Appomattox Court House

The war ended in a parlor chosen almost by accident. On April 9, 1865, with 95,000 soldiers converging on a village most residents had fled, Lee's aide Charles Marshall asked Wilmer McLean for a meeting place — rejected McLean's empty building, accepted his house. Lee arrived at one o'clock in his finest uniform; Grant came half an hour later in mud-spattered field dress, having ridden twenty miles around Lee's army, his headache gone at the reading of Lee's note. Ninety minutes in the McLean parlor wrote the terms: officers keep their sidearms, the men keep their horses, everyone goes home.

The famous symmetry was real — Wilmer McLean had moved from a farm on the Bull Run battlefield, where the war's first great battle had shelled his kitchen in 1861, to Appomattox specifically for safety. The war found him again at its end; he is supposed to have said it began in his front yard and ended in his front parlor. In the yard behind the house, nine enslaved people belonging to the McLean household became free while the generals talked.

The village and the house had their own afterlives — the courthouse burned in 1892 and the county seat moved; McLean defaulted and the 'Surrender House' went to auction in 1869; a veteran dismantled it in 1893 intending to rebuild it in Washington, went bankrupt, and left the bricks in a pile for fifty years. The Park Service reconstructed it in 1949 on the original foundation with the surviving bricks flanking the door — the village restored as the stage set where the war's most consequential hour and a half happened.

Appomattox Court House is the archive's surrender file — the village where Grant and Lee met for ninety minutes in Wilmer McLean's parlor on April 9, 1865, the parlor reconstructed brick by salvaged brick.