JOHN MOSBY & OLD BAD ROAD

An old engineering adage has it that "forces flow." Gravity, friction, and tension move and carry over surfaces. Structures dictate the way these forces are channeled to find their ultimate expression.

Military forces also flow. This is especially true of the American Civil War, in which nearly every aspect of each army was beholden to the earth below. Landscapes channeled the flow of military forces and changed the course of the conflict.

Fairfax County, Virginia--just west of Washington, D.C.--played host to both the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. For small windows of time, the turnpikes fanning westwards from the Potomac River funneled these famous armies to sprawling battles elsewhere.

More enduring chronologically and more compelling geographically is the case of John Singleton Mosby, a Confederate partisan ranger who operated independently and to great success in Fairfax County from January 1863 to the war's end.

Often credited with tying up as many as 50,000 Federal soldiers in an area roughly the size of modern-day Los Angeles, Mosby and his men leveraged privileged knowledge of Fairfax County's terrain to terrorize occupying Yankees, absorbing valuable Yankee troops required for the destruction of Robert E. Lee.

Mosby and his command are the stuff of legend. Meaning that they were so successful that the truth of their deeds has been obscured by a veil of heroic myth. Reality belongs less to the legendary and more to the careful study of landform.

The landscape of Fairfax County, Virginia exerted inordinate influence on John Mosby's war. His relationships with locals who lived at the boundary between the flatlands of the Culpeper Basin west of Chantilly and within the sunken thickets and maze-like byways of Difficult Run allowed Mosby and his command to hide and maneuver within a stone's throw of the Federal bases at Jermantown, Vienna, and Centreville.

Under John Mosby, irregular forces flowed over the complex landscape of Difficult Run in Fairfax County, Virginia. Heightened by particular economic relationships, bulwarked by specific religious beliefs, agitated by mass emigration from the north, and armed to the teeth, a creek valley rich in informal ancient paths hosted a complex landscape along a route known on Federal maps as "Old Bad Road."

There, John Mosby developed a secret hiding place and an invaluable network of shortcuts across Federal lines.

The place name "Old Bad Road" dates to the first months of 1862 when a map supervised by Federal Major General Irwin McDowell recorded the route between Hunter Mill Road and West Ox Road in words that would emphasize its unsuitability for military application.

Civil War-era maps, even those depicting areas just outside of the nation's capitol, were notoriously poor. The Union army blamed lousy cartography for marching miscues and poor performance during the First Battle of Manassas. Over the ensuing winter, a team of engineers, draftsmen, and scouts attempted to cobble together a new and more accurate universal map of Northern Virginia.

Union source material included a body of notoriously inaccurate existing maps, second-hand reports, and notes from lightning-fast horseback jaunts through enemy-held terrain. The resulting McDowell Map was inexact, but pragmatic.

Highways like the Warrenton, Little River, and Middle Turnpikes featured prominently. As did major byways like the prehistoric Ox Road, Chain Bridge Road, and the Hunter Mill Road. These routes were well-established and could support the maneuver of massed infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

Elsewhere, the McDowell Map also included many of the poorly-maintained farm lanes and local roads that laced across the countryside. Unsuitable for military use, these roads were potentially depicted to allow field commanders to account for alluring turn-offs that quickly devolved into mudholes.

In Difficult Run, two such roads appear on the McDowell Map: Old Bad Road and Bad Road. You can find Old Bad Road on a modern map by locating Vale Road, which darts through a collection of subdivisions in contemporary Oakton, Virginia, on a course that winds down from the Ox Hill across Fox Mill Road and over Difficult Run before cutting towards Vienna.

Laid out along property lines, the roadway's disposition hints to communal access dating to a point in the early 18th century when metes and bounds conformed to existing informal use. The road was formalized in 1845 when a road petition sought support for improvements to a trace linking Hunter Mill Road with the Little River Turnpike. Today's roadway follows much the same course, except for a slight diversion where Vale Road swerves through two dangerous ninety degree turns within a quarter mile of one another. These features were part of an adjusted 1872 roadway, which sought to pull the avenue towards higher ground and out of the bottom land, through which it ran during the Civil War.

This last part is important, specifically because the given name "Old Bad Road" was a distinguished honor for 1860s Fairfax County, an area which was famous throughout the War of the Rebellion for its heinous and poorly maintained roads. A Federal soldier entering comparatively well-heeled Fairfax Court House in March of 1862 described "the most villainous red mud you ever saw." Four miles northwest in the raw hinterlands of Difficult Run, Old Bad Road must have been a superlative morass for Federal cartographers to christen it with a name that served as an avoidance warning for Yankee troops.

If "Old Bad Road" was a practical identifier, it also served the unintended purpose of clearing a warren of backroads and little-known farms of Union interference. Free from prying Federal eyes, rebel-loyal locals with sons in Confederate service offered place-knowledge and sanctuary to irregular southern forces. These partisan rangers and their commander--John Mosby--used the forests surrounding Old Bad Road to maneuver on interior lines between the well-patrolled Ox Road to Frying Pan and Hunter Mill Road.

This was a place where a cunning commander employing unconventional tactics and sly men could utilize a landscape of mills, flood plain pastures, timber, and unmarked fords to cross Difficult Run and slice through Federal lines.

John Mosby and his 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion did exactly this between February of 1863 and March of 1865.

The hilly forests and swampy bottom land on either side of Old Bad Road were not an obvious choice to host the Civil War's most celebrated guerrilla campaign. Despite prolonged Confederate presence in and around the Upper Difficult Run basin during the first two years of the war, the watershed was never seriously used as a staging area and shortcut until John Mosby arrived in the first months of 1863.

It took a person with John Mosby's perspectives to fully utilize the space. What resulted was an immensely successful series of skirmishes and raids that endures as a testament to the possibilities present when land use patterns and personal biography dovetail perfectly into a symbiotic system.

In a very real sense, Mosby's entire life before the war prepared him to stage ambushes in the heavy thickets around Old Bad Road.

John Singleton Mosby was a sickly child who grew into a slight adult. Born ten months after and one hundred and fifty miles away from his future commander in the Confederate cavalry, JEB Stuart, Mosby's life was far afield from the dashing cavalier archetype associated with southern horseman of the Civil War.

Mosby was bookish and insular as a child. His mind was more impressive than his physique, and a sensitive disposition molted the future partisan into a sensitive adolescent with a sharp tongue that wrote checks his fists could not cash. He remarked later in life that he had been in many fights as a teenager and not won a single one.

As a student at the University of Virginia, Mosby's instinct for kinetic action merged with his penchant for getting the worst of a fight. He staged his first successful ambush in a Charlottesville boarding house after a known bully who greatly outsized young Mosby threatened to kill the future guerrilla. At this early juncture, John Mosby evolved past the burdensome code of Southern honor to embrace a more modern pragmatism. So he borrowed a pistol, knocked on the bully's door, and shot him in the chest, wounding the bully severely.

This moment changed the course of John Mosby's life forever and probably elongated the survival of the Confederacy--still a decade distant--by another year. Necessity and physical limitations dictated that the young Mosby negotiate difficult circumstances with a surprise visit and the application of lead. The success of this maneuver and his subsequent imprisonment in the Albermarle County jail crocheted a through line in John Mosby's life.

In a damp and dimly-lit cell, Mosby's jailer recognized a spark of brilliance in his charge. William Robertson fed John Mosby legal texts and established a foundation of analytical processing that primed Mosby to become a lawyer after his imprisonment.

If the event seeded a profession for John Mosby, it also forever tarnished his social standing and jilted his worldview. Decades after the war, he would comment to a former subordinate that a year in jail is all the State of Virginia had ever given him. Mosby bore the stigma of his imprisonment and the traumatic experience itself as laurels befitting a proud outsider.

Serving as a country lawyer in Bristol, Virginia, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, Mosby prided himself on a certain combative contrarianism. He was at once a member of the local secessionist-leaning militia and a devout Unionist. Upon Virginia's exit from the Union, many in Mosby's company expected that the scrawny lawyer with the mean wit would not muster in service to the Confederacy. They were wrong.

Mosby became a steadfast member of Grumble Jones' company of the 1st Virginia Cavalry. There too, he stood out. Poorly dressed, slouching, and crane-necked, Mosby was one of two men in his company to accept and don shabby penitentiary uniforms. Appearances aside, something about John Mosby struck his company commander as extraordinary. On the eve of First Manassas, six revolvers arrived by requisition from Richmond to be distributed at Captain Jones' discretion.

Mosby was one of six to earn the dubious honor. The men with revolvers were expected to perform the most dangerous scouting duties to which the company was assigned. Analytical Mosby thrived in this role. Merging the pistol-in-face pragmatism of his youth with his lawyerly instinct for bluff and maneuver, John Mosby quickly became one of the most trusted scouts in Confederate service.

