Walking the Battlefield at Big Bethel | Virginia, 1861

Walking the Battlefield at Big Bethel | Virginia, 1861

This month, I crossed Big Bethel off my Civil War history bucket list. There isn’t much of the small battlefield near Hampton, Virginia left today. A Civil War Trails sign describing the Battle of Big Bethel Much of it has been swallowed by the Big Bethel Reservoir and the sprawl of Langley Air Force Base. But on June 10, 1861 – just two months after Fort Sumter – United States and Confederate forces clashed here in what became one of the first …