Chatham Manor

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Chatham Manor was the 1771 Georgian style home of William Fitzhugh overlooking the Rappahannock River in the U.S. state of Virginia. In 1805, a number of Fitzhugh's slaves rebelled, overpowering and whipping his overseer and four others. An armed posse put down the rebellion and punished those involved. One black man was executed, two died while trying to escape, and two others were deported, perhaps to a slave colony in the Caribbean. Many founders of the United States of America, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, visited Fitzhugh at this home.

The manor served as a Union headquarters and hospital during the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln met with General Irvin McDowell in April, 1862. According to the National Park Service, this visit gives Chatham the distinction of being just one of three houses visited by both Lincoln and Washington (the other two are Mount Vernon and Berkeley Plantation). In the winter of 1862, Clara Barton and Walt Whitman attended wounded there after General Ambrose Burnside's campaign in the area. The following winter, Dorothea Dix, the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War, operated a soup kitchen in the house. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker has also been associated with serving the wounded at Chatham. Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor, the only woman from the Civil War to be so recognized for her meritorious service to the wounded during several battles. When the law for the Medal of Honor changed to restrict the medal to combat veterans, she refused to return the medal.

In the Twentieth Century, Dwight David Eisenhower and George C. Marshall both attended a meeting at Chatham.

The manor is located downstream from Falmouth, Virginia in Stafford County, opposite the historic district of Fredericksburg. It is administered by the National Park Service as part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial National Military Park and now serves as park headquarters.