Brentmoor: The Gray Ghost's House

The Italian Villa-style house on the western edge of Warrenton has had no shortage of notable occupants, but one name overshadows the rest. John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla leader whom Union soldiers called the Gray Ghost, bought this house in eighteen seventy-five and made it his postwar home. He had earned the name in the worst possible way for his enemies , by striking from nowhere and vanishing just as fast.

Mosby's Forty-Third Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry, known as Mosby's Rangers, operated through Fauquier and Loudoun Counties throughout the war in a way that defied conventional military logic. With a force that rarely exceeded a few hundred men, he disrupted Union supply lines, captured prisoners, and burned wagon trains deep behind Union lines. He would rally his men from a local farmhouse, execute a raid at night or at dawn, and disperse back into the civilian population before Federal cavalry could respond. Union General Winfield Scott Hancock put a bounty on his head. Mosby kept riding.

The original house here, then called the Spilman-Mosby House, was built in eighteen fifty-nine by a local judge and designed in the Italianate style that architect Andrew Jackson Downing had popularized in his eighteen fifty book on country architecture. James Keith, who served in the elite Black Horse Cavalry raised from Fauquier County before the war, acquired it in eighteen sixty-nine, and Mosby bought it from Keith six years later.

Mosby himself became something of a historical paradox in his later years. He voted Republican, supported Ulysses Grant, and befriended African American political figures , positions that made him a target of contempt among former Confederate circles. He served as a United States consul in Hong Kong under President Hayes, then practiced law in California. He died in nineteen sixteen, having outlived nearly everyone who had fought beside him or against him. A small museum in his memory once operated in the house, in the county where his legend was made.