Upon the Confederate army's retreat from Northern Virginia in March of 1862, Mosby tailed the Federal pursuers to determine their strength and mission. Three months later he discovered, reported, and then led JEB Stuart on a route around McClellan's entire army. Captured shortly thereafter, John Mosby did a quick bid in Federal prison.

On the voyage back to Confederate lines, he noticed Federal infantry preparing to ship northwards away from the gates of Richmond and towards Washington, D.C. Mosby brought this information directly to Robert E. Lee, who promptly ordered Stonewall Jackson westwards in a series of maneuvers that became the Battle of Cedar Mountain, which seeded the Second Manassas Campaign and paved the way for the Maryland Invasion.

Being a man apart gave Mosby an undeniable knack for the collection and interpretation of actionable military intelligence. More importantly, he was a man with seasoned nerves that knew when and how to fight.

This toolkit earned the faith and respect of JEB Stuart. After a New Year's raid across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg to Fairfax Station, which culminated with a crossing of Difficult Run at Hunter's Mill and a brief bivouac at Frying Pan, Stuart ordered Mosby to begin independent operations in Northern Virginia.

The version of Northern Virginia with which John Mosby is most often associated is an idealized landscape of rolling hills, dotted with stands of pines and scenic farms sprawled out over flatlands that ended at the distant Blue Ridge. There, we are meant to believe, John Mosby and his men holed up before striking out again and racing across the Culpeper Basin to attack an oblivious Federal foe.

These spatial relationships do not necessarily add up. The rolling hill motif and distant hideaways negate the agency of qualified Federal adversaries and fail to account for the way that John Mosby and his men navigated a web of Yankee checkpoints on the highways west of Fairfax. Until war's end, the Gray Ghost as Mosby was known, maintained an ability to penetrate deep into eastern Fairfax County.

This operational capacity hints at another paradigm. In order to push across Federal lines and raid past Fairfax, Mosby and his men required a foothold in the Upper Difficult Run basin. Enduring folk lore places Mosby at specific locations along Old Bad Road in the area of Difficult Run immediately west of Fairfax. Many of his most trusted men hailed from the area and Mosby himself patrolled there in the fall and winter of 1861 when he was a lowly private entrusted with a revolver.

More importantly, the landscape there matched the parameters for guerrilla warfare that Mosby had consumed decades prior. The biography of Francis Marion--the famous Swamp Fox of the Revolutionary War--was the first book that John Mosby ever read. Its ideas had a prodigious effect on the way he viewed the world and navigated its challenges. This primer on partisan shock potentially fed into his decision to ambush the bully George Turpin at UVA.

After the war, John Mosby couched his site selection criteria in Northern Virginia in Marionesque language. He admitted to privileging "shelter...as Marion had in the swamps of the Pedee." Difficult Run was the closest he could get.

By war's start, a warren of struggling farms that were equal parts pasture and timber were thoroughly entrenched in a sunken domain. The beleaguered local farmers who struggled to till long-term stability from the earth there connected their future prospects with the Confederate slave system.

Swampy, set-apart, and oft forgotten, Difficult Run was ready-made to play the Pedee Swamp in a Mosby helmed reenactment of the Swamp Fox's Revolutionary War campaign eighty years prior, one couched in surprise attacks executed in unlikely spaces by a man who himself thrived when set apart.

The story of John Mosby's war in Northern Virginia is rich in story book moments and often short in specificity. Sixteen decades later, we're left to color in the increasingly obscure times and spaces that connect the grand events of the Gray Ghost's partisan campaign. Mosby and his men spent a bulk of the war in the margins between daring raids and sharp skirmishes.

These unexciting intervals have slipped through the cracks in the annals of Mosbyana. The resulting narrative gap begs a number of doctrinal questions that shine light on spatial and temporal problems with the Mosby narrative.

Put simply: we can't account for the exact way Mosby negotiated space and time to execute sometimes simultaneous exercises deep within enemy territory from an operations base tucked away in the distant mountains.

Sources like Ranger John Munson's Reminiscences of a Mosby Guerrilla provide off-hand details about the mundane spatial existence of Mosby's command. Munson recalls long stretches of boredom spent "hiding out in the pines" between spurts of violence. Less sexy historically than the first seconds of a well-laid ambush, the pines anecdotes nonetheless offer important context. Mosby frequently found temporary refuge in advantageous forward terrain and foliage environments when he was in close contact with Federal foes.

These obscure landscapes were the deciding factor in Mosby's success. He owed knowledge of places like Difficult Run and Old Bad Road chiefly to an abundance of highly accurate human intelligence. In March of 1863, Mosby opponent Charles F. Taggart of the 2nd Pennsylvania Cavalry diagnosed the situation with good accuracy. Describing a raid against Federal pickets at Herndon Station, Taggart reported that "the enemy were led on by citizens, and entered on foot by a bridle-path in the rear of the post."

Mosby partially corroborated this methodology in his Memoirs. "Recruits came to us from inside the enemy's lines," he wrote in 1917, "and they brought valuable information."

We can start to fill in between the lines of the Mosby story with patterns of behavior built around the twin braid between friendly locals and unlikely terrain that was unsuitable for the standard Napoleonic warfare of the age.

Hugh C. Keen and Horace Mewborn put these relationships most succinctly when they described Mosby's loosely knit, free-wheeling tactics. "Deep ravines, skirted by massive foliage summer and winter, gave him shelter while his knowledge of every road and footpath gives him a fine opportunity to escape with his booty in case of pursuit," they wrote in their definitive history of the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry.

Like any other conflict, Mosby's campaign in Northern Virginia sprouted at the intersection of people and place. Investigating both of these factors provides a unique opportunity to better understand an extraordinary chapter of a much larger conflict in the context of the complex landscapes on which it flowed.

One of the most striking features of topographic maps of Fairfax County is a V-shaped ridge system that carves up the northern and western sections of the county. The leftward leg of the V begins near the Potomac north of Dranesville and follows the modern-day Reston Parkway and West Ox Roads southeast over Ox Hill and across the Little River and Warrenton Turnpikes. The rightward leg can be traced to its origin point at Tyson's Corner. From there, it follows the course of Route 123--the Chain Bridge Road--southwest through Vienna and Oakton before the ridge crest darts west on a path marked by Jermantown Road. South of Route 66, the ridge carries Waples Mill Road. South of the Warrenton Turnpike, the region-defining heights reach their nexus on an wooded hillock between the modern-day Jubilee Christian Center and Gesher Jewish Day School.

The drainage regime that exists in the center of the V is the Difficult Run Basin. Every drop of rain that falls between these convergent ridges will enter the Potomac River via that water course. When considered relative to the heights that flank and define it, Difficult Run is unusually sunken.

The western-most ridge, on which today's West Ox Road and Reston Parkway connect Fair Oaks Mall with Reston Town Center, marks the dividing line between the rolling Virginia Piedmont to the west and the descending, creek-carved bottoms of the Tidewater to the east.

This interface is pre-historic. Landform on either side of the ridge provides vestigial hints at ancient calamities. Some 250-million years ago, this area was the boundary where the North American and African continents collided. Later, when the mega-continent Pangea began to pull apart, the Culpeper Basin west of West Ox Road was the site of a failed mid-ocean rift, the tension forces from which left the region taut and gently terraced.

Difficult Run, by comparison, bears the lasting marks of metamorphism. Continental-scale pressure created a belt of micaceous schist, which is known to weather and erode faster than crystalline soils found in places like Chantilly, Ashburn, Leesburg, and Aldie. The resulting millions of millennia created stark contrasts. West of the V, the land weathered into rolling plains. In the V, a challenging creek strewn with sharp defiles and depressed spaces was established.

Without exaggeration, one could argue that Civil War soldiers who fought and died in the slice of sunken soil between the two ridges of western Fairfax County perished because of unresolved geographic conflicts at the place where North America and Africa collided.

The geology that defined the V also determined the way Federal troops occupied Fairfax County during the Civil War. It should be no surprise that the ridge-lines coincided with concentrations of Federal cavalry. High ground and dry roads offered superior maneuverability and communications.

It was, the Federals assumed, improbable that a large Confederate force could sneak across those well-patrolled ridgeways and attack the Yankee headquarters at Fairfax Court House or Washington, D.C. beyond.

Unfortunately, these calculations did not consider the probably that a gritty insurgency of atomized mounted units would take hold in the bottom lands between the ridges. If they appreciated this risk, they would have taken appropriate steps to mitigate the potential inherent to the feverish maze of trails and roads that were carved across Difficult Run beginning as far as eight thousand years before the Civil War.

