Stafford supervisors agreed Tuesday to a Northern Virginia developer’s plan to transfer portions of a remote and historic rock outcrop from its current location to the county’s Civil War park off Brooke Road.
The tall formation of rocks known by local historians as Buzzard’s Roost, is located deep within the woods on the north side of Centreport Parkway near Stafford’s regional airport, about a half-mile northeast of Mountain View Road. Still visible are etchings left by Union Army soldiers passing time as they stood watch at the remote battlefield outpost nearly 160 years ago.
Tuesday’s unanimous decision by county supervisors now paves the way for over 1 million square feet warehouse space to be built in two separate buildings on the land as part of a project the builder has dubbed the Northern Virginia Gateway.
“The proposed project will create an integrated industrial campus of 177 acres along with 1.8 million square feet of building space in Stafford’s long-planned logistics and industrial area,” Peterson Companies of Alexandria reports on their website. “This shovel-ready industrial site is on the I–95 corridor between Richmond and Washington, D.C.”
People are also reading…
Anita Dodd, who leads Stafford’s historical commission, said a large group of people met at Buzzard’s Roost several months ago, including the land developers and representatives from Peterson Companies, the National Parks Service and the county.
Dodd said during that meeting, members of the county’s historical groups and park service personnel expressed a desire to leave the rock formation intact. Kathy Baker, Stafford County’s assistant director of planning and zoning, also told supervisors Tuesday the Virginia Department of Historic Resources noted Buzzard’s Roost “is potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and measures should be taken to ensure its protection.”
“I think it should stay where it is,” Dodd said. “Once you remove something like that, it loses all of its context and that’s significant.”
Supervisors 7–0 vote on Tuesday allows Peterson Companies to have stonemasons remove several portions of the sandstone mass bearing the soldiers’ inscriptions and relocate them to the Stafford Civil War Park off Brooke Road. In a report provided to county supervisors by the Peterson Companies, “consultation with stonemasonry experts has indicated that extraction is feasible with minimal risks to the engravings.” In addition to removing the wartime etchings, the developer will also pay $10,000 to the Stafford County Cultural Heritage Museum.
The unanimous vote also allows Peterson Companies to proceed with plans to clear the area to make way for two warehouses on the former Buzzard’s Roost site, but Peterson representatives said it’s still premature to release the names of any of the businesses interested in occupying those two new buildings.
“We have confidentiality agreements that until the leases are fully executed and until they’ve confirmed their economic incentive packages, if any, we’re not really allowed to release names yet,” Adam Cook said, managing director of Peterson Companies.
Peterson’s original proposal submitted to the county early in the project planning phase called for an 80-foot buffer to be built around Buzzard’s Roost to protect the historic rock formation, but Cook says after the transfer of graffiti remnants to the county’s Civil War park, the area will be completely cleared.
“What would be left is just developable flat land,” Cook said. “[Buzzard’s Roost] itself, if it were to remain, would be sort of like Rapunzel’s Tower, 40 feet in the air. It would just be a very odd feature in any landscape.”
Between April 1862 and June 1864, more than 213,000 Union soldiers occupied Stafford alongside its 8,633 residents. Soldier graffiti seemed to be a popular pastime for troops on both sides of the conflict, and samples of Civil War graffiti can still be seen elsewhere in the county and surrounding areas.
Visible on the exterior corners of Aquia Church in North Stafford is graffiti from the Confederate’s Texas regiments during their occupation of the church in 1862. On the same corners of the church, initials are clearly visible at eye-level from members of the Union’s 9th New York Cavalry and the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, whose forces occupied the church the following year. Similarly, soldiers sent to the Buzzard’s Roost outpost carved their names, hometowns and company numbers into the sandstone found there.
While hiking with Boy Scouts in 1957, Clarence Snellings said he recalls coming upon Buzzard’s Roost in the woods.
“It was strange to see this tall rock formation in the woods,” said Snellings. “It’s in an isolated area.”
Erik Mink, historian and cultural resource specialist with the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, detailed the inscriptions found over the years at Buzzard’s Roost, including those of Pvt. Edward S. Nourse of Company K, 22nd Massachusetts Infantry; Pvt. Richard Oliver Meredith of Company C, 11th United States Infantry; and Pvt. Leonard Hastings Livermore of Company I, 3rd Maine Infantry.
Mink said the Union Army’s 5th Corps was encamped on the north side of what is today Cranes Corner Road during winter 1862 to 1863. One of the carvings Mink identified at Buzzard’s Roost came from a soldier assigned to the 11th infantry, which was camped at that location.
“Given its location, it certainly seems logical that it was part of the picket line, sort of the outposts, the early warning systems that were spread out a distance from the camps to provide that sort of protection,” said Mink. “To find a set of inscriptions that has not been vandalized is especially rare and unusual.”
