Hallowed highway: from Gettysburg to Monticello, a 175-mile thoroughfare leads through a rich concentration of national history.(DESTINATION AMERICA)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-MAY-06

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"HOW DO I GET to Ball's Bluff--the Civil War site?" I ask a docent at the visitors' center in Leesburg, Virginia. "Oh, it's easy," she replies with a wave of her hand. "You just drive past all the housing until you can't go any farther."

Leesburg, until the late 1980s a sleepy village some 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., has nearly tripled in population--to 36,000--since 1990. I park at the end of a street called Battlefield Parkway, lined with gated communities, and continue on foot down a small dirt track. The trail peters out at a wooded hillside known as the Bluff, site of a little-known but crucial battle. Here, in October 1861, Union troops approached a high bank overlooking the Potomac and stumbled upon a Confederate contingent, 1,709 men strong. Rebel soldiers slaughtered the Union force as they fled over the cliff edge; the corpses, floating downriver to Washington, shocked the North, which had anticipated a short, decisive war.

At Ball's Bluff, less than half a mile from suburbia, the path leads under a canopy of maples near the spot where Union soldiers met their deaths. I sit beneath the trees, the woods around me so quiet I can hear--well before I see--a fawn in the underbrush.

Throughout the mid-Atlantic, places freighted with the nation's history--from legendary sites such as southern...

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