In Oakton, Virginia--one of the communities that comprises a bulk of the Upper Difficult Run Basin--a small historical anecdote from the early-20th century shines a light on path-making practices. When the first Oakton High School opened on the ridge-defining Chain Bridge Road, students who lived in the Difficult Run Basin would "walk across the fields all the way to Oakton" despite the presence of abundant roads that carved across established draws up to the ridge crest.

Simply, it was just easier to make a shortcut over hill and dale.

These efforts hint at the permissibility of cutting informal paths. This was probably not a generational anomaly, but a long-standing pattern of human use in an area defined by creeks and hills.

Roads begin as desire paths. These trails of utility are laid out in the mind of their creators and motivated by an urge to connect meaningful or useful places by the shortest, most convenient route. This mindset is a universal that transcends time and culture to embrace collective human endeavor.

Historian Lee Gutheim traced the origin of the name "Potomac" to an Algonquin phrase meaning "where something is brought." What is known today as Northern Virginia was once an in-between place, a commercial hinterland oriented around the river into which Difficult Run pays its tribute.

For thousands of years before John Smith's first European account of the area that became Fairfax County, native peoples of varying tribes utilized the Potomac River as a trade hub. Tool-appropriate stones, food stuffs, and novelties all changed hands here. These resources came from specific places. They were extracted programatically and brought to market via predictable avenues.

The routes that supported these practices represent the first overlay of human trails over the Difficult Run. Patterns cut into the earth in pre-history predicted and influenced events millennia later.

When English colonists began fanning into the western reaches of Fairfax County, their movements and subsequent homesteading efforts were funneled over "ridge roads," or long-held indigenous roads that carried over the spines of prominent highlands.

Predictably, the V of ridges that defines the Difficult Run watershed once served as foundation to two such trails--the Chain Bridge Road and the Reston Parkway/West Ox Road. More than convenient topography incentivized indigenous infrastructure along these routes. Both of these avenues connected trading corridors on the Potomac River with inland lithic deposits.

Near Frying Pan, an alluring vein of greenstone was appealing enough that English settlers mistook it for copper. Off Marbury Road in modern day Oakton, there was a seam of exposed white quartz which early Englishmen also misidentified as flint in a case of mistaken identity that seeded the first name for Oakton: Flint Hill.

One greenstone axe dating as early from 2000BC to 1600 AD has been recovered in the Difficult Run basin. Its lithic origins are unknown. However, the abundance of white quartz and its attendant popularity in regional tool making has a much clearer resonance in local archaeology. An easily-harvested resource with strong trade utility, quartz could be found in a surface seam on a hillside overlooking Difficult Run within a stone's throw of an intersection where two pre-historic ridge roads collided.

Both Hunter Mill Road and Route 123 wind their way from indigenous trade markets along the Potomac directly to the shoulder of Difficult Run, indicating that the region enjoyed a lengthy unrecorded history as a resource extraction zone.

Crucially, the ridge overlooking the watershed is not the only site to resonate with indigenous history.

(In Virginia, archaeological sites are protected. For the purposes of compliance with state and Federal laws, my source work here includes only those sites which former County Archaeologist Michael Johnson and others inserted into public record and were subsequently made available via publicly-accessible historic records. So too, specific place knowledge has been appropriately broadened in compliance with the spirit of the privileging mandate.)

The remains of temporary camps spanning as long as 6000 BC to 1600 AD have been discovered and documented in the area between Jermantown and Waples Mill Elementary as well as the triangle formed by modern Fox Mill, Hunt, and Vale (historic Old Bad Road) Roads with other sites overlooking Little Difficult Run near Stuart Mill Road. Quartz points and other tools were found here in near proximity to the quartz vein in Oakton.

Charting the most direct line between these sites and the nearby lithic deposit that sat on prominent indigenous highways suggests desire-based spatial relationships that navigate the hills and creek bottoms in interesting ways.

These stone-centric relationships are not the only determinants of potential pre-historic path making. The oldest archaeological finds documented in the Upper Difficult Run Basin would have been in use during a period in which nut-producing hardwood was a primary source for indigenous diets. We know from early metes and bounds and later accounts (not to mention the modern place name "Oakton") that mast-rich trees like oak, chestnut, and hickory were plentiful in Difficult Run.

During the span of time in which archaeological records corroborate that indigenous people were using the Upper Difficult Run Basin for resource extraction, an agricultural revolution steadily infiltrated native populations in the area. Hypotheses for the earliest agricultural developments have coalesced around the centrality of floodplains and floods as venue and mechanism for intentional food cultivation. For indigenous groups along the Potomac, the Upper Difficult Run basin and its broad valleys would have offered strong potential for the establishment of agriculture.

Put spatially, there is chronological evidence that spans these dietary paradigms. In a valley that sloughs off from a hillside known to entice native people with lithic resources, it is possible that historic paths ran parallel to creekside agricultural development and integrated with hillside mast forests by paths of least resistance in drainage draws.

Early use patterns dictated by indigenous desire could have spawned a positive feedback loop that rutted significant legacy paths into the erodible micaceous schist soils that comprised the area's bottomlands and hills.

Familiar patterns repeated as colonial settlement encroached upon the Difficult Run Basin. Beginning in 1714, English settlers began to patent large, many-thousand acre tracts that divvied up Difficult Run. A bulk of these lands remained unoccupied until mid-18th century when small tenant farmers began to carve one to two hundred acre farms out of the chief land grants.

Ridge roads like the Chain Bridge, Hunter Mill, and West Ox Road channeled these first farmers into clusters of occupation that centered along the same high and accessible paths their native predecessors developed thousands of years before.

D'Anne Evans' monograph The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1999 chronicles the steady movement of settlement downwards towards Difficult Run on axes like Miller Road and Old Bad Road. In the case of Miller Road, these first settlements spread out on a plateau spaced almost directly between the seam of white quartz on Marbury Road and the known indigenous extraction site across Difficult Run.

Whether existing pathways guided this movement toward the creek bottom is uncertain. What is incontrovertibly true is that creek bottoms offered numerous settlement incentives that rivaled positions on the ridge above. For those arriving too late or too poor to snag prime leases on land sitting adjacent to existing ridge roads, the loose, alluvial soils closer to Difficult Run would have presented a significant advantage for cultivating tobacco, which was used to settle leases, pay taxes, and engage in basic commerce.

As the decades progressed, another set of opportunistic developers established themselves at the lowest, most choked points along Difficult Run. They did so purposefully. There, set amongst high hillsides and narrow valleys, the potential for motive power was best.

Like their native predecessors, millers and their lowland neighbors harnessed the economic potentials of negative topographies. Smaller properties on uneven terrain pushed settlers to develop a convenient network of paths that connected individual farms to milling centers like Fox's, Hawxhurst's, and Hunter's Mills. Life on this Virginia frontier encouraged the conservative expenditure of calories. It's reasonable to assume that bringing raw grain and timber to be milled would likely occur on desire paths that utilized the least challenging terrain. In the case of Difficult Run, these avenues coincided with the creek itself.

Many of the millers were themselves wholesalers who purchased raw product before processing it and moving it to market themselves. The fate of a miller was only as promising as his ability to bring his product to Alexandria--a prominent grain port that achieved regional economic hegemony in the years after tobacco crops plummeted.

So it was that basic microeconomics encouraged a familiar chorus of place patterns. People came to Difficult Run to extract value from the earth. In doing so, they were incentivized to cut paths parallel to the creek and upwards out of the basin to highland roads connecting to trading centers.

Legacy ridge roads and informal desire paths cut between farms and mills did not long suffice to feed the economic and social engines of Northern Virginia.

Political divisions and a changing inventory of court house locations pushed residents of Difficult Run to cut reliable roads to places like Fairfax Court House, Tyson's Corner, and Leesburg. The long-tenured Lawyers Road connecting Hunter Mill Road to West Ox Road north of Vale Road (Old Bad Road) was one such appropriately titled litigious corridor connecting western Fairfax County with an early court house located at today's Tyson's Corner.

The health of markets has always been an important pillar of political activity in these United States. That trend firmly established itself in the country's earliest years when dickering about tariffs, commerce, and central banks was strongly tied in with national identity. The United States was growing and the creation of a viable economy weighed heavily on public representatives and private citizens alike. Great efforts were poured into slotting distant resources into seaboard ports and burgeoning industry. Canals, turnpikes, and railroads connecting the interior with the coast became a chief priority.

