Receiving and Wayside Hospital
My Dear People,
On
a recent Sunday after
church, Gena, Nelson, and I drove out to Hanover
County, to pay a visit to and share a
meal with some parishioners who live on the Pamunkey River. I will
never forget the afternoon. We had a lovely time, and I saw my first
Indigo Bunting and my first Summer Tanager.
It was bright and clear and, in a word, felt like peace on earth. All
of which made the following all the more
poignant:
As we were riding along, taking
in the bucolic scenery, I suddenly saw a road sign identifying a crossroads
ahead, "Old Church," and I knew where I was. Or, more accurately, as of that moment,
totally unexpectedly, I was somewhere that, until then, had only been a place
name in a family story.
Robert Adams was his name and
he had stopped, hurriedly, to help a friend who was hurt, only then himself to
be shot through the abdomen. His friend
died. Robert lived. Thanks, no doubt, to a Federal surgeon, who
must have stitched him up. From there he
went, eventually, to Washington, D.C., to the Old Capitol Prison, and from there to a
prison in Elmira, New York.
When, eight and a half months later, he was exchanged, he was brought to
Richmond, and
admitted to an army hospital in Shockoe Bottom.
He was my great-great
grandfather. Another great-great
grandfather of mine had been in that same hospital a few months earlier, having
been shot through the right arm on the Darbytown Road.
The hospital these two
great-great grandfathers of mine spent time in, the Receiving and Wayside Hospital, was on none other than Grace Street.
Of course, everything is on
Grace Street.
Your
brother in Christ,
Wallace+
