"Every tree, stump, and fence has disappeared? What was once verdant is now a wasteland of dust and dirt."
- John Haley, 17th Maine Infantry January 26, 1865
The gentle depression in front of you is the only vestige of the Josiah Jordon House. The house was dismantled by Union troops during the Siege of Petersburg.
War came to the Jordon farm in late 1862, when Confederate engineer Charles Dimmock laid out ten miles of defenses to protect Petersburg. Battery 5 of the "Dimmock Line" stood only yards from the Jordon House.
When Union and Confederate armies swarmed over this area in 1864, dozens of farmers like Jordan were uprooted, their homes damaged or destroyed, their woodlots cut, and their fields ravaged. The landscape sill bears the scars.