In a rigorously researched thesis on road development in Fairfax County, anthropologist Heather Crowl charts the interrelationships between political influence, economic interest, and road development that coalesced in Virginia during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Beginning with a 1705 Road Act that compelled plantation owners to make their properties accessible by road, legislation scaffolded infrastructural developments in the hopes of spurring economic growth. In Fairfax County, plantation owners and Alexandria-based exporters relied on "rolling roads" which pulled private and public interests into the common goal of maintaining avenues for rolling large "hogs heads" of tobacco to shipping warehouses.

Tobacco's days were numbered in Northern Virginia. In its place, wheat and other cereals began to represent the lion's share of GDP as consumers in the West Indies and Europe began to clamor for the bumper crops of grain sewn across the Piedmont and into the Shenandoah Valley.

In 1787, the Virginia legislature backed an act that Alexandria merchants first championed. Both groups sought to charter a turnpike from the Potomac port westwards nearly thirty-five miles to the Little River running through Aldie. Opened in 1806, the road quickly boosted Alexandria's fortunes and shifted road-making practices overnight. By 1816, three turnpikes carried over Difficult Run.

State-mandated regulations like standard fifty foot width, reasonable pitched grades, and macadamized road beds were not universally abided by. The vast, proud highways that came to define maps and enchant Civil War generals soon garnered a reputation for poor quality and seasonal complications owing to sub par drainage and steep hills.

The Commonwealth of Virginia empowered the keepers of these turnpikes to charge a toll every five miles. The Little River Turnpike, for instance, was authorized to charge six cents per horse, twelve-and-a-half cents for a two-wheeled riding carriage, and six cents per draft animal on a cart or wagon. Though these prices eventually went down, the initial sticker shock inspired another important chapter of road genesis.

In many regards, the roads that serviced the mills along Difficult Run were the antithesis to the turnpikes. Largely unregulated, these mill roads served small-scale locales with even more tenuous roadbeds than their well-financed competitor roadways. Where great pains had been taken to chart the turnpikes over high and passable ground, mill roads funneled radial paths ever-downwards to a local minima where elevation was low and water power was high.

Facing mounting costs, travelers in the area surely felt motivated to carve a few tolls off their journey. The resulting culture of "shunpiking" brought attention and traffic to neglected byways that ran roughly parallel to the main highways.

It was in the turnpike era that members of the Fox family began to petition the county government to improve the road connecting Jermantown to the Ox Road by way of Fox Mill and Ox Junction and another road from that latter intersection to Hunter Mill Road. This second route came to be known during the war as Old Bad Road.

Maps from during and before the Civil War regard the Fox Mill Road with a weight that suggests a major thoroughfare. Indeed, this axis enjoyed a heyday in the 1840s and 1850s. The reason feels obvious when you consider that there were two toll booths on the Little River Turnpike between Jermantown and the Fairfax/Loudoun County line. The westernmost toll station sat at the intersection with a north/south road that connected Centreville with Frying Pan to the north. The eastern of the two was found on or near the bridge over Difficult Run, about a mile south of Fox's Upper Mill.

The promise of financial penalty spurred the creation of an alternative road network, one that found experienced riders and freighters ducking north off the Little River Turnpike west of Chantilly. From there, they could travel on a couple of routes, including one that ran past the Frying Pan Meeting House where the Fox family worshipped. At this position, they could turn eastwards on to the Old Ox Road that fed into a legacy ridge road, which eventually brought the shunpiker to Ox Junction--a convergence point on the northern slope of Ox Hill (today's Vale/Waples Mill/West Ox Road intersection).

At this point, a resident could ride Old Bad Road eastwards to the Hunter Mill ridge road, which connected them with Vienna and the Chain Bridge Road to Georgetown, Maryland. Or they could ride past Fox's Mill, over Difficult Run, and into Fairfax Court House without paying two tolls.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the dominant mindset amongst West Pointers schooled in Prussian logistics and Napoleonic strategy was to coopt high ground, well-built roads, and known positions of strength to leverage an area of operations. So it was that Federal cavalry videttes often found themselves stationed on or around the site of the two toll booths that encouraged so many travelers to stray off the Little River Turnpike in the years before the war.

By no coincidence, boys born in the 1830s who spent their adolescence accompanying their parents on errands or wandering through western Fairfax County would have had ample time to integrate alternative roadways into their mental maps before volunteering to fight in Mosby's Rangers in 1863 and 1864.

The dichotomy between turnpikes, ancient high roads, and practical bottom trails created a warren of bridle-paths and subsidiary desire trails that made operating in the forests and thickets of Upper Difficult Run a nightmare for outsiders and a true pleasure for locals.

Mosby's wartime exploits earned him a cold reception in Fairfax Court House after Appomattox. Though he attempted to conduct business as a simple country lawyer, his well-earned reputation as the bogeyman of Fairfax County haunted Mosby's ability to achieve normalcy in the years after the war.

Accordingly, it is interesting to note that the men who Mosby most often referenced as vital guides to his campaign in Northern Virginia are also men who died in the course of the war. Perhaps a lawyerly sense for plausible deniability tempered his words.

It was a new age and John Mosby fought to be a part of it, first as a civil servant of the Federal government he once worked so bitterly to thwart and later as a fixer for railroad magnate Collis Huntington. These were not predictable associations for men who had served under Mosby. Nor was his practiced stance of avoiding reunions of his former unit, the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry.

Mosby broke his own rule in 1895 when he attended a gathering of over one hundred and fifty Mosby Rangers in Alexandria. Virgil Carrington Jones retold a version of Mosby's speech that night, which elicited an outpouring of sadness in his men.

"Modern skepticism," Mosby said, "has destroyed one of the most beautiful creations of Epic ages, the belief that the spirits of dead warriors meet daily in the halls of Valhalla, and there around the festive board recount the deeds they did in the other world. For this evening, at least, let us adopt the ancient superstition, if superstition it be." Then Mosby listed names belonging to his most-cherished dead who perished fighting under him.

"It may seem presumptuous in me, but a man who belonged to my command may be forgiven for thinking that, in that assembly of heroes, when the feast of the wild boar is spread, Smith and Turner, Montjoy and Glasscock, Fox and Whitescarver, and all their comrades, will not be unnoticed in the mighty throng."

The Fox he mentioned was Lieutenant Frank Fox, second eldest son of the Fox milling family and junior lieutenant in Company C of Mosby's Rangers. Frank was mortally wounded during a failed raid into Maryland in 1864. He bears mentioning here, not simply because this son of Fox's Mills died in service to John Mosby and the Confederacy, but because the world in which he was raised and the associations he made in his youth transposed themselves so neatly onto the rolls of Mosby's Cavalry.

On paper, the valleys of Upper Difficult Run were a patchwork of families carving out their own existences. Genealogy tells another story. Fixtures of Fairfax, the kinship networks present in the area in 1860 were a densely interwoven net of cousins and in-laws whose sympathies were definitely Southern.

Frank Fox and his younger brother, Charles Albert, joined their brother-in-law, Jack Barnes, their childhood friend and future cousin-in-law, Albert Wrenn, their immediate neighbor across Difficult Run, Thomas Lee, and a nearby landowner's son, Tom Love, Jr. in an early iteration of John Mosby's Rangers. Frank and his enjoyed intimate knowledge of Squirrel Hill, the home in which he was raised just south of Old Bad Road on today's Lyrac Street.

Just to the north along today's Fox Mill Road, Rangers Thomas Clarke, John Saunders, and James Gunnell left their homes and joined Mosby as a group in mid-1863. They were late to the game. Nearby, where Little Difficult Run creeped upwards to find its headwaters along the Ox Road, the land belonged to the intermarried Thompson and Davis families who sent four sons total to Mosby's Rangers.

Across Difficult Run, Old Bad Road petered off into the woods east of Hunter's Mill Road. There, a pocket of devoted secessionists lent their many sons, husbands, and fathers to John Mosby. Richard Dorsey Warfield, George West Gunnell, William E. Moore, LB and Silas Huntt, and LB Trammell hailed from a block of tracts that bracketed the AL&H railroad east of Hunter's Mill. This land came within feet of the Federal cavalry camp at Vienna and shrouded the lonely patch of rail bed where members of Mosby's Rangers shot the Reverend John D. Read at point blank range in October of 1864.

These men did not live isolated lives. Their professions, their faith, and their friendships brought them into wider spheres. At pre-war knight tournaments, church picnics, and militia musters, they would have met men who lived on the other side of the ridge separating Difficult Run from the flat plains where today's Dulles Airport can be found.

Another member of the Trammell family, Margaret, was married to John Mosby's finest scout, John Underwood, who lived nearer to Frying Pan. Richard Turley, Philip D.C. Lee, George Turberville V, Curg Hutchison, and other various kinfolk controlled major land features, creek bottoms, and countless desire paths that could provide shelter to mounted men seeking to cross West Ox Road and duck into a valley rich in productive paths.

