Battle of Lynchburg tour guide, 86, wows visitors

LYNCHBURG -- Ed Bearss is 86, but you'd swear he was 175.

When he talks about the Civil War, it's in the voice of someone who has been there, who has heard the whine of the Minié balls passing overhead, eaten the wormy food, tromped for days on Virginia dirt roads.

"That's what makes him so popular," said Greg Starbuck, executive director of historic Sandusky, as Bearss led nearly 20 history buffs on a recent tour of several Battle of Lynchburg sites. "He really puts you there."

Yet it's more than just descriptions of battlefields and battle formations. Bearss (pronounced "Barse") is a font of obscure but fascinating information. He talks about Civil War generals not in tones of awe but from the perspective of a foot soldier who sees these men as often flawed.

These true stories spill out in a gruff but compelling cadence that steps down hard on the key words. How descriptive is Bearss? One of his favorite tour groups when he was a park ranger at Vicksburg was the Louisiana School for the Blind -- they "saw" exactly what he wanted them to see.

Of course, the Marine Corps veteran from Montana has been there, in a sense. His left arm was permanently disabled by Japanese machine-gun fire on the Pacific island of New Britain in 1944 -- that and other injuries put him in a hospital for 26 months. He may not have faced death in combat at the Wilderness or Cold Harbor, but he knows that the emotions swirling within a soldier haven't changed since the first combatants attacked each other with clubs.

On the other hand, every violent interaction between armies is also unique, and Bearss had obviously done his homework on the Battle of Lynchburg. At the first stop on the tour, standing in front of Sandusky as golden leaves wafted down behind him in the sunshine, Bearss spoke for an hour straight without notes and without pause, setting the scene.

Among other things, he told the group that David Hunter, the Union general who attacked Lynchburg in June 1864, probably dyed his beard and wore a toupee. That Benjamin Dupont, a Union artillery commander, later helped pass a reparations bill in Congress so that Virginia Military Institute -- largely burned by Hunter -- could be rebuilt. That Gen. Francis T. Nicholls, the Confederate officer in charge of Lynchburg until Jubal Early arrived, had lost a leg, an arm and one eye and was later elected governor of Louisiana on the slogan "I'm only half a man, but I'm still more of a man than my opponent."

Bearss retired as chief historian for the National Park Service in 1994, but that hasn't slowed him down -- he still leads as many as 200 tours a year.

"He does it, I think, because it keeps him going," Starbuck said.

In addition to Sandusky, the tour stopped at Quaker Memorial Presbyterian Church (where the then-deserted Quaker Meeting House was a Confederate artillery emplacement 145 years ago), Fort Early and several cemeteries where principles in the battle are buried.

"Next to Richmond and Petersburg, Lynchburg was probably the most important city in Virginia during the war," he said.

As he walked from the Quaker cemetery to the parking lot, he stopped and pointed to the west. "See where the skyline is, over that last ridge?" he asked. "That's where the Confederates would have first seen the Union troops approaching, and fired on them."

Where his finger was pointing was the intersection of Timberlake and Leesville roads -- and for a moment, the stoplights and road signs and buildings all fell away under the spell of the past.

It was almost like being there.

Darrell Laurent is a staff writer for the News & Advance of Lynchburg.