Historian Chris Calkins Will Manage Sailor’s Creek Battlefield
By Kathryn Jorgensen
(February/March 2009 Civil War News)

RICE, Va. — Longtime National Park Service (NPS) historian Chris M. Calkins will soon end his split identity. Since last June he has spent part of his time getting Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park ready to be an independent entity.

When that happens in July Calkins will be the park’s first manager.

His 34-year NPS career will end sometime before then as Calkins heads into the Civil War Sesquicentennial years at Sailor’s Creek. He aims to have the park ready.

The Hillsman House will have a “soft opening” in April as a furnished house museum interpreting it as a home and field hospital. Construction of the park’s first visitor center will be completed in June.

“My goal is to have all the infrastructure up and running by 2015, the 150th anniversary,” he says. “It includes everything from trails to interpretive programs, even doing a landscape restoration.”

When the state approached Calkins about “splitting myself in half” and taking over Sailor’s Creek Battlefield he was able to arrange his schedule to continue at Petersburg National Battlefield and see some projects through. He set up a Sailor’s Creek e-mail address and visits the park once a week or so.

“Everyone seemed to be happy with that and I said I’d give it a try,” he says. Since then he has produced a variety of planning documents for the state park.

And he made a lot of decisions, among them that the battlefield’s name is Sailor’s Creek, not Sayler’s, thus ending confusion and oddities when the two spellings were used concurrently.

Calkins’ relationship with Sailor’s Creek goes back decades. Growing up in Detroit, he was a Civil War buff at age 10. He left home at 20, was a seasonal employee at Appomattox in 1971 and knew that’s what he wanted to do.
He went to Longwood University 15 miles from Sailor’s Creek. His Thirty-Six Hours Before Appomattox was the first book written about the battle and was published before he graduated.

Calkins says he wrote it because the only book he could find, Burke Davis’ To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865, didn’t offer the depth he wanted.

“As I started studying the fight in that area and Sailor’s Creek, I realized I was in virgin territory,” he recalls. He started collecting research on the Appomattox Campaign and related artifacts.

In doing the book he learned that the battle of Sailor’s Creek was actually three separate engagements — Hillsman Farm, Lockett Farm two miles away and Marshall’s Crossroads, a mile from Hillsman Farm.

In the years since Calkins stayed involved with the state as a consultant, including on where to site the visitor center, and he led tours of the battlefield.

He wrote the Lee’s Retreat Civil War Trails driving tour, which centers on Sailor’s Creek and Appomattox. The five Sailor’s Creek stops are at Holt’s Corner, Hillsman House, Marshall’s Crossroads, Lockett House and Double Bridges.

Early in his career Calkins also worked at Fredericksburg and since 1981 has been historian and chief of interpretation at Petersburg.

In addition, he spent eight years on the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites board and helped broker the preservation of seven sites around Petersburg and Appomattox.

As a result, Calkins knows more than most people do about this area of Virginia and the last days of the war.

He also wrote The Appomattox Campaign, which just came back in print; From Petersburg to Appomattox - A tour guide to the routes of Lee’s withdrawal and Grant’s pursuit April 2-9 1865; and Lee’s Retreat: A History and Field Guide.

Until now the state has managed Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park through Twin Lakes State Park. The battlefield park is 324.62 acres, with protective easements on another 623 acres.

Last summer Calkins produced an Interpretive Prospectus & Exhibit Plan for Sailor’s Creek. He listed many things, from goals and objectives and interpretive themes to furnishings and exhibits for the Hillsman House.
For the first time the house will be furnished and interpreted as a middle-class Southside Virginia farm house and field hospital. Visitors will enter an exhibit room showing family life.

The main room will appear as the Federal Army hospital it was during and after the battle. Only officers were treated in its two beds. One of them, from Rhode Island, described the scene.

An operating room was in the entry hall. This display will feature surgical instruments.

Federal and Confederate wounded were treated on the lawn. Calkins says 358 Union VI Corps men and 161 Confederate troops were treated at the Hillsman House.

Forty-five dead from the farm were buried at Poplar Grove National Cemetery near Petersburg. Calkins says as far as he knows the Confederate mass burials could still be on the battlefield.

It was a bloody scene. A 1st Vermont Cavalryman wrote, “The dead were here virtually piled one upon another and it was the last ditch of thousands.”

A week later Union Gen. J. Warren Keifer said he “could then have walked on the bodies of the unburied Confederate dead for many successive rods along the exposed face of the heights.”

Calkins has an inventory of Hillsman home furnishings, including beds, tables, desks and chairs, many of which stolen in the 1950s. He and his wife, Sarah Brown, are donating a lot of their collected antiques to the Hillsman House display.

The new visitor center Calkins describes as an approximately 4,070 square feet, wood-framed building, with 1,586 square feet of exhibit space and an outdoor observation patio overlooking the valley of Little Sailor's Creek.

It is located between the fighting at the Hillsman Farm and Marshall's Crossroads on the battlefield. The center will feature audio-visual programs, a research library with books donated by Calkins, bathrooms and a shop. Development and completion of exhibits will follow the expected June completion.

When it is complete Calkins’ collection of Sailor’s Creek artifacts that has been displayed for years at Appomattox Court House will move to the new facility. Among them is one of his favorites, a piece of Confederate cornbread found on the battlefield at Sailor’s Creek.

Excavated and non-excavated items that the park will exhibit in a time line from April 2, 1865, through the surrender negotiations 72 hours after the battle, include everything from percussion caps, friction primers, bullets and buttons to a Bible, officer’s sword, hand-made dog tag and artillery shell fragments.

The Sailor’s Creek season is basically Memorial Day through Labor Day. Calkins will work with a chief ranger, maintenance man and three seasonal workers until the visitor center opens. A new friends group is being formed.

He is up for the challenge, ready with a list of many interpretive opportunities and “untold stories”: Robert E. Lee lost almost a quarter of his army at Sailor’s Creek; it was the war’s last major battle before the April 12 surrender; it was the largest surrender in the field of an army without terms following; Confederate Navy, Marines, government employees and heavy artillery fought at the Hillsman farm; the U.S. awarded 57 Medals of Honor.

He could go on — and he will.

“My comrades in arms in the NPS, when they heard I got this job, said I had a chance at probably one of the last pristine battlefields in the state to develop, and I agree with them,” he says.