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OC) a TETTÉT Stee ETTE Tesz et Dae VAMES: REV ÉR |\PPARTARLON BELT = —— = —a —————— —_ — pensed from his "gyarden" to the khaki boys of Camp Lee as they came and went over the pike while training for overseas service. Just before Petersburg is a stone marker put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy. This marks the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee from June to September, 1864, at Violet Banks, the old estate of John Shore. ‘The plantation has gone and a modern subdivision has taken its place, but a quaint facade of the interesting old house still remains, the rear portion of sixteen rooms having been shot away. It will well repay the tourist to detour a bit and see the remains of the house and the beautiful trees which enframe it. | John Shore, it is said, had a passion for all ornamental plants. He used shrubs and flowering trees in great variety for the embellishment of his grounds. Years after, the grounds and garden supplied family and friends with specimens for ornamenting their new driveways and gardens in many parts of Virginia—flowering locusts, mimosa, horse-chestnut, hawthorns, crepe-myrtle, magnolias (grandiflora, glauca, acuminata), acacia (yellow, pink and white), and every variety of fruit tree then obtainable. [wo torch-like hollys stand on either side of the house. It is said that a suitor came a courting one of the Mistresses Shore; from far away he came on horseback with a switch from a tree in his hand as a whip. ‘This switch he stuck in the ground and it grew and grew into a tremendous magnolia acuminata. Under its spreading branches General Lee had his tent, and a little child brought him each day baskets of fresh vegetables from her mother's garden. She remembers yet his lifting her in his arms to gather one of the pale yellow blossoms of this great tree. Following a road, still flanked with marvelous old oaks, down the hillside and around the river banks studded in spring with millions of violets, we cross the Pocahontas bridge, which leads over the Appomattox to Petersburg. We go through the town to Camp Lee, now silent, shabby and dilapidated, but so recently the scene of bugle calls and intense activity; thence to Hopewell, the city of [55]
