The Griffith Family

William H. Griffith, owned of a small tract of land along the Jerusalem Plank Road in 1861. The land had changed hands several times and by the time Griffith bought it, a house valued at $700 stood on the property. Griffith worked to grow the small plantation and owned four slaves. The Griffith property fell behind Confederate lines during the siege and became the site of the Battle of the Crater, which his twelve-year-old son Timothy watched from the road in front of his neighbor’s house.

War's Arrival

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Although the Battle of the Crater wreaked havoc on the land, after the war William Griffith continued to demonstrate ingenuity and a desire for growth. It is not known what his former slaves did post-war.

Instead of filling in the hole left by explosion, the Griffiths made a considerable profit by charging admission to see the Crater and relics from the battle. Signs advertising the site sprang up along the road, and they even built a refreshment stand and sidewalks to guide visitors out to the Crater.

Twenty-year-old Timothy Griffith ran the business after his father’s death in 1872. He lived in a post-war two-story frame house located about twenty yards away from the Crater, and he continued to grow crops like corn and peanuts in the nearby fields. By this time, nature had started to reclaim the land around the battle site. In 1881, one visitor stated, “The crater now looks like an abandoned reservoir, of uneven banks and irregular bottom, overgrown with clumps of briars and bushes.” However, the depressions in the earth still were impressive enough that it “looks as if a herd of wild boars with hundred-horse-power snouts had rooted them out,” so visitors continued to flock to “Crater Farm,” as the Griffith property quickly became known.

When the family sold their land in the early twentieth century, the Crater Battlefield Association continued to maintain the Crater as a tourist attraction and converted the surrounding farmland into a golf course. When the National Park Service acquired the property in 1936, it began working to restore the area to its Civil War appearance. The Griffith family’s entrepreneurship was a unique reaction to the siege and helps reveal the diverse ways in which Petersburg residents reconstructed their lives.