Rose Hill Manor

Rose Hill was originally built for Martin Nalle (1777-1843) in the first decades of the 19th century. The exact dates are unclear, as are the histories of the enslaved people who lived, worked, and died at this site. Records indicate that skilled workers, likely including enslaved workers and free men, used construction techniques that include the hand-split sub-plaster lathework. These techniques suggest that the structure was completed before the 1820s. Oral histories from the family recollect that the “Old Hall” was the first structure to be erected around 1810. The Nalle family lived in this one-story, one-room, frame building while the main house was constructed over a period of about seven years. The mansion house is a two-and-a-half frame structure with a back wing and dormer windows and has two large chimneys on either end. It has a full basement with subterranean masonry walls of local stone and brick believed to have been fired on-site and composed of local red clay quarried somewhere on adjacent property.

Culpeper County occupied a strategic location between the Rappahannock River to the north and the Rapidan River to the south. Through the county ran the important Orange Alexandria railroad (now Southern Railroad). The countryside along this rail line was witness to numerous armed engagements throughout the Civil War. The two most important battles fought in Culpeper County were Cedar Mountain (August 1862), and Brandy Station (June 1863) which was the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America.

 The County was occupied by armies of both the North and the South at various times. It was headquarters to Union General John Pope in 1862, then Robert E. Lee in 1863, just prior to the Gettysburg Campaign, and finally in the winter of 1863-1864 was headquarters to General George Meade and later Ulysses S. Grant, when over 100,000 Union troops made it their winter encampment prior to the Wilderness Campaign in the spring of 1864.

It was during these years that Rose Hill and the Ashby family was witness to many of these events. Battle damage is today still visible in the attic and front porch of the main house. It is unclear exactly when this damage occurred, but a significant series of Cavalry engagements took place in the vicinity on September 13th, 1863. During the action Confederate forces of the 11th Virginia Cavalry commanded by Col. Lunsford Lomax and supported by Col. R. L. T. Beall’s 9th Virginia Cavalry, were pushed back west by Union forces under General Judson Kilpatrick and George Armstrong Custer.

In 1938 newspaper article about Rose Hill suggests that the house was shelled by a Federal battery hoping to get at Confederate soldiers hidden in a “holly planting” just to the west of the main house. Shortly thereafter Rose Hill was made the winter Headquarters of the Third Division U.S Cavalry under Brig. General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick. Stories passed down through the years recount some of the experiences of the occupation.

Before the Union troops arrived, the family was worried that they would be stripped of food and so hid numerous hams underneath a large dining room table, which they then covered with wooden slats. The family was forced to move into the basement while General Kilpatrick and his staff requisitioned the more comfortable upper stories of the house. Many times the family heard the soldiers complain of how heavy “that table” was as they moved it around never realizing what was hidden underneath.

It was during this time at Rose Hill that plans were made for General Kilpatrick and his second in command Col. Ulrich Dahlgren to launch a Cavalry raid on Richmond. The ambitious and ill-fated plan was to free the Union prisoners of war impounded on Belle Isle in the James River and in Libby Prison at Richmond. They also planned to possibly capture and kill members of the Confederate government of Jefferson Davis.

During that time of occupation and planning, many Washington notables including Senators and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin were entertained as guests of General Kilpatrick at Rose Hill. There is an amusing account of some of the escapades surrounding the social activities at Rose Hill which are detailed in Virgil Carrington Jones book Eight Hours Before Richmond.

It was later in the War after the occupying Union forces had vacated the home that a young Confederate of the 9th Virginia Cavalry rode up to the house to ask for food. Young Mary Jane Ashby had just baked some fresh biscuits and had dumped them “hot” into Thomas Rosser Covington’s haversack. He later returned after the War to woo and marry Miss. Ashby in 1868 and raise a family at Rose Hill. It can be noted that Col. Dahlgren’s part of the ill-fated Richmond raid met with disaster when he was killed near King William Court House ambushed by the 9th Virginia Cavalry.

Andrews, D. M. (2001). Rose Hill: An Historic Structures Report.

Giesen, J. C. (2020, October). The View from Rose Hill: Environmental, Architectural, and Cultural Recovery on a Piedmont Landscape. In Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 19-38). University of Minnesota Press.

Rose hill Park. (n.d.). Welcome to the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley | The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. https://www.themsv.org/visit/rose-hill

Virginia Museum of History . Accessed July 1st 2021. https://virginiahistory.org/about-us.