Historic Preservation

Welcome to Ben Lomond Historic Site, a site managed by the Prince William County Office of Historic Preservation. We appreciate you coming to visit us today! A few notes as your tour begins: There is no food or drink, except water, inside the buildings. Please feel free to interact with the spaces and take pictures. If you have any questions or would like any additional information, please let a guide know. Ben Lomond Historic Site has over 200 years of history that can be explored in the 6-acre site and in four historic buildings, all of which date to around 1832: main house, slave quarters, smokehouse, and dairy.  Restrooms and the Museum Store are located in the white annex to the main house at the top of the ramp.

STOP 1: IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE—FROM CANCER PLANTATION TO BEN LOMOND
Benjamin Tasker Chinn inherited Cancer Plantation in 1830. He was the grandson of Robert “Councillor” Carter III. Chinn built the house in 1832 using skilled enslaved labor and locally quarried fieldstone. Once complete, stucco covered the exterior walls. Chinn built the house in the Federal style of architecture, which was prominent throughout the United States at the time of the house’s construction.
Chinn, a bachelor, married Edmonia Carter in 1838. She changed the name of the home to Ben Lomond which loosely translates in Scottish Gaelic to “beacon mountain.” Historically, the house sat on a prominent hilltop. Here, the Chinns raised hundreds of Merino sheep and grew typical Virginia crops while raising their family. 

STOP 2: SLAVE QUARTERS
Built in the 1830s to house the enslaved community at Ben Lomond, this building constructed from the same field stone as the main house. While many slave quarters in the antebellum South were constructed of wood, many slave quarters in Northern Virginia were made from stone.

The building is divided into two rooms for the enslaved community that lived here. The cook likely lived above the kitchen while enslaved house servants slept on crude beds in the main house. 

Agricultural laborers worked sun-up to sun-down six days each week. Enslaved men and women typically had Sundays off. When not in the fields working, this building was used not only as a house but also as a community space for enslaved workers from nearby farms visiting family and friends here. Outside the building, many of the enslaved laborers tended to a small garden that provided fresh vegetables to supplement their meager allowance of food and a chance to sell or trade their produce for money to add to their clothing allowance.

By 1861, this building no longer housed slaves. In 1980, the building was moved here from its original location east of the house to save it from demolition.

STOP 3: CENTRAL PASSAGE OF THE MAIN HOUSE
In the 1850s, the Chinns relocated their family about one mile from here but they continued to own Ben Lomond. They leased it to the Pringles, a family of Scottish immigrants, in 1855. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Andrew Pringle, Sr. and his two sons, Andrew, Jr., and Thomas, lived in the house.

The war’s first major battle occurred one mile north of here on July 21 ,1861, the Battle of First Bull Run or First Manassas. Confederate troops marched past here on the way to the battle. During the day, Confederate surgeons told the Pringles that their house would be used as a hospital. Safe distance from the battlefield and its location along a road used by the Confederate army ensured the house’s transformation into a hospital.

By nightfall, a thunderstorm forced the team of surgeons and hospital stewards to move the hospital’s operations inside the house. Wounded soldiers filled every space of the building except for the upstairs bedroom where the Pringle family stayed. For the next 35 days, wounded and sick Confederate soldiers remained in the Pringle House Hospital.

STOP 4: DINING ROOM/OPERATING ROOM
Surgeons transformed the dining room into the operating room and a makeshift pharmacy. The dining room table became the operating table, and a surgeon’s kit is on display. Items of particular interest include tourniquets, a trephine, bone saws, thread and horsehair often used to close wounds, and anesthesia such as ether and chloroform. Scalpels and a hooklike item called a tenaculum tied up veins and arteries during the surgical process. 

The Minie balls on the edge of the table marked a vast improvement over the old round ball musket loads of antebellum weapons and increased the gruesome nature of battlefield wounds. An estimated 250 men were treated for gunshot and shrapnel wounds here at Pringle House Hospital. Five thousand men were killed, wounded, missing, or captured during the Battle of First Manassas. 

The coat resting on the desk chair is a reproduction of that worn by Surgeon Isaac S. Tanner of Shepherdstown, Virginia (today West Virginia). Tanner was one of the doctors stationed here in July 1861. Despite 15 years of prior medical service, Tanner, like many surgeons present at the Battle of First Manassas, had likely never treated gunshot wounds. The small pieces of paper on top of the desk are copies of actual records made for soldiers treated at this hospital.

Items on the sideboard near the desk represent those found in a Civil War era pharmacy. You can see a pill making device, a stethoscope, and different medicines.  Most medicines in this era were alcohol or opioid based.

STOP 5: PARLOR/RECOVERY ROOM

On July 21, 1861 Lt. Col. William Fitzhugh Lee of the 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment was struck in the breast with an artillery shell fragment.  He was brought here to Pringle House Hospital to receive care and recover.  Lee’s wife Lily Parran Lee traveled from Shepherdstown to attend to her husband. Despite her best efforts and those of the attending physicians, Lee scummed to his wounds and gangrene eight days after the battle.

In the spring of 1862, Federal troops occupied the Pringle House. When they learned that the Pringles aided the Confederate army the previous year, they retaliated by breaking up furniture and writing on the walls. Two sections of the original graffiti have been left exposed for you to see. The upper panel shows the signature of “J.E. Mooney, Co. A, 1st Regt. PRC.”  There is a picture of Company A on one of the stretchers. James Mooney is likely the one circled in red. William Wallace Cranston, a Medal of Honor recipient from the 66th Ohio Infantry, signed his name on the walls of the upstairs landing.

STOP 6: UPSTAIRS LANDING

Civilian Room

Many civilians made their way to Ben Lomond to try and help the wounded. Dr. Thomas Page travelled over fifty miles to care for his mortally wounded son, Richard. Reverend Charles Andrews stayed to comfort and write letters for injured men from his hometown, including William Fitzhugh Lee. Women tried to provide aid as well, but prior to the Civil War it was improper for women to nurse in a public space, and supposedly having a delicate nature, they were excluded from hospital activities. Early in the war, the only women allowed inside a hospital were those with family, like Lily Lee, who refused to leave her husband.

Disease Room

Disease and infection were major problems in field hospitals. Crowded in unsanitary, temporary camps and exposed to the elements, two-thirds of the over 650,000 Civil War fatalities came from diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, measles, or malaria. With little knowledge of germ theory, even professional hospital personnel struggled to contain outbreaks. Only able to treat symptoms, medical staff administered medicines, like mercury chloride, that were more harmful than helpful. While Ben Lomond was used to treat wounds in July 1861, it was periodically used as a hospital to treat diseases until March 1862.

STOP 7: PRINGLE BEDROOM

The Pringle family decided to stay rather than abandon their home when it was taken over as a hospital. However, they were forced to move as many of their possessions as they could into one bedroom to make room for converting the house into a hospital. This was the bedroom they stayed in.

Why would anyone choose to stay in such miserable conditions as a makeshift hospital in the middle of the summer? Conditions were abysmal. It was hot. The smell of gangrene ran rampant throughout the house. Simply walking through the house required stepping over wounded who were placed wherever there was space. Once the house was full, more wounded were left outside. They most likely remained as a matter of circumstance as well as to protect their remaining assets. 

As British citizens, the Pringles were entitled to reparations for damages under the 1872 “Mixed Commission on American And British Claims.” They claimed $1,261.20 worth of damages incurred by occupying Union troops. The damages included furniture being broken apart for firewood and livestock and food confiscated. Ultimately, because they could not provide vouchers for everything they said they lost and because they could not prove themselves as being strictly loyal during the conflict, the Pringles only received about $550 worth of reparations.