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Before the Beer Garden: The Civil War Story Under Your Bar Stool

May 22
7 min read

If you are hanging out enjoying a warm evening at Stratford Garden, the new beer garden and restaurant on West Broad Street in the suburban City of Falls Church Virginia, it's easy to lose yourself in the vibe: a cold local brew, the hum of conversation, the comfort of a neighborhood finding its footing again. Yet not so long ago, about where you are sitting, men were dragged from their beds at gunpoint.


This block anchored by Stratford Garden was once the west end of a small, war-worn village. It was here, between Union-held Washington DC and the Confederate guerrilla country beyond, that John Daniel Read and his daughter Betsy undertook a quiet brave act of defiance and paid a terrible price.



John D. Read
John D. Read

John D. Read was born on February 6, 1814, in Lisbon, Connecticut, into a family of prominent Baptist ministers. The family moved first to Oswego, New York, and then, in the 1850s, John and his brothers Caleb and Hiram and his sister Miranda packed up and headed south, settling in Fairfax County, Virginia.


They were not drifters. They were institution builders. Within a few years of arriving, the Read family had helped found Columbia Baptist Church, the first Baptist congregation just outside of Falls Church, with John's younger brother Hiram serving as its first pastor.


John was never ordained. But faith without action was not something he had much patience for. When the civil war came he stepped forward without hesitation. The U.S. Christian Commission gave men like Read an organized outlet for that conviction. Founded in 1861 by the YMCA in the immediate aftermath of Bull Run, the Commission sent thousands of civilian volunteers south to Union lines, distributing Bibles, medical supplies, and providing literacy instruction to Black soldiers and freed people. When the Commission called for volunteers to teach near the front lines, Read joined in immediately.


In early 1862, Read arrived in Falls Church, then a scarred and hollowed out village caught between Union and Confederate strongholds: abandoned farms, makeshift camps, Union patrols, and three small African American enclaves where freed people sought safety. Read was soon joined by his twenty-year-old daughter Betsy. One of those enclaves, known as The Hill, became the center of their work.


The school did not begin with a building or a charter. It began with need. John and Betsy opened a Sabbath school in a private home on The Hill, a house whose owner allowed her rooms to be used for teaching. Word spread quickly. It soon became a weekday school. Adults came in the evenings after laboring through the day. Children came whenever chores allowed. The room filled beyond capacity.


Betsy taught reading and writing while John added scripture readings, arithmetic, and moral instruction shaped by his long abolitionist work. Supplies were scarce. Books were shared and passed around. But the school survived on improvisation and sheer determination.

 

Lieutenant Colonel John Singleton Mosby
Lieutenant Colonel John Singleton Mosby

As the war dragged on, the atmosphere grew increasingly dangerous. Falls Church was a front-line war border village in every sense: Union-controlled during daylight, watched and infiltrated by Confederate sympathizers and a band of Confederate soldiers known as Mosby's Rangers after dark.


The Reads walked students home by lantern. Everyone on The Hill understood the stakes. Teaching African Americans to read and write was not merely controversial. It was seen by Confederate sympathizers as a direct assault on the social order they were fighting to preserve.


By the summer of 1864 the school had become noticed. Its success made the Reads more visible, more vulnerable.  And John was not simply a teacher, he also had become a member of the Falls Church Home Guard, an interracial militia of white Union loyalists and free Black men that kept watch over the village throughout the war.


In Confederate Virginia, that kind of arrangement was almost unheard of. To Mosby's men, Read was not just an abolitionist running an illegal school, he was a Union sympathizer actively undermining the social order they were fighting to preserve.  John lived in his brother's modest home on the western edge of the village, placed by later historians at the site of Stratford Garden, today's 300 West Broad Street, though the original house is long gone.


On the night of October 18, 1864, danger arrived at Read’s doorstep.


Shortly past midnight, a detachment of at least seventy-five men from Mosby's Rangers rode silently into Falls Church. Hardened men, more than two years into the brutal business of night raids, they moved with practiced coordination, dismounting in the shadows, entering homes in search of weapons, supplies, and anyone they considered a threat. Frank Brooks, an African American member of the Falls Church Home Guard, sounded the alarm as they entered the village. The Rangers shot and killed him. Then they continued down Broad Street to the Read residence.


