In Memory of Don Pfanz: Chris Mackowski

The week that Don Pfanz retired from the Park Service, a bunch of us got together in the early evening on the Chancellorsville battlefield. We had just wrapped up Sesquicentennial commemorations of the battle, and Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park’s cannon sat in the open clearing of Fairview, the location of key Federal artillery positions during the battle. Don wanted to celebrate his retirement by firing the cannon, and so his Park Service colleagues assembled to make it happen. As a volunteer that weekend, and a friend of Don’s, I was invited to join in.

We fired off six shots that evening. Shot five offered a special treat for Don, who held a special disdain for the self-serving writings of Clara Barton. For the Civil War’s 150th, the Park Service printed trading cards, one of which featured the “angel of the battlefield.” We loaded several Clara Barton cards into the cannon along with the fifth charge of powder, and Don gave the lanyard a particularly exuberant pull. For round six, we loaded a full set of the park’s cards in with the charge and KA-BOOM.

Nothing captured Don’s sense of boyish mischievousness quite like that night, although examples abound. Anyone who knew Don has a story or six about his playfulness.

Don had worked for the NPS for 32 years, with stints at Petersburg and Fort Sumter as well as at FredSpot. That’s where I met him back in the mid-2000s. He had an office on the grounds Chatham, the park’s headquarters, in a former free-standing kitchen. The brick building was stuffed full of park archives and files and photos—a treasure trove of research material that Don, as the park’s staff historian, took great pains to make available to researchers.

Sometime around 2010, Kris White and I decided to write our first book, a microtactical study of the Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church titled Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front, which remains today the definitive work on the battle. That was a low bar at the time: several folks had attempted to write books about the battle and all had abandoned the work. Don, however, greeted me and Kris with good cheer and gusto when we went to see him to plumb the archives. In fact, he was so encouraging and helpful over the course of our work that we asked if he’d be willing to write a foreword for the book, which he did. We even dedicated the book to him.

Shortly after Don retired, I moved to Fredericksburg, and our work friendship turned into a personal friendship. We got together for lunch every few months, sharing laughs and telling stories and catching up. Don loved to laugh.

Occasionally in life you meet someone so superlative that they become the standard, and everyone else you meet thereafter is measured against that standard. Don was one such person. He was, quite literally, the nicest person I’ve ever met. He became the bar: “So-and-so is Don Pfanz nice”—a distinction few people have ever achieved because it’s the nicest of the nice. Don was friendly and kind and generous and helpful. He was humble and self-effacing. He was like a squeaky clean Boy Scout trapped in a 67-year-old’s body. He didn’t swear, and he said things like “Golly” and “goodness,” and he was quick with a corny joke.

And he was an outstanding historian, of course. It was probably in his blood. His father, Harry Pfanz, was once chief historian of the National Park Service and author of an acclaimed trilogy on Gettysburg. Don followed in those footsteps. While best known for his biography Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life, he wrote ten books, including a pair for Emerging Civil War, Where Valor Proudly Sleeps: A History of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, and No Turning Back: A Guide to the Overland Campaign (with Bert Dunkerly and Dave Ruth).

Don’s cemetery book started as a reference source for staffers at FredSpot. I spent many hours behind the counter at the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center reading Don’s cemetery book so I could learn about that incredible hallowed landscape on the hillside just outside the building. Don had a deep love and respect for the cemetery and was widely recognized as “the cemetery guy” on the park staff. He was instrumental in helping to establish the annual Memorial Day luminary ceremony that honors the soldiers buried there.

My favorite of his works, though, was his monument book, History Through Eyes of Stone, also created as a reference source for park staffers. A month doesn’t go by that I don’t still use that book, which provides histories for all the monuments and memorials in the FredSpot region. It is an incredible—and incredibly useful—work of scholarship. It will serve as an enduring memorial to Don and his work.

I last saw Don earlier this summer. He’d had some health problems earlier in the year and looked tired, but he told me he was on the rebound. He felt good, he told me. He was looking forward to some planned travel with his wife in the months ahead.

And so I was shocked to get the news on August 28 that Don had entered hospice care. The prognosis didn’t look good. Days later, just after noon on September 2, I received the news that he had died earlier in the day.

Don’s might not be a household name, but he had a profound on many of us old-timers here at ECW because of our own origins at FredSpot—origins shaped and nurtured by Don’s helpfulness and good cheer. We’re among the hundreds if not thousands of people Don helped over the span of his career, either directly or through the reference materials he created for the park.

I have asked a few of those ECW colleagues to join me today in paying tribute to Don. You’ll hear their stories and remembrances throughout the day.

Don’s interment service will be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial donations be made to The American Battlefield Trust. On April 22, 1987, he wrote a letter that kicked off the modern preservation movement and led to the organization that eventually became the Trust—yet one more of Don’s important contributions to the field. (You’ll hear more about that in detail a later tribute.)

I hope you’ll join us in honoring Don today by being “Don Pfanz nice” to those you come in contact with: family, friends, neighbors, strangers. We could all use more Don Pfanz niceness in our lives.

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