Long Bridge
Crossing the Chickahominy
In a well-coordinated movement, Grant’s army crept away from the grim experience at Cold Harbor and marched rapidly for the Chickahominy River crossings.
A Union soldier writing home from Long Bridge on June 13, 1864, was not impressed: “I think I never saw a more horrible looking stream than this…slow, sluggish, black, villainously treacherous looking.” In all, he concluded, Long Bridge offered “one of the most gloomy and unpleasant scenes we have yet met with.”
Half of the army crossed one-half mile south of here on June 13. The other two corps used Jones’s Bridge downstream. Once across the Chickahominy, only the James stood between the Union army and the Confederate defenses at Petersburg.
Marker is on Roxbury Road 0.4 miles south of Pocahontas Trail (U.S. 60), on the left when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
