We moved to Walnut Hills in the fall of 1963. It was in town but there were no real hills. Someone may have had a walnut tree, I don’t remember any. I do remember pines and sycamores and sweet gums. The latter’s hard spikey fruit served as make-believe hand grenades in the battles we reenacted.
Walnut Hills was in the city of Petersburg, but still partly country when we moved there. I attended first grade at Walnut Hills Elementary school and would occasionally walk home from the school to our house on Bishop Street. Petersburg’s suburbs were expanding outward. While a nice working class neighborhood, we were not as rich as those who lived in the big homes along Sycamore Street. Yet it was a good place to be a kid.
Behind our house was an alley; across it was another row of houses and the last street which was named for my brother Warren. Behind those houses, woods stretched all the way back to Carter Road This road’s name came from one of the battles during the Siege of Petersburg which lasted for nine months from the summer of 1864 to the spring of 1865. On Saturdays, my friends and I played Johnny Reb in these woods, covering the same terrain our ancestors fought over a hundred years earlier during that final bloody year of that rich folk war.
At the second Crater Road turn off into our subdivision sat a genuine civil war fort operated as a private museum. Folks who attended church with us owned it, but I don’t remember their name. However, I’ll never forget the name of the fort. Known as Fort Hell, its real name was Fort Sedgwick. When my uncle Frank came to visit, he asked me why they called it Fort Hell. “’cause they really gave the Yankees hell,” I proudly proclaimed. I only vaguely remember saying that, and maybe I don’t really remember saying it at all. Instead, I remember it because Frank kept reminding me of it right up to the time of his death some 15 years ago.
I later learned that it wasn’t a Southern fort after all, but a part of the Union siege line and at the time was the largest inland artillery battery in the country. In the summer of ’66, after three years of roaming those woods, we moved back to North Carolina. We moved just the nick of time. As we left, workers busied themselves cutting down trees and laying out roads through the woods. The people who owned Fort Hell sold it to developers. Soon, the bomb proofed shelters dug by hand a 100 years earlier faced down bulldozers leaving the ground. The place became a strip mall. By the time we left, the woods in Walnut Hills ceased to exist.
Kids and young families filled Walnut Hills in the mid-1960s. I enjoyed my time there. It was a great place to spend a few years, and it still haunts me. Just a month or so ago, in Ronald White’s biography of Josiah Lawrence Chamberlain, I learned his severe wound occurred along the Jerusalem Road (I think that’s now Crater Road) near Fort Hell.
Check out other posts about my time in Petersburg
What a fantastic memory, Jeff! Growing up on a literal Civil War battleground sounds like a kid’s dream. I love your proud answer to Uncle Frank about “giving the Yankees hell”—even if history later corrected you, it makes for a priceless family story. Sad to hear the bulldozers got the woods in the end, but thanks for sharing this glimpse into Walnut Hills!
lAs the song goes, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”
Interesting memories. Sorry to hear that whole landscape was so altered but glad you got out before the worst of it.
The strip malls haven’t stopped being built as the whole of the Southland seems to be one big one.