This already robust roster of personnel represents a full geography that doesn't even begin to account for Confederate sympathies or families that had loved ones in regular rebel service. These many families wove into a fabric of support that shielded the movements of John Mosby and sheltered him in place.

Advantageous combinations of people and place provided untold opportunities for the Difficult Run basin and its surrounding environs to be utilized as a temporary camp and maze of interior lines for John Mosby and his men. We have evidence from Federal reports and Confederate accounts that this was the case. Local folk lore has it that Mosby favored hiding out in the spring house at Fox's Mill and used the Squirrel Hill home on Old Bad Road as a headquarters.

Still, this theory and the growing dramatis personae that supports it beg an important question: why?

We take for granted that southerners fought for the Confederacy and northerners went all in for the Union. This is a cherished myth that has grafted itself over the nuanced wounds of a war that was demographically complex. A variety of perspectives--about slavery, economics, the divine, and freedom itself--laid out powerful cross currents of dissent and cooperation that did not always conform to regional reductions.

Sometime in the late-1850s or early-1860s, men who had spent the bulk of their lives in thirteen square miles of the Upper Difficult Run Basin committed themselves to armed revolt against the Federal government. There otherwise bucolic country lifestyle somehow mutated into an ugly bare-knuckle brawl for the nation's soul.

This was a seismic event, a catastrophe of inconceivable proportions. In the horrors that followed secession, we lose touch with the simple fact that years of senseless bloodletting began as individual choices that morphed into a collective movement.

At such a granular level, the cultural and geographic horizonsof this localized American landform provide meaningful answers to vexing "why" questions. In this case, the big "why" puzzles concentrate around two major decisions: why did these men feel compelled to secede and why were they subsequently inspired to wage guerrilla warfare?

Answers to both conundrums run concurrent to questions about the way land was held, used, and perceived in Difficult Run. The landscapes that developed in this basin over many millennia prior to the Civil War informed both the movement towards secession and the formation of guerrilla bands.

Slavery is an obvious explanation and one that demands immediate scrutiny. Especially in a climate of ideological minimalization--both then and now--that finds apologists for the southern cause staunchly denying that chattel slavery, the cornerstone of southern civilization, bore any weight in secession.

The institution of chattel slavery was practiced along Upper Difficult Run. In 1860, there were numerous slaveowners in the basin, including future Mosby Rangers. John Barnes owned two slaves. Frank Fox's stepfather administered a total of five slaves for the Fox family. Their cousins, James and John Fox, owned eight adult slaves between them.

These numbers are modest and consistent. A tax assessment nine years prior reveals similar numbers. The slave population was neither growing nor shrinking in the decade before secession. Nor was it robust enough to suggest serious agricultural output or wealth. West of Difficult Run on grounds occupied by today's Dulles Airport, the family of future Mosby Ranger Alexander Turley kept twenty slaves in 1860 to maintain their spacious plantation. Those numbers indicate a serious stake in the institution of slavery.

More importantly, many prominent Mosby Rangers from Difficult Run, including James N Gunnell, Minor and William Thompson, and the Trammell family, were not slave owners.

If slavery was a factor in secession, it was not a uniform motivator. Nor can the zeal of the coming years be properly attributed to small-scale and inconsistent slave ownership. We must look deeper.

In her memoir, Sarah Summers Clarke basked in the glow of a serene youth spent near the meadows and millponds of Fox's Mills. It was a peaceful, beautiful chapter in her life when family and friends were many and the croak of bullfrogs was the loudest noise in that gentle, cozy valley.

"And then the war came," to borrow from Lincoln, and a confusing season of ruthless violence and loss culminated in a new, more modern world where the cold calculations of an industrial society replaced the intimate fellowship of an antebellum that appeared romantic by comparison.

This is one example of a Confederate Fantasy Past--the nostalgized longing for a lost world transcribing itself into a prose that embellishes the comparative splendor and ease of a time that supposedly died beneath the Yankee heel.

A truer and somewhat uglier reality churns beneath the placid surface of this imagined bygone. Seen in the context of a longitudinal history of Difficult Run, the fire-eating secession that swept through the area was but a last ditch effort to mitigate the consequences of a many-century long extraction bonanza that stripped the land of value, impoverished long-tenured occupants, and encouraged a recolonization by strangers whose very presence was an existential threat to the men who swelled Mosby's ranks.

Historically, sweet stability was not so much the rule of thumb in western Fairfax County. Instead, steadily diminishing returns punctuated with sharp catastrophe was more apropos. With its broken land form and muddy roads, Difficult Run was especially susceptible to disruptions in agricultural markets and other macroeconomic tremors.

Beginning in the mid-1700s, huge land holdings that had been patented decades prior began to divide into smaller tenant farms. Three-lives leases for these properties were negotiated with tobacco established as the preferred currency for rent. The idea was simple: potentially three generations of a family would earn their keep on Difficult Run land by cultivating an endless cycle of tobacco.

The results were famously disappointing. By 1800, the tobacco market collapsed, chiefly due to soil exhaustion. Market pressures encouraged over-planting of a crop that leached nutrients at unprecedented levels. To make matters worse, the abundance of land to the west encouraged early planters to adopt a frontier mentality where a quick exit from a spent farm that produced quick profits was the status quo.

Fox's Mill dates to the end of the tobacco boom at a threshold where the port at Alexandria, its merchant apparatus, and the farms in the surrounding counties pivoted desperately to cereal production. At the onset of the 19th century, war in Europe created a scarcity in grain which producers in Northern Virginia gladly addressed with their own yields. Dozens of mills similar to Fox's sprouted up as the demand for processing wheat for market grew in inverse proportion to the profitability of tobacco.

In the swales and draws of Difficult Run, geography frustrated attempts to dominate local wheat production. Nearby Fauquier, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties became the prime granaries in Virginia. North of the Potomac, western Maryland also began to produce a bumper crop of wheat. Those farmers were economically and infrastructurally linked to Alexandria's great competitor, Baltimore.

Eventually, the two cities embarked on ambitious attempts at turnpike and railroad building designed to bring more rural wheat districts into their respective economic spheres. The outcome was predictable. Difficult Run's importance as a destination plummeted. Investment capital didn't land there, but passed through.

The world was growing and Difficult Run was falling behind. Worse yet, the introduction of grain and its market pressures instilled another cycle of soil exhaustion. Amidst declining production, the arrival of a hessian fly blight that eviscerated wheat crops, and a sudden cash crisis concurrent with the Panic of 1837 familiar rhythms of abandonment encouraged population outflow and debt.

The last element was particularly important. As times toughened and independent farmers went under, a crust of lender elites began to consolidate land and influence. Men like AS Grisgby and Joshua C Gunnell expertly leveraged rare levels of liquidity at the top of a pyramid of seasonal debt. Many farmers in Difficult Run borrowed to plant each year and found themselves summoned before the court to pay off debts.

Other farmers either borrowed or liquidated slaves in attempts to restore their land to productivity via one or many newly popular soil amendment techniques. Loudoun-based efforts to amend played-out soils with gypsum from ground-up limestone and imports of nutrient-rich Peruvian guano were both viable, if expensive, means to restore lands in western Fairfax County.

For citizens whose families traced their lineages back deep into the area's historic roots, the increasingly difficult task of staving off financial oblivion signaled a tremendous diminishment of personal fortune from even a century before. Land patterns in 1860 give a sense of scale to the situation.

Beginning in 1714, land patents in the Difficult Run Basin ranged from a puny 557-acres to a sprawling 4,481 acre spread that was closer in size to the local median. By 1860, land holdings of this scale were enviable luxuries. Prominent (read: wealthy) farmers with holdings along Difficult Run enjoyed parcels between three hundred and six hundred acres apiece. More common were middling farms between fifty and one hundred and fifty acres.

One hundred acres was a size consistent with colonial-era tenant farming standards. Figuring that only a few acres would be under active cultivation at any given time, the hundred acre mark was a long-term subsistence dimension. The fact that secession-era plots in Difficult Run often amounted to barely half of this acreage hints at a drastic drop-off in material prospects.

West of the V-ridge, where the Culpeper Basin offered sprawling flatlands ideal for wheat cultivation beyond Chantilly, the profitable Virginia plantation was alive and well. Slaves, like those owned by the Turley family, tended to monoculture. Products were processed and shipped via turnpike to nearby ports where profits became manufactured goods that added to a sense of luxury and largesse on Fairfax's Piedmont.