Witness accounts describe the door forced open, the household startled awake, John Read was taken from his bed at gunpoint. He had heard the horses and whispered to his wife Charlotte: "Wife, I think they are coming. We can hear horses' hooves, but I do not know who they are." The Rangers also seized Jacob Jackson, a young African American member of the Home Guard. Both men were marched out into the dark and taken onto the road toward Vienna.


Today that route runs along Route 29 to Nutley Street to Hunter Mill Road. In 1864 it was a dirt track, rutted and narrow, cut through thick woods. The Rangers pushed them north and west toward Confederate-held ground. Near Hunter's Mill, in the vicinity of what is now the intersection of Hunter Mill Road and Chain Bridge Road, the Rangers stepped off the road and pushed the two men to a roadside ditch and shot them both, execution style, in the head, leaving them for dead. Read died there in the dirt. However, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, the bullet aimed at Jacob Jackson had only grazed his head. Jacob feigned his death and after the Rangers moved on, walking in the dark night eight miles back to Falls Church. The next morning Jackson told the Union garrison where Read's body could be found. The officers declined to retrieve it, claiming the area was too unsafe.


So it fell to Betsy and her aunt, two unarmed women, to make the journey themselves to recover John Read's body. As they were preparing to go, Charlotte , John's wife--Betsy’s mother, received a note from Colonel Mosby personally assuring safe passage for the women as they traveled. It was a gesture that revealed the complicated code Mosby lived by: capable of ordering an execution one night, extending a courtesy the next. Mosby's men maintained that Read was a Union spy. Charlotte saw it differently. In 1871 she wrote that the rebels "had a great antipathy to him because he served in the Union Home Guard, and because he taught Sabbath school to the colored people, and befriended them. Many of them came in there hungry, and in a destitute condition, and we used to do what we could for them."


The Hill School closed after Read's murder. But Betsy did not leave. That is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story. She stayed in Falls Church and continued her education work for decades, living until 1895, thirty-one years after the night the Rangers came. She never stopped. In 2024, the Falls Church Women's History Walk erected a marker in her name on South Maple Avenue, just a few blocks from where she once taught, honoring her as a 19th-century abolitionist and educator.


The wartime village of Falls Church gradually shifted from a place of conflict to a rural hub, then to a growing suburb and eventually to the bustling little city we know today. The modest house where the Reads lived is gone. The home on The Hill where Betsy taught is gone. The route the Rangers used is now a busy congested suburban artery.


Yet the ground remains. Stand on the sidewalk near 300 West Broad Street and you are standing on the ground where a father and daughter taught Black Virginians to read during the most dangerous of times. Drive the road toward Vienna and you trace, almost precisely, the last steps John Read took in the dark.


And if you walk to the cemetery at The Falls Church, the old Episcopal church on Fairfax Street just a few blocks from where he lived and taught, you will find John Daniel Read's grave. He lies there beside his wife Charlotte, who survived him by more than twenty years, dying in 1886. Most people pass without stopping. No marker explains who he was or what he did or how he died. But the stone stands in the same city where he arrived as a stranger, where he and his daughter built something quietly remarkable, and where Confederate riders pulled him from his bed in the middle of the night for the crime of teaching people to read.


History lingers in places even when the structures are gone. In Falls Church it lingers in the faint outline of a village that once witnessed quiet courage, nightly fear, and the belief that knowledge could reshape a life. It lingers in a grave that almost no one notices, in a churchyard a short walk from where it all began. And it lingers in a marker for Betsy, still standing in the city she never left.




Sources

Primary

  • Charlotte Read, written testimony, 1871 — describes her husband's killing and the motives of Confederate partisans

  • Betsy Read, letter to Emily Howland, October 23, 1864 — describes her father's death in her own words

  • Union Army investigative report, October 19, 1864 — describes the raid and its aftermath

Secondary and Reference


Physical

  • Grave of John D. Read and Charlotte Read, The Falls Church Episcopal Cemetery, 115 E. Fairfax Street, Falls Church, Virginia — visited by the author

  • Betsy Read historical marker, South Maple Avenue, Falls Church, Virginia


Note: the two historical markers in Falls Church covering this event differ slightly on certain details, including who sounded the alarm and the name of the African American man taken with Read. Where sources conflict, this essay follows the Virginia Civil War Trails marker and the Fairfax County African American History Inventory, which name Frank Brooks and Jacob Jackson respectively


 
 
 

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