Like the majority of New Englanders, Chaplain Alonzo Quint found much to be desired in what the people of Virginia called "towns." They never measured up to their equivalents in the more prosperous North. Quint seemed to take pleasure in discribing the often ramshackle places he visited with the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, drawing a corollary between the physical features of the villages and the people who inhabited them.

Here are some of his observations:

Winchester, VA: "dirty and shiftless."

School house on Maryland Heights: "a respectable farmer in New England furnishes better accomodations for his pigs."

Darnestown, MD: "Most of the houses are of the log-and-mud style...The few houses of more than usual pretentsion would hardly pass muster in a New England village, and the poorer ones were sadly dilapidated. 'These buildings seem out of repair' it was said one day to a native. 'Wal, yes,' was the reply. 'Why don't the people repair them?' 'Wal, we kinder take things easy and when they tumble down we build up new ones'...Two or three houses were enclosed with fences and had a few flowers in front; but as a whole, the village of one street was of the Rip Van Winkle order."

Strasburg, VA: "the dirtiest, meanest town of all the shiftless villages in the valley."

Gum Springs, VA: "a shoddy village of 9 houses, a spring (whether 'gum' or not I don't know), and a church."

Annandale, VA:"called a 'dale' doubtless from its being situated on an elevated plain, just as the South calls itself 'chivalric' because it whips women and sells babies. Annandale was made up of half a dozen houses; it now comprises one or two houses, and the balance in chimneys."

Stafford Court House, VA: "Digging into the ground, one finds a few feet down, vast quantities of shells. Does that imply that the land was once under the water? If so, it was a mistake, humanly speaking, ever to have raised this miserable tract to daylight."

Forestville, VA: "a mean and dirty village."

New Market, VA: "for a description of this place turn to any of my allusions to Southern towns."

Shelbyville, TN: "a very pretty, well built, enterprising town, strongly Union."

OTHER ARCHITECTURAL OBSERVATIONS

Hagerstown, MD

"...a queer sort of town & looks as if it had been brought over from France to be Americanized but the attempt had been given up after a short trial." [Richard Cary]

Area around Martinsburg, VA

"This is the meantes looking country I ever ever heard of, a great many of the houses are no better than log houses." [Henry N. Comey]

Harper's Ferry, VA

"Everything about the place looks as if a set of barbarians had been through here." [Robert G. Shaw]

"Those who have been abroad say that this town reminds them strongly of foreign towns by its narrow, dark streets, dirty, steep alleyways, peculiar stone houses, etc." [Charles Morse]

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