In Difficult Run, even as far as a decade before Lincoln's election, times were tough and an already scrappy populace was becoming increasingly hard-scrabble. Worse than diminishing agricultural prospects and shrinking land holdings, a new jolt of competition laid waste to any stability Virginia-born farmers had. The Yankee had arrived.

If the Civil War was a sectional conflict between North and South, then Fairfax County was the razor's edge where those populations interfaced. By the mid-1800s, land in Upstate New York was so expensive that farmers there were incentivized to seek out real estate in the south where cheap, damaged soils meant bargain-barrel prices. A generation of ambitious families from the Empire State's Duchess and Ulster Counties flooded into Fairfax County.

As Patricia Hickin recounted in Fairfax County, Virginia: A History, the demographic shift was stark. Between 1800 and 1840, countywide population fell thirty percent owing to unproductive land. Real estate prices ranging from five to fifteen dollars an acre in Fairfax meant that New Yorkers accustomed to paying between forty and seventy dollars for a similarly sized plot came in droves. Two hundred northern families made the move by 1847 so that one third of the county's adult white males had emigrated from the north by the 1850 census.

The Yankees flourished where their Virginia successors had not. Advanced agricultural practices were common place in New York. So too, observers noted a sharp difference in work ethic between populations accustomed to the use of slave labor (and the annual leasing of slave labor to supplement income, as the Fox family was known to do) and men who were their own labor supply.

A culture war developed on the central axis of Hunter Mill Road. In 1861, those living east of Hunter Mill in Vienna voted overwhelmingly against secession at Lydecker's. West of Hunter Mill Road in the Difficult Run District, residents almost unanimously supported secession at Sangster's Station, Fairfax Court House, and Ross's Store.

Beyond differences in agricultural ability or labor, perceived incongruities in identity fueled divisions. Sally Summers Clarke remembered her new Yankee neighbors as rude and arrogant. Other Yankee accounts contend that the diminished Virginia gentry was lazy and ignorant.

Central to the divide were cultural differences rooted in faith. The New Yorkers were chiefly Quakers. They valued community, mutual aid, and a certain austerity. They also championed abolition. Many of the Virginia-born families along Difficult Run were staunchly Baptist--a faith that relished personal independence, a historically contrary relationship with the state, and a desire to save the souls of their slaves while keeping them in bondage.

Yet another depression and banking crisis in 1857 underscored the long odds and diminishing returns that native Virginians faced in Difficult Run. They were being colonized by New Yorkers they perceived to be sanctimonious. These southerners responded accordingly.

One local woman, who happened to the be the descendent of Jeremiah Moore, the area's favorite Baptist preacher and a nationally famous theologian, told Northern neighbors who read the New York Tribune to "cancel their subscriptions or 'git out'!"

A war of words mutated into something sinister in October of 1859 when radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers occupied the Federal Armory at Harper's Ferry some forty miles to the west. The shock of the raid itself gave way to a glowering rage when native Virginians in Fairfax, many of whom were slave owners or supporters of slavery, ruminated on Brown's intent to foment armed revolt amongst the enslaved.

Slave patrols were instituted at night. Militia companies were formed. Northern emigrants took out ads in the local paper to proclaim their disgust for John Brown's actions. A year later, a man found to have voted for Lincoln was stripped and dipped in printer's ink.

A war of words between wary neighbors paved the way for a storm front of hostilities in which boys born in Difficult Run eagerly sought to sublimate years of tension and repressed frustrations by fighting those they perceived to have been at the root of their misfortunes.

Secessionist citizens of Difficult Run greeted the arrival of the long-anticipated Civil War with an on-rush of support bordering on glee. Yankees fled from the area en masse. Men from the Fox, Gunnell, Barnes, Wrenn, Thompson, Underwood, and Trammell families rushed to enlist in one of two infantry organizations: Company D of the 17th Virginia, known as the Fairfax Rifles, or Company G of the 8th Virginia, Thrift's Rifles.

At the war's onset, when the conflict wasn't anticipated to last beyond one major battle, John Mosby was an anonymous private in a Virginia Cavalry Regiment. Men of Difficult Run in Confederate service were eager and willing to stand in the ranks of linear formations and slug it out with their Yankee counterparts. These summer soldiers knew nothing of war, its horrors, or its chronological scope.

They soon learned.

The 17th Virginia received their nearly bloodless baptism of fire at Blackburn's Ford of Bull Run on July 18, 1861. The 8th Virginia had the distinction of fighting on Henry House Hill at First Manassas three days later and eventually participated in the lop-sided Confederate victory at Balls Bluff later that fall.

Each regiment went into camp within walking distance of Fox's Mill. They enjoyed a quiet winter ignorant of the maelstrom awaiting them with the spring thaw. Both regiments and their compliments of Difficult Run men were destined to figure prominently in the grizzly Peninsula and Seven Days campaigns.

The Fairfax Rifles saw their first serious action at the Battle of Williamsburg, where the regiment lost seventeen killed and forty-seven wounded. They were thrown back into the maw at Seven Pines on May 31. Freshly dressed in new uniforms, the 17th's brigade commander, James Kemper, sent the regiment in a four-wide marching column towards an unseen federal position. Concentrated rifle and artillery fire chewed the men up. Another forty-eight were wounded and eighteen killed.

In April of 1862, the 17th Virginia counted six hundred men in the ranks. No more than two hundred and fifty went into action at Frayser's Farm on July 1, 1862. Undaunted by murderous federal artillery fire, the regiment pushed back Yankee opponents until fresh reinforcements crushed the battle-withered regiment. A further seventeen men were killed and seventy-three wounded.

During the war, a position of honor was accorded to those who bore the first and most brutal toll in battle. That honor was bestowed on the Fairfax Rifles' regiment at Second Manassas. There, boys from Difficult Run surged forward on the killing edge of Longstreet's August 30 assault against Chinn Ridge. Men of the 17th Virginia expended over a hundred rounds apiece and the regiment tallied another fifty-four casualties.

At South Mountain a few short weeks later, another thirteen men from the 17th Virginia fell. On September 17, 1862, along the banks of Antietam Creek, the 17th Virginia fielded fifty-six men at dawn reveille. By nightfall, they had lost thirty-one killed or wounded and ten captured. Seven men remained of the six hundred on the rolls in April--a shell of a unit.

The 8th Virginia did not fare much better in 1862. Joseph Gunnell, a twenty-one year old private from the Difficult Run basin died of typhoid fever in camp at Centreville in February. During the April reorganization of the Confederate Army, Ox Hill resident and founder of Company G, James Thrift, was elected major of the regiment. It was a fine and lethal distinction. Thrift was mortally wounded at the head of his battalion at Seven Pines on May 31, 1862. John Trammell, whose family lived near Old Bad Road, was wounded and captured at Seven Pines as well.

By this point, the regiment was 'covered in glory.' Col. Eppa Hunton, who lost eight dead and forty-five wounded of the two hundred and nineteen men he fielded at Seven Pines, began to refer to the regiment as "The Bloody Eighth."

On June 30th at Frayser's Farm, Samuel Underwood was wounded--one of the twenty six casualties in the Bloody Eighth. Along with the Fairfax Rifles, the men of Thrift's Company stormed Chinn Ridge at Second Manassas. They also fought at South Mountain, where eleven of the thirty-four men in the regiment fell wounded. At Antietam three days later, another eleven of the twenty-two men remaining became casualties, giving the regiment the dubious distinction of taking 50% losses on America's bloodiest day.

The extended kinship groups of the upper Difficult Run basin were represented in the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia until Hatcher's Run in March of 1865 when 2nd Lieutenant John Ratcliff Gunnell of the 8th Virginia was captured. By that point, the bulk of the men from Difficult Run who enlisted in 1861 to stand up and slug it out with the Yankees had either been killed or melted away from the Army of Northern Virginia.

In his celebrated For Cause and Comrades, a study of Civil War soldiers and the abstract forces that motivated them, James McPherson identifies a prominent through-line of camaraderie and honor that laced through Confederate service. For some men from Difficult Run like John Ratcliffe Gunnell, that was surely true. However, the local experience contradicts the idea that honor alone was powerful enough to hold men in the ranks.

Prominent future Mosby Rangers like Frank Fox, Jack Barnes, and Minor Thompson were all at home in Difficult Run by New Year's 1863 when John Mosby arrived. Their experience as proverbial grist for the Confederate cause pushed these men closer to desertion trends identified in Joseph T. Glatthaar's rigorous quantitative investigation of the Army of Northern Virginia.

According to Glatthaar, 15.5% of Lee's army deserted at least once. Farmers, the bulk of those who enlisted from Difficult Run, were the occupation most likely to desert and most likely to stay in service. Soldiers who remained in service were 81% more likely to be slaveholders, which illuminates another important distinction: men from the low and middle classes were drastically more likely to desert than the wealthy were.

