Chapter 13
It was an old city, some parts of it dating back to the Civil War, or older—Centre Hill Mansion, for instance, had served as a hospital when General Lee was stationed nearby, and every Halloween it ran ghost tours through rooms decorated with antebellum furnishings as if frozen in time. Historical markers lined the streets and alleys, Battersea, and Pocahontas Basin,and Lafayette’s Headquarters, their silver signs reminders of what the city used to be.
Now it sat in ruin, Blandford Cemetery around the corner from a strip of smut shops, the battlefields paved over, the past roped off into small segments clearly marked for the tourists and hemmed in on all sides by drugstores, gas stations, fast food joints, broken down or abandoned factories, and subsidized housing.