The vantage point of the painting is the intersection of Route 11, the old Valley Turnpike (Main Street here) & Washington Street, Route 60 which would take the traveler to West Virginia or on to Richmond towards the east. The vista served as a set (it's streets covered in dirt) for the movie "Sommersby" a retelling of "Le Retour de Martin Guerre" & taken from 16th Century France to the end of the American Civil War and the ravaged South. Ironically the distortions in the rain slicked asphalt are caused by huge pedestrian crossing stones from that era being left in place under a modern paving. In the distance is the Virginia Military Institute where Hollywood came to film a representation of the military South in the movie, "Gods and Generals" and the place in stark reality in the course of that war, where the entire student body fell in and marched north on the old pike to meet and die in battle against a better equipped and seasoned Federal Army. Lee rest in a nearby chapel that bears his name, at the campus of Washington and Lee University with his old war horse, "Traveler" buried just outside. Cadets in current classes at VMI still offer lemons to Jackson by tossing them on his gravesite just up the street from here. Pedestrains hurry about their business now in the helpless rain of the painting, taking little note of the changing past still changing and yet coming; looking north.