Occasionally the strangest things will surface in the county records.  While processing Amelia County records (Barcode 1147160), archivist Callie Freed found a map depicting the U.S. Army’s 20-day siege of the Mexican city of Veracruz during the Mexican-American War. 

 Titled “Siege of Vera Cruz by the U.S. Troops under Major General Scott in March 1847, from surveys made by Major Turnbull, Captains Hughes, McClellan, & Johnston, Lieutanants Derby & Hardcastle, Top. Engineers,” the map depicts General Winfield Scott’s troops and siege engines spread out across the land surrounding the city of Veracruz and its fortifications, as well as other key features of the landscape and the reefs just off of the city in the Gulf of Mexico.  Statistics are given about the regiments of the divisions belonging to William J. Worth, David E. Twiggs, and Robert Patterson as well as the numbers of troops killed and wounded in the operation.  The map was drawn by Captain George McClellan and published in 1847 by the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers.

 The siege of Veracruz took place in March 1847 and was the scene of the first successful large-scale amphibious assault by a United States military force.  General Scott landed his U.S. Expeditionary Force near the city and lay siege to it for twenty days until it was surrendered, opening up the east coast of Mexico to United States forces and offering a clear road to the interior of the country.

 The Mexican-American War lasted from 1846 until 1848, instigated by the Texas Revolution of 1836 and its annexation by the United States in 1845.  The United States sought territorial expansion to the Pacific coast and ultimately achieved the acquisition of New Mexico and Alta California, but the cost both in money and in American lives was extremely high.  Additionally, the issue of the expansion of slavery into the new territories continued to take a political toll that would lead in just a little over ten years to the cataclysm of the American Civil War.

 So why would such a map be found among the records of the Amelia County court?  Perhaps the clerk had an interest in the topic or perhaps it was used to prove Army service by a pensioner.  We will never know the answer yet it is an interesting question to contemplate.

-Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

Editors Note: This post originally appeared in the Virginiana section of Virginia Memory.

The beautiful maps in the Voorhees collection and those that reside in Special Collections are well known to Library of Virginia researchers. Yet thousands of rough but informative maps exist in the Library’s local government records collection. Often classified as “plats,” these detailed property maps were created and filed as part of county land records, chancery records, or other legal proceedings.

Some of the most interesting local plats are found within criminal papers. Murder trials occasionally required jurors to consider a particular crime scene, and the resulting sketches created for this purpose offer fascinating glimpses into landscapes and violent episodes. One is featured on the Library’s 1997 web exhibit The Common Wealth: Treasures from the Collections of the Library of Virginia. This drawing shows a portion of Manchester, Virginia, in 1869, at the time of a barroom-related shooting, complete with building facades and streets. And in her 2003 book A Murder in Virginia, based on three Commonwealth Causes against Pokey Barnes, Solomon Marable, and Mary Abernathy, historian Suzanne Lebsock drew upon a court-directed plat from Prince Edward County to illustrate the scene of an infamous 1895 crime involving four black defendants.

While processing Henry County’s criminal causes, I came across a number of particularly gruesome plats. The most remarkable one was filed in Commonwealth vs. Wade W. Lester, July 1897. This trial involved a mill owner who allegedly poisoned one of his mill hands with a mixture of liquor and strychnine, a rat poison. After drinking the mixture, the mill hand staggered back to his home and collapsed in the yard in view of his relatives. The court mapped out the man’s final steps, with a dotted line showing the man’s meandering walk towards home to the very “Point at which [he] died,” just 74 ½ yards short of his residence. The plat also shows neighborhood roads, railroad lines, creeks, and buildings.

In another cause, Commonwealth vs. Sam Valentine, April 1893, a plat was drawn to document a shooting. Trouble began one evening when Sam Valentine, an officer of the law, arrived at Alfred Hairston’s house party to serve a warrant on a guest. After Valentine entered and apprehended the accused man, someone in the crowd resisted, and a scuffle broke out. In the midst of the activity, Valentine shot one of the rowdies in the head, and the man eventually died from the wound. At the trial, the inquest committee sketched a floor plan of Hairston’s house, showing the position of the participants, as well as the hearth, stairs, and doors.

An even more elaborate plat was drawn for an arson investigation for Commonwealth vs. Silas Minter, September 1898 and January 1899. This oversized drawing revealed one neighborhood’s roads, houses, and creeks, plus its many barns. The defendant was accused of setting a barn full of oats and wheat on fire, causing $400 in damages. One issue under debate was whether the fire from several nearby stumps had set the barn on fire, so the map dutifully records the spot of the stumps and brush surrounding the barn in question.

Such maps may not match the artistic merit of those in specialized map collections, but for budding forensic historians, their lines can be just as revealing.

-Ryan Smith, Former Local Records Archivist