“Strolling about Culpeper while peering from beneath an old straw hat as he jotted notes in a leather journal, the stooped, bewhiskered Quaker must have seemed an odd figure to the town’s citizens and the Northern army’s occupying soldiers. Not yet famous as one of America’s great poets, the forty-five year old Walt Whitman arrived in Culpeper in January 1864 to volunteer as a nurse in the Army of the Potomac’s sprawling field hospitals. “
And despite the devastation the war wrought upon the county, Whitman penned that Culpeper “must be one of the pleasantest towns in Virginia.” He added, “Even now…all broken down…it has the remains of much beauty.” Gazing upon the distant Blue Ridge “with some gray splashes of snow yet visible,” Whitman found the scenery “spread on the most generous scale, and the sights…have been varied and picturesque beyond description.” And although his section was at war with the South, Whitman noted that he had “seen a good deal of the Southern people—know them well, love them well, would not misjudge them.”