We don't know what their motivations were, but it's possible that the honor of raw combat faded in favor of a pragmatic honor associated with protecting one's home. If home and individual liberties were the crux of the movement towards southern independence, then perhaps the presence of Yankee troops in Difficult Run was justification enough to leave the army.

More enticing still, conditions in Difficult Run ripened in the decade before the war so that defense of property and economic self interest were concrete realities for the men who would become Mosby's Rangers.

The heavy woods that jacketed Difficult Run served as ready-made means and motivation for the prosecution of guerrilla warfare. Heavy foliage equalized force incongruities. This enabled loyal Confederates with a pre-existing penchant for fighting Yankees to utilize swift ambush tactics and effective revolvers to sew terror in the psyche of Union occupiers. These trees were available to John Mosby and his men because of specific economic and geographic factors.

A co-evolution of secessionist sentiment, views about stand-up combat, and available landscapes in Upper Difficult Run created the conditions for Mosby and his men to run roughshod over Federal forces there. Before either of these processes can be discussed, it's important to flesh out exactly what the landscape of Difficult Run looked like during the war years.

Common practice for mapmaking during the Civil War found cartographers representing trees only where they were known to be. The 1864 Michler Map, which represents Fox Mill as "burnt," is an excellent example of the attendant distortion when trees are presented only if they have been verified.

Foliage appears to concentrate around known routes, with the hinterlands between rendered as if it was open country. These maps are less accurate representations of ecology and more reliable confirmation that Federal patrols stuck mainly to the roads and knew little of the marginal spaces beyond.

Reconstructing the environment around Difficult Run with total accuracy is a long-lost impossibility. Too much has changed and too little was remembered. Fortunately, a body of tangential puzzle pieces fit together into a composite image of an area that sat in heavy timber. Extant real estate listings, court cases, and the 1870 census agricultural schedule suggest that Upper Difficult Run was rich in hardwood forests.

As early as 1802, a court case between Thomas Fairfax and Morris Fox centered around the unauthorized pillaging of one thousand oaks, one thousand hickories, and one thousand other trees from the north side of Difficult Run.

An 1880 legal case between the Waple Family, who purchased and restored Fox's Mills after the war, and former Mosby Ranger Thomas Lee stemmed from an 1874 complaint pursuant to an 1867 land deal involving twelve and a half acres of land "being in timber" on Difficult Run.

In 1856, Fairfax real estate speculator MC Klein listed four hundred and forty acres on Difficult Run just north of Fox's Lower Mill. The description is typical for the area and the era. "These lands are undulating, with sufficient bottom for meadows, well watered, having several never failing springs of pure water thereon, and bounded on the west by Difficult Run on which there are Merchant Saw-Mills of convenient access; also abundantly supplied with timber of original growth."

Ten years later, the adjoining parcel was advertised for sale as "heavily timbered...no portion of it is cleared." Property once owned by George Fox "near Fox's old mill" went to market in 1878 with the promise that it was "well-wooded."

The MC Klein sale in 1856 occurred within months of several similar listings "in the vicinity of Frying Pan" involving near identical language that assured potential buyers of thick old growth timber on plots as large as eight hundred acres.

In 1881, the Whited Tract, a sprawling six hundred and fifty three acre plot wedged between Lawyers Road and Difficult Run was similarly advertised as being "in heavy timber." These post-war sales occurred at an interval of time in which it would not have been possible to cultivate heavy, harvestable timber had the area not been wooded during the war.

Further granularity can be gleaned from the 1870 census, in which local land owners reported improved land acreage vs woodland. The census was by no means rigorous, but values paired to known parcels present a portrait of dense forest. James Fox's 262-acre property on the heights west of Difficult Run overlooking the mill complex were unusually clear with a mere 23% of the property in timber. Nearby, farms belonging to George Cooke and David Thompson had fifty acres of improved land and six hundred and thirty acres of woodland between them. Closer to the lower mill and delving deeper towards Old Bad Road, 50/50 ratios were common place.

Interestingly, John Fox's 541-acre spread that sat just across Difficult Run from the MC Klein property that was "abundantly supplied with timber of original growth" was split with two hundred and seventy five acres of improved land to two hundred and sixty six acres of woodland in 1870. Two hundred and sixty six acres of forest is a lot of land in which to hide. In fact, the entire area offered bountiful woods that were available to known partisans at any time.

Ecology in this case was only partly natural. These timber belts were fashioned from accident into a designed economic scheme. In a region of Virginia famous for natural resource depletion between, during, and after the war, abundant old growth timber and subsequent regrowth groves have semantic meaning.

Tobacco cultivation incentivized early farmers to deforest and plant fresh cleared lands with cash crops. Remaining original growth in the latter decades of the 19th century suggests less desirable terrain. These timber groves potentially sat on hillsides that were difficult to clear, still more difficult to plant and tend, of unsuitable soil, or bathed in irregular light that made them less advantageous for profitable tobacco agriculture.

Lands that were cleared and used to grow either tobacco or corn would have suffered from soil exhaustion. The practice of large-scale abandonment is well-documented. This would have invited sixty years of natural succession, in which local trees and bushes reestablished themselves in the basin.

We have a good idea what this regrowth looked like, because today's forests along Difficult Run are the results of a similar process. From 1875 to 1890, the area north of Old Bad Road was known as a productive charcoaling region. Former Mosby Ranger Jim Gunnell as well as a man named "Charcoal" Thompson (who sported the same surname as another prominent Ranger from Difficult Run) made good money supplying the District of Columbia with charcoal. In 1964, County Planner Rosser Payne attributed the lack of large trees north of Old Bad Road to this practice.

This knowledge is valuable in two ways. First, charcoaling follows major timbering operations. A boom in production of charcoal in the decades after the war also hints at the fact that there was first a major post-war timber boom. That boom would have required existing woodlands to supply a prolonged charcoaling operation. Second, the interval between the tobacco collapse in roughly 1800 to the Civil War and the time from when Rosser Payne pronounced that there were no large trees north of modern-day Vale Road because of charcoal production until today are roughly the same.

Today's Oaktonians are shrouded in heavy oak and soaring tulip poplar. Due to blight, the chestnut that once figured so prominently in the area has disappeared. Nonetheless, we have a sense of the growth potential for previously cultivated lands that fallowed from 1800 until the Civil War. Difficult Run was very likely densely timbered.

Given the importance that timber played in real estate advertisements before and after the Civil War, it's intriguing that timber did not appear as often or with such zeal in listings from the same area in decades prior. An 1813 notice for the sale of Fox's Mill and adjoining lands known to have been in timber at the time makes no mention of wood stock. Eight years later, the Fox family attempted to liquidate eight hundred acres of land including areas that surely included old growth stock. Again, timber did not merit mention in the real estate listing.

The explanation is economic. In the early 1800s when farming in Fairfax was primarily geared towards grain wholesaling, wood and timber represented a hindrance and a possible labor cost obstacle to realizing profits on land. By the 1850s, this mentality changed drastically.

An 1857 article in the Alexandria Gazette heralded the export of three thousand tons of ship timber to England from a belt of land just north of Lawyers Road in the Difficult Run Basin. Set astride the Alexandria, Loudoun, and Hampshire Railroad, the intensely profitable enterprise found a solution to English shipbuilding demand and a shortage of appropriate trees in Great Britain itself.

This large-scale operation was the brainchild of a disgraced Scottish wool magnate named Benjamin Thornton who acquired almost nine thousand acres of old growth forest near Difficult Run in the early 1850s. Precious white oak disappeared from the local landscape at great gain to Thornton via two saw mills sporting twenty seven perpendicular saws.

For the first time in Fairfax County, timber became a primary instrument of wealth. With the arrival of railroad infrastructure and markets developing internationally and along the eastern seaboard, previously depressed landscapes that were less than suitable for monoculture grain cultivation were suddenly prized.

This emerging industry dovetailed with two liquidity crises, one in 1837 and another in 1857. Currency was both unreliable and scarce in Difficult Run. Enterprising southerners sought refuge, as they always had, in chattel. Commonly equated with slaves, the category is a much larger basket of personal property that can be easily traded or converted into currency. In the South, chattel slaves were a popular investment because of their liquidity. A slave could be quickly sold to raise funds or pay off debts. In Virginia law, the act of cutting a tree immediately converted it into chattel, or a liquid financial instrument.

The local popularity of timber as an investment is evidenced by the amount of well-wooded Difficult Run-adjacent land that prominent Fairfax lenders came to own before the war. In 1859, the 440-acre property rich in original growth timber that MC Klein listed was purchased by James Love, son of Fairfax's most wealthy resident and land investor, Thomas Love. He made the acquisition thanks largely to co-investor and equally prolific real estate speculator Lewis D. Means.

