An enormous cache of recently discovered Civil War letters and other 19th century documents has been donated to Virginia Tech by a descendant of a Confederate general who later played a key role in founding the land-grant university.
The officer was Gen. Gabriel Colvin Wharton, a native of Culpeper County and a graduate of Virginia Military Institute. In 1863 — in the middle of the Civil War — Wharton married Anne “Nannie” Radford, whose family helped found the independent city of the same name.
Gabriel Colvin Wharton, 1824-1906, was born in Culpeper County and was educated at Virginia Military Institute. During the Civil War he fought for the Confederacy and in 1863 rose to the rank of general. Among the battles in which he fought was the 1863 Battle of New Market. He survived the war and later, as a Virginia lawmaker, helped found Virginia Tech.
Wharton surrendered at Lynchburg on June 21, 1865. After the war, the couple built Radford’s Glencoe Mansion, which is now a history museum. And Wharton won election to Virginia’s legislature.
In that position he played a key role in establishing Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, as a land-grant institution in 1872. (Earlier, the Blacksburg campus had been a Methodist boys school founded in 1852.)
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The donor is the Whartons’ great-great-granddaughter, Sue H. Bell, of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
In all, Bell has donated 1,233 documents to the university, with more to come. The items were buried in steamer trunks, foot lockers and boxes that Wharton left in Glencoe Mansion when he died in 1906.
Sue H. Bell, great-great-granddaughter of Confederate Gen. Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne “Nannie” Radford Wharton. Prior to the Civil War, Anne Radford Wharton’s family helped found the city of Radford.
“This is really an important collection for Virginia Tech,” said Aaron Purcell, director of Special Collections and University Archives.
One of the amazing things about the discovery is, it was never supposed to see the light of day, Purcell noted. In fact, near the end of his life, Gabriel Wharton “put a note on (the cache) that read: ‘Please burn,’ ” Purcell told me.
“This kind of complete collection — 1,200 items and letters that snap-shotted the Civil War period, is amazing,” Purcell added. “This is going to be a showpiece, top of the list certainly, for Civil War collectors.”
The donation was announced Saturday, during the university’s — Bell is in town for that.
Anne "Nannie" Radford Wharton, wife of Confederate Gen. Gabriel C. Wharton, with their only child, William Radford Wharton. A trove of Wharton historical documents was recently donated to Virginia Tech by the general's great- great- granddaughter, Sue Bell.
The university’s Special Collections and University Archives will catalog and preserve the donated material to ensure it’s accessible to students, researchers and history enthusiasts. Some of the documents will be digitized and available for perusal online.
Bell, and her brother, and their uncle, and their father and their grandfather are all Virginia Tech grads. That’s one reason why the Wharton collection is now at Virginia Tech.
The other reason is, “Wharton fought hard as a legislator to have Virginia Tech established as a land-grant college,” after Virginia was readmitted to the union, Bell said.
Saturday night, she and retired Tech professor William C. “Jack” Davis, a noted Civil War historian, gave a presentation titled “Gabe and Nanny – The Love Letters of a Confederate General and his Wife.”
In 2022, Sue Bell and William D. Davis, a retired Virginia Tech professor and Civil War historian, published “The Whartons’ War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865.” It was based on 500 letter between the couple, which are part of 1,233 documents Bell has donated to the University.
It was based on a 2022 book that Davis and Bell co-authored,
The 463-page book examines 500 letters between the couple over a two-year period following their marriage.
“All the papers were up in the attic of the house, which is now the Glencoe Museum,” Bell told me.
After the family sold Glencoe in the early 1980s, Bell’s mother moved to Winter Park in central Florida and took the unexamined boxes with her. She stored them in her two-car garage, Bell said.
The boxes, trunks and footlockers were stacked “floor to ceiling,” Bell added. “They took up the entire front wall. They were not cared for; they were forgotten about.”
When Bell asked her mom about the items, her mother replied: “Oh, those are all just family papers from Radford.”
