"...and some have greatness thrust upon them."

This afternoon in 1865, the American Civil War ended with General Robert E. Lee's surrender to General U.S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

The event was a considerable vexation to Wilmer McLean, a 50 year-old wholesale grocer who'd bought the property two years earlier. McLean and his family previously lived on a farm in Manassas, Virginia, where, in July 1861, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard requisitioned McLean's home as his headquarters. Union batteries promptly began shelling the house, dropping one cannon ball down the kitchen fireplace.

Having relocated 120 miles south, McLean might well have thought himself beyond the war's reach, but Union and Confederate forces closed in on the Appomattox area in the last gasps of the war. McLean's house (below, in 1865) was chosen to host the surrender of General Lee. "The war began in my dining room and ended in my parlor," McLean later commented.