The Past is a Foreign Country.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.  Reprint 1995.

Merrens, Harry Roy.  Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Historical Geography.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

110  Cultural Landscape Report:  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Mitchell, Thornton W.  “The Granville District and Its Land Records.” The North Carolina Historical Review 70 (April 1993): 103-129.

Murtagh, William J.  Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America.  Pittstown, NJ: Main Street Press, 1988.

Orr, Douglas M. and Alfred W. Stuart.  The North Carolina Atlas: Portrait for a New Century.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Otto, John S.  The Southern Frontiers: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South.  New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Parton, James.  Life of Andrew Jackson.  3 Vols.  New York: Mason Bros., 1860.

Remini, Robert V.  Andrew Jackson.  New York: Twayne Pub., 1966.

Schenck, David.  North Carolina 1780-1781, Being a History of the Invasion of the Carolinas.  Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Pub., 1889.

Silver, Timothy.  A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800.  Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990.

South, Stanley A.  Indians in North Carolina.  Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1965.

Stebbins, Dan.  “After the Battle: Joseph Hoskins and Guilford County in the Late Eighteenth Century.”  Parts 1 and 2.  Bound Reports.  January and July 2000.  Copies in GUCO Files.

Stephens, Ronald B.  Soil Survey of Guilford County.  Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 1977.

Stuckey, Jasper L.  North Carolina: Its Geological and Mineral Resources. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, 1965.

Swanton, John R.  The Indians of the Southeastern United States.  Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946.

Taylor, Raleigh C.  “The First Guilford Courthouse and Adjacent Land.”  TMs. 1953.  GUCO Files.

Unrau, Harlan D. and G. Frank Williss.  Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s.  Denver: National Park Service, Denver Service Center, 1983.

Ward, Trawick and Joffre L Coe.  “Archaeological Investigations at the Site of Guilford Courthouse.”  Bound Report.  Research Laboratories of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976.

________.  “Preliminary Archaeological Tests: Guilford Courthouse.”  Bound Report.  Research Laboratories of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, c. 1973.

Ward, H. Trawick and R. P. Stephen Davis, Jr.  Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Yates, Elizabeth.  “The Public Career of Alexander Martin.”  M. A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1943.

National Park Service  111

Appendix A

Recommended Native Trees, Shrubs, and Ground Covers for Reforesting Areas of Guilford Courthouse Battlefield

Botanical Name Common Name

Canopy TreesAcer rubrum Red MapleCarya glabra Pignut HickoryCarya ovata Shagbark HickoryCarya tomentosa Mockernut HickoryLiriodendron tulipifera Tulip PoplarLiquidambar styraciflua Sweet GumQuercus falcata Red OakQuercus  coccinea Scarlet OakQuercus velutina Black OakQuercus stellata Post OakQuercus albus White OakUlmus alata Winged Elm

Understory Trees and ShrubsAmelanchier arboreum ShadbushCercis canadensis RedbudCornus florida DogwoodHalesia caroliniana SilverbellHamamelis virginiana WitchhazelOxydendrum arboreum SourwoodVaccinium arboreum SparkleberryVaccinium staminium Huckleberry

Ground Covers and FernsHeuchera americana AlumrootHexastylis arifolia Wild GingerPachysandra procumbens Allegheny SpurgePolygonatum biflorum Solomon’s SealSmilacena racemosa False Solomon’s SealTiarella cordifolia Foam FlowerAthyrium filix-femina Southern Lady FernDennstaedtia punctilobula Hay-Scented FernPolystichum acrostichoides Christmas Fern

The list of Ground Covers and Ferns has been vetted with the North Carolina Botanical Garden of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Selected plants should be naturalized in drifts of not less than seven plants. 

112  Cultural Landscape Report:  Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Appendix B

Recommended Native Evergreens for Screening Areas of the Guilford Courthouse Battlefield

Botanical Name Common Name

Small Trees and ShrubsIlex opaca    American Holly1

Ilex glabra Inkberry HollyJuniperus virginiana Red CedarKalmia latifolia Kalmia, MounatinlaurelMyrica cerifera Wax MyrtleMagnolia grandiflora Southern Magnolia2

Vines (trained along perimeter fences)Gelsemium sempervirens Carolina jessamineSmilax lanceolata SmilaxBignonia capreolata Crossvine

Note: Shrubs used for screening are to be naturalized in their spacing and composition. Evergreen and deciduous understory trees and shrubs should be mixed for the most naturalistic effect.

1.  There are many American Holly hybrids that are sold commercially and would do well, such as Carolina  #2, Croonenburg, Greenleaf. All hollies should be allowed to grow naturally, no pruning recommended.

2.  Many hybrid forms are available that stay small and dense, which is more appropriate as a screening plant.

The National Park Service cares for special places saved by the American people so that all may experience our heritage.

National Park ServiceU.S. Department of the Interior

E X P E R I E N C E  Y O U R  A M E R I C A  T M

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park2332 New Garden RoadGreensboro, NC  27410-2355

www.nps.gov/guco

guco_back.ai Crop Marks are Black

- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Info Page
- Signature Page
- Contents
- Figures
- Figure Credits
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Site History
- Existing Conditions
- Analysis of Integrity
- Treatment Recommendations
- Bibliography
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- NPS/DOI Info Page
- Back Cover