Hello friends and welcome, so glad you're here and joining me for the final episode

in our series, Secrets of the Civil War.

Wilmer McClain stood in the front parlor of his home in the village of Appomattox Courthouse

for Jinnia, and watched as the Union soldiers around him took his tables, chairs, and dozens

of other household items to keep as souvenirs.

They wanted to remember the historic event that they had just experienced.

But for Wilmer, it was a moment of deja vu.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

Four years earlier, the first Battle of Manassas, technically the first major Battle of the

Civil War, had been fought on Wilmer McClain's farm in Prince William County, Virginia,

outside of Washington, DC.

Wilmer was not especially keen about being so close to the action a cannonball had literally

dropped through his kitchen fireplace during meal time.

Nope, he must have that I am too old for this, he was nearing 50, so he moved his family

about 130 miles south to Appomattox County, Virginia.

It was a small community and safer, he guessed, way too out of the way from where the war

action would be happening.

Four years, he got four years of peace, and then on April 9th in 1865, the Civil War

officially concluded in his parlor when General Robert E. Lee finalized the surrender papers

to General Eulissie's S. Grant.

The Virginian wholesale grocer put it best when he said, the war began in my front yard

and ended in my front parlor.

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