It was a pleasant spring day in May as my daughter Becca and I drove through the small town of Danbury on our way to Hanging Rock State Park. In Danbury, the county seat of Stokes County, we happened upon a scenic historic district and a marker telling us that Stoneman’s Cavalry had come through this way in the waning days of the Civil War. I was excited by this news, just as I had been when my daughter Katy and I came across a similar marker in Boone (see Wintry Watauga, May, 2014). I believed that Seth Freeman, my daughters’ great-great-great grandfather fought with Stoneman which makes Stoneman’s travels of special interest to me. Standing near the marker and Moody’s Tavern where Stoneman was housed, I let myself be carried away with images of Seth Freeman, a young man in his mid-twenties, walking these same streets more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

We like to think of history as a straightforward timeline, where right and wrong are readily apparent. But history is nothing more than the story of human beings who came before us and experience should have taught us by now that the stories of human beings are complicated and messy! When I first began looking into the life of my husband’s ancestor, Seth Freeman, a young Madison County farmer at the start of the Civil War, I assumed Seth fought for the Confederacy. Much to my surprise, I found that he fought with the Union. No sooner had I jumped to the conclusion that he was a principled hero standing up against slavery than Seth’s grandson (my husband’s grandfather) told me Seth had not wanted to fight for either side. Instead, he hid out in a cave for some time, attempting to escape having to serve all. Even later I discovered Seth had been charged with desertion from the Union forces he’d eventually signed with and later still, I found papers that indicated that the desertion charge had been rescinded.

Whew! Most of us probably have stories like Seth’s, filled with twists and turns. Maybe it’s the anxiety of life’s ambiguities that leads us to cling so fiercely to what we believe to be true, even when we’re faced with clear evidence to the contrary. I was reminded of this when I returned home from Stokes County and began reading up on Stoneman’s Cavalry. For years I’ve thought of Seth whenever I heard the line about Stoneman’s cavalry in The Band’s song, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. As I read though, I came upon the befuddling realization that Seth Freeman didn’t ride with Stoneman’s Cavalry! Instead, he was part of another notorious-to-Confederates group known as Kirk’s Raiders. Somewhere along the line, I had confused the two groups and put Seth with the wrong outfit. Sheepishly, I realized my Watauga County post of 2014 was based on an error on my part.

In our current frightening era of American history, it seems especially important to correct and own our mistakes. Even if we’ve joined a chorus of people loudly singing praises of the emperor’s new clothes, for example, we need to take a second look and allow ourselves to admit when we see the emperor is irrefutably naked.

Stokes County is in the Appalachian foothills, with roads as full of twists and turns as Seth Freeman’s Civil War years. Various bends on our winding route brought us panoramic views, moments of humor, and sites where history was made, along with the always-necessary reminder to keep our hearts and minds humble and open to correcting false assumptions and learning something new.

May 23, 2025 – County #63 – Stokes