Sue Bell, Gen. Gabriel Wharton’s great-great-granddaughter, discovered the historical treasures left by her ancestor in stacked boxes and trunks in the garage of her mother’s home in Florida in 2012. It took Bell seven to eight years to go through all the materials, which she has donated to Virginia Tech.
Bell added: “She didn’t want to throw them out, but she hadn’t read them, either, in 30 years. In 2012, I started to go through them.”
That’s when Bell realized she’d hit a historical jackpot.
“Literally, one of the first boxes I opened — they were not dated or organized — about one-third of the way down, was a stack of Civil War letters that were sewn together with a needle and thread.”
Letters weren’t the only things in those boxes, Bell added. She also found newspapers from 1900; playing cards; clothing’ hairbrushes; purses; Confederate currency (in $1 and $5 denominations) and Confederate war bonds with unredeemed interest coupons still attached.
She discovered signed orders of the day from Gens. Jubal Early and John C. Breckinridge, both of whom Wharton fought alongside, and documents reflecting Confederate roll calls of troops and sick calls.
“It took me seven or eight years to go through all the stuff,” Bell told me.
Partly, that’s because Bell decided to experience the letters like her great-great grandmother had. For example, if a letter was dated Jan. 10, 1864, Bell read it on Jan. 10, 2018, and later letters on their corresponding dates, too.
That forced Bell to live with the uncertainty her ancestors faced back during the Civil War, when letters were the chief means of communication, and they usually arrived days or weeks after they’d been sent.
Among the letters between Wharton and his wife, some explicitly detailed Confederate troop movements. Interception of those could have spelled disaster for the Confederacy, Bell said.
But not everything was related to the Civil War. Among the documents she discovered were a 1783 land grant of 46 acres to the Radford family; other deeds dating in the early 1800s; and an account of Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., from a friend in 1840, when it was a relatively new institution.
Many of the letters are humdrum matters between a husband and wife, and weren’t meant for anyone else to see.
One of the missives to his Nannie describes Wharton’s costs of boarding in Richmond. His hotel charged $2.50 for Wharton (including meals) and an additional $1.50 to board Wharton’s horse and slave-servant, Bell said.
“As a whole, (the cache) provides insight into the life of people in Southwest Virginia in the 1800s,” Bell said. She called it “a picture of history that hasn’t been painted in memoirs and official documents.”
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Some of the documents describe hair-raising episodes in American history. One was the December 1859 hanging of abolitionist John Brown, who was found guilty of treason against the commonwealth of Virginia for inciting a slave rebellion at Harper’s Ferry the previous October. It was a key precis to the Civil War.
Still other letters recount battlefield tragedies. In one, Wharton breaks the news to Nannie that her brother had been shot and wounded. A later letter noted Col. John Taylor Radford had died of his injuries.
One of some 500 letters exchanged between Confederate Gen. Gabriel C. Wharton and his wife, Anne "Nannie" Radford Wharton from 1863 to 1865, while he was away from their home in Radford, fighting. In this letter, the general informs his wife that her brother, Col. John Taylor Radford, was shot in battle. Radford later died from his wounds.
And some of the letters Bell unearthed were written long before or long after the war.
One is “the earliest known letter” from future Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill, Bell said. Hill, who died in the Third Battle of Petersburg in April 1965, was a close boyhood pal of Wharton’s from Culpeper.
Like Gen. Robert E. Lee, Hill attended West Point before the Civil War. While there, he wrote his old friend encouraging Wharton to join him. But Wharton attended VMI instead, earning a degree as a mining engineer.
One of the post-war letters is from then-Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes, Bell told me. Hayes had fought for the Union against Wharton in the Civil War’s early years, and wrote Wharton requesting a photo.
“I’m collecting photos of those I fought with and against,” the future U.S. president wrote in the letter, Bell said.
Other letters were from fellow Confederates decades after the war had ended.
“In the early 1890s, they were starting to write their memoirs,” Bell said. “But their memories were fading.”
They wrote Wharton seeking to clarify battle details, such as “Okay, I’m thinking about the Battle of New Market — where were you standing when this happened?” Bell said.