Similarly, Joshua C Gunnell, lender extraordinaire and middle man for the transaction that netted Benjamin Thornton his timber belt, purchased three hundred acres of land on the eastern slope of Ox Hill--a parcel we know to be heavily wooded by its description in Confederate after-action reports from the Battle of Chantilly in 1862.

Timber speculation was not just a rich man's game. Any boom requires producers and processors who stand to make small fortunes by bringing the resource through harvest to market. Not coincidentally, most of the men from Difficult Run who served John Mosby had a connection to the timber industry.

Frank Fox and his younger brother Charles Albert Fox were direct beneficiaries of their family's saw mill. Their brother-in-law, Jack Barnes, was not only tied to the Fox Mill fortune, but owned his own flourishing sawmill on Pope's Head Run. Minor Thompson, whose family had a substantial chunk of land on Little Difficult Run, was a carpenter. Most notable of all was John Underwood who married into the Trammell family of Old Bad Road. Underwood's knowledge of unknown paths was critical to John Mosby's success in the area. He earned his place know-how as a woodsman serving the timber operations in the area.

These men knew the woods and the winding paths that bored unlikely corridors through heavy timber. More to the point, these men drew sustenance from these woods and any idea of economic well-being or financial independence they harbored for the post-war era would have been innately tied into the sustenance of Difficult Run's timber.

Interestingly enough, the December 1862 JEB Stuart raid into Fairfax County encountered a detail of "contrabands," or freed slaves, felling timber in the neighborhood of Vienna. This raid famously culminated with a movement towards Hunter's Mill that found the Confederate cavalry maneuvering westwards to Frying Pan on a route that likely took them through the timber country of Difficult Run via Lawyer's Road. There they found valuable timber resources being harvested at the hands of African-Americans. One day later, JEB Stuart authorized John Mosby to begin his independent command in Fairfax County.

In Ruin Nation, Megan Kate Nelson estimates that the combined wood consumption for both Confederate and Federal forces in any given year of the Civil War amounted to 400,000 acres of timber. Accounts of desolation in Fairfax County as early in the conflict as Spring of 1862 suggest that the well-trafficked highways and hamlets near Difficult Run were readily picked apart and consumed to sate these same requirements.

By March of 1863, it behooved men in the Upper Difficult Run Basin to make the woods that fed their fortunes feel like a scary place to operate. If an army was allowed to comfortably occupy the area, locals risked losing the very assets they relied upon to survive.

This is a rational solution to the motivation question. More irrational and likely more compelling is the ever-important intangible of any war: hate.

The war sprouted from a national eruption of spite. Near Fox's Mill, categorical mistrust bordering on lethal fixation grafted on to an emigrant geography that concentrated itself on an axis concurrent with the line assumed by Federal pickets two years later. This was formative distaste.

It's worth considering that the bloodbath baptism experienced by local men of the 17th and 8th Virginia Infantry Regiments in 1862 instilled something deeper than disgust. Having stood shoulder to shoulder with friends and neighbors and marched towards a wall of soft lead projectiles only to be slaughtered wholesale again and again, the experience of conventional war could have potentially shaped its survivors into seasoned and willing killers.

Desertion from the Confederate army can not be equated with forgiveness for the Yankee. Weary of Napoleonic conflict, it's easy to see the appeal of irregular warfare conducted at night with six-shot pistols in sharp ambushes against a categorical enemy that would be hated in this region well into the mid-20th century.

The South lost. That truth can sometimes disappear in the retelling of the Civil War. Nevertheless, it happened. Stuart died. Lee capitulated. Mosby finally surrendered only to become friends with Ulysses S. Grant and a booster for the despised Republican Party.

The places recalcitrant southerners called home suffered greatly in the final accounting of the war. Southern critic W.J. Cash referred to the ensuing blight on the landscape as "the Frontier the Yankee made."

In a chapter of the official Fairfax County History entitled "Old Virginia Done With," Patricia Hickin described the post-war landscape as a "prairie." Select and unspecified areas within the county, however, were "relatively untouched." Given what we know about timber along Difficult Run, the Old Bad Road area likely fell into the latter category.

Still, the years immediately following the Civil War were a period rife with crime and alcoholism in Fairfax County that didn't stable off until local agriculture stumbled back to its feet around 1870.

Everyone in Fairfax--northern or southern--lost something during the war. In the long run, prominent Yankees lost much less. Because they remained loyal to the Union, these Fairfax residents could petition the Southern Claims Commission to be reimbursed for property the Federal Army destroyed during the war.

Several prominent farmers whose lands abutted the Difficult Run Basin enjoyed substantial restitution. William Ansley, Josiah Bowman, Squire Millard, and Richard Bastow all received liquidity with which to reestablish themselves. With cash in hand, owners of farms that were denuded of trees instantiated the next big cash bonanza in Fairfax County: dairy.

The war reconfigured Fairfax from a minor role in the story of Alexandria to a supporting place in the economic epic of Washington, D.C. The raw, largely deforested lands around Difficult Run were ready and primed for herds of cattle that could supply the District with their daily dairy needs via train and eventually electric trolley.

There was a problem. One that was appeared frequently in the Southern Claims Commission records. Dairy herds required the one thing that had been almost completely eradicated in Fairfax County during the war: fencing. William Ansley described the loss of 5000 yards of fencing. Josiah Bowman claimed 10,000 lost rail posts along with 38,334 rail stakes, 3,254 cords of wood, and 2000 shingles. Squire Millard was short 1,467 rails, 2,705 cords of wood, a 30'x40' barn, and a dwelling. Most, if not all, of these lost articles burned in Federal picket fires or cooked Yankee rations.

When the Waple family reconstituted the Fox Mill shortly after the war, the timber-rich Difficult Run basin was primed to mill oak, poplar, chestnut, and hickory into finished lumber that could be leveraged by ambitious dairy farmers into products that the Federal apparatus in nearby Washington would pay a premium to consume. Later, when the cast off timber was converted into charcoal for the same market, Difficult Run and its roster of former Mosby Rangers achieved a weird paradox. They reintegrated their local economy and hence their prospects with the hated Yankee across the Potomac.

Most interesting is the case of John Fox, whose nearly six hundred acre farm sat directly across Difficult Run from the MC Klein holdings at a place where previous indigenous trails once connected to the stone deposits at Flint Hill and 1930's-era aerial surveys indicated well-used paths crossing the creek.

One year after the war, John Fox's daughter, Lucretia Fox, married Lieutenant Albert Wrenn, a local boy who was one of Mosby's best fighters and an officer in a segment of Mosby's Rangers known to have crossed Federal lines at Flint Hill to raid deep into Accotink Creek.

In 1860, John Fox reported twenty eight head of cattle and fifty eight sheep or hogs on his tax filings. Six years later--one measly year removed from a war that gutted the local economy and stripped much of Fairfax County of any wealth--John Fox had fifteen head of cattle and twenty five sheep or hogs. What loss he took during the war years was paltry, almost as if he enjoyed special protection by an armed band that he fed from time to time. Maybe even one young officer in particular who loved his daughter and made every excuse he could to stop by.

Amidst the dense suburban overcoding of modern-day Fairfax County, Difficult Run stands apart. The roads retain their curved and undulating form. Trees crowd out the sky and the many tributaries of Difficult Run are laced with trails and overgrown with brush and bramble.

Given a choice to join the newly upgraded county sewer system in 1966, residents of the area rejected a ballot measure. When asked to account for their decision, they credited the neighborhood's sense of independence. Subsequent waste water regulations in the town of Oakton require new homes to sit on no less than an acre of land to accommodate septic tanks and leach fields. The result is a suburb where residents maintain respectful distance from one another.

Today, winding roads not far removed from their Civil War-era predecessors cut between patches of dense bramble and lace over oak-strewn hills into muddy flood plains. Patterned use over many millennia has fostered a place that holds secrets well.

Case in point: this obscure, but compelling story, which has evaded retelling for one hundred and sixty years.

John Mosby & Old Bad Road is the fruit of nearly four years of concentrated research on landform, land use, economics, sociology, and war. A raft of valuable primary sources ranging from the collections of the Virginia Room of the Fairfax Library and the Historic Records Center at the Fairfax Court House to agricultural censuses, genealogies, Virginia chancery archives, geological surveys, cartographic records, and local folk lore have enriched this story. Great care has been given to document the work in such a way that others could duplicate and hopefully improve the research in coming years. There are limits to narrative. In the interest of time and space, citations have been excluded here, but provided rigorously on the parent site: https://oldbadroad.com.