Lord Cornwallis' Table

Civil War Liberation at Ravensworth Plantation

Here’s a mystery for you.

My late father once told me that one of the Crown Point troopers (”Yankee raiders” Co. H., 5th New York Vol. Cavalry/Essex County) “liberated”the desk on which Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War (October 19, 1781).

The desk was brought back to Crown Point in ~1865 and was painted black (to disguise its origins?)

I very much doubted it, but the perp might have been Col. John Hammond or Maj. Elmer J. Barker.

My father suggested Sotheby’s auctioned off the table in the 1920s.

I recently discovered a 1927 ad in the NYTimes about the Jane Teller Estate in Locust Valley, Long island, that seems to fit the story. The trooper was apparently a Major at the time, the desk had belonged to FitzHugh Lee of Ravensworth Plantation in nearby Annandale, VA (now a housing development of the same name).

The desk itself bore a brass plaque to the effect that Lord Cornwallis had given the desk in gratitude for Col. Fitzhugh’s hospitality to Cornwallis after the 1781 surrender. FitzHugh Lee had apparently inherited the table through a family connection with Fitzhugh.

Between December 1862 and April 1863, Co. H, 5th NYVC was stationed near Chantilly and Annandale (very close to Fitzhugh Lee’s plantation). Hammond, the commanding officer, was likely not to have been promoted from Major to Colonel yet and may have been a Major at the time of the “liberation”.

Ad says the table was sold by the California granddaughter of the Union Major.

It remains only to narrow the field of suspects by seeing which officer had granddaughters, and when they died.

Naturally, I’d be curious as to the whereabouts of the said Cornwallis campaign desk at present.

Anyhow...