At Long Last — Ox Hill/Chantilly Battlefield Is A Park
By Kathryn Jorgensen
September 2008 Civil War News

FAIRFAX, Va. — Ox Hill Battlefield Park will be dedicated on Sept. 1, the 146th anniversary of the 1862 battle where Union Gens. Philip Kearny and Isaac Stevens died.

The new 5-acre county park is a tribute to persistence and efforts over more than 20 years to save something of the battlefield (also known as Chantilly), which lies under and surrounded by suburban Washington development — highways, malls, townhouses and office buildings.

Opening ceremonies at the park, at 4134 West Ox Rd. in Fairfax, will begin at 10 a.m. The program will include color guard, speakers, wreath-laying and reenactor demonstrations. Details are at www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/oxhill.

The battle was fought during a thunderstorm a couple of days after the battle at Second Manassas. More than 20,000 men fought at Ox Hill, with some 1,500 of them becoming casualties.

Markers to Kearny and Stevens were erected in 1915 on land deeded by one of John S. Mosby’s cavalrymen. Memorializing the battlefield wasn’t as easy.

First, some land had to be saved. For that purpose the Chantilly Battlefield Association was founded in 1986 by preservationists Brian Pohanka, Clark B. “Bud” Hall, Edward T. Wenzel and the Bull Run Civil War Round Table.
In 1987 developers were pressured to donate 2.4 acres surrounding the granite monuments after their proposal to move them caused an uproar. The Fairfax County bought another 2.4 acres in 1994.

In 2005 the county Park Authority Board approved a master plan for the site, which is part of the 500-acre core area of the battlefield where Stevens was killed carrying the national flag at the head of his troops.

Ed Wenzel recounted the battlefield association’s 125th anniversary observance in a tribute he wrote after Brian Pohanka’s death in 2005.

He said Pohanka stood “beside the Kearny and Stevens monuments and only a few feet from a huge gash in the earth scraped by monster earth-moving machines.”

Pohanka recalled how he had been visiting the site since his teen years. He told of feeling sadness that so much of the battlefield was destroyed and shame that efforts to preserve it “were less than they should have been.”

“We should have begun this fight earlier, and we should have waged it with the intensity that we waged it in the last year and a half, a decade ago, or five years ago even,” he said.

Pohanka ended his talk: “I sincerely hope, as a Civil War buff, as a historian, and as an American, that all of you who care stand together and fight, as we should have fought a decade ago, to save these fields which even as we stand here are threatened, and even as we stand here, are being destroyed.

“And so I urge all of you to do what you can to preserve not only the historic sites in this county, and not only the historic sites in this state, but those fields throughout this country where these brave men gave their lives, because I think were they to see the fate of this ground they too would be ashamed.

“Let this place, let Chantilly, Ox Hill be a rallying cry for all of us who care so that this doesn’t happen again.”

When Wenzel spoke at the May groundbreaking for Ox Hill Battlefield Park he admitted that he sometimes wondered “whether we’d ever see this day.”

He recently reported in the Bull Run Civil War Round Table newsletter that the battlefield landscape has re-emerged after removal of 80 years of tree and brush cover from the fields.

“The best treat is walking across the undulating topography that rolls across the scene of the Union attack,” he wrote. This land where the 79th New York and 28th Massachusetts crossed at the height of Stevens’ assault “was virtually hidden in the tangle of vegetation.”

The new park will have a wheelchair-friendly interpretative trail, benches, markers, an interpretive kiosk, fence lines and part of the Reid cornfield. Wenzel lamented that the county arborist reduced the cornfield’s size by increasing the tree buffer width between it and neighboring condominiums.

“At long last, the people of Fairfax will finally be able to walk the historic ground and learn what happened on that stormy day in 1862. I think you’ll like what you see,” Wenzel wrote.  

Sculptor and longtime reenactor Michael Kraus has been commissioned by the Chantilly Battlefield Association to produce two granite obelisks with bronze reliefs honoring the soldiers who fought on each side at Ox Hill/Chantilly.