Tag Archives: preservation

Disarmed

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This one’s rather macabre, so if you have a sensitive constitution, don’t click through to the picture that accompanies the article.

Shortly after the battle of Antietam, a farmer plowing his field dug up a dismembered arm.  For some reason, he and the doctor he consulted about it decided to pickle it rather than bury it, and it wound up in the collection of a private museum.

Wunderlich said he hopes to have a Smithsonian Institution forensic anthropologist examine the arm for clues about the owner’s diet and origin.

Battlefield Superintendent Susan Trail said the arm can’t be displayed at the Antietam visitor center because the National Park Service generally forbids displaying human remains. But she said the medical museum could display it at the Pry House, a field hospital site that the museum runs on the battlefield.

This imagery reminded me of a passage from Sam Watkins’ Co. Aytch, where he describes a very human reaction that led to many mangled and dead boys:

I saw another man try to stop one of those balls that was just rolling along on the ground. He put his foot out to stop the ball but the ball did not stop, but, instead, carried the man’s leg off with it. He no doubt today walks on a cork-leg, and is tax collector of the county in which he lives. I saw a thoughtless boy trying to catch one in his hands as it bounced along. He caught it, but the next moment his spirit had gone to meet its God.

via Md. Civil War medical museum aims to exhibit severed arm thought to be from Antietam battle – The Washington Post.

Battlefields in Motion – Fort Moultrie

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This company contacted our Civil War Round Table a few weeks ago.  Turns out we’re not the only Canadians with an interest in the war!   The CG Fort Moultrie presented here is amazing. A real glance into the surroundings of those who eventually found themselves dodging the first fire of the war at Sumter.  The only thing that’s missing are maquettes of the soldiers and families walking around in their daily routines.  Worth a look!

In 2008, a historian and two young computer-graphic specialists began an exploratory association, to learn how their respective talents might be combined for educational ends. They tried combining the latest CG technology with in-depth research, to direct the visualization of vanished buildings or even past historical movements. Through a reconstruction of 18th-Century Quebec City and its surrounding terrain, their methods evolved sufficiently to allow them to become incorporated in 2010 and embark upon their first independent project.

After discarding various possibilities, they chose to virtually recreate the remnants of 200-year-old Fort Moultrie, as only its weathered ramparts still remained intact on Sullivan’s Island at the entrance into Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Satellite imagery was used to calibrate its outer perimeter and the north-western interior around its Magazine, while the footprint of its long-lost West Barracks — plus vintage photographs and historical records — allowed for a virtual resurrection of that building, followed by several more. Fully-functional cannons were then replicated from 19th-Century US Artillery manuals, and the entire model textured in period stucco, paints, bricks, and vegetation. The resultant three-dimensional model serves to produce a variety of instructive video-clips, dioramas, and photographs.

Battlefields in Motion – Fort Moultrie May 1860 – Peacetime Federal Garrison.

Family Ledgers

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I posted a somewhat whimsical article on April 1st about family trees, and today’s news item is a more sombre followup.

My mother is a genealogist, and delights in tracing our family tree (which consists mainly of failed farmers or drowned fisherman – unlike their lucklessness, I have not inherited her enthusiasm). It involves painstaking detective work, investigating Scottish and Irish church records, municipal rolls and clerical receipts, but the links are there for anyone who wishes to find them.

I wonder, if we were black Americans, if genealogy is something she would even attempt to undertake. The records, where they exist, would be so muddied and complicated – involving sales across distance, informal family arrangements and unofficial marriages – as to make this detective work impossible.

While not decreasing the difficulty in such a search, the Virginia Historical Society has provided some intriguing new records to pore over.

So using a $100,000 corporate grant from Dominion, one of the nation’s largest producers and transporters of energy, society researchers began examining some of its 8 million manuscripts that Virginia residents have been giving to the historical society since its founding in 1831.

Those Virginia families found the old, handwritten papers in attics, basements or desk drawers, Levengood said. The society stores the documents in an archive spanning thousands of square feet, he said.

The antique papers turned out to mention slaves.

“Often they appeared in the records of the owners who owned slaves as human property, which to us sounds so obscene and alien,” said Levengood, who’s also a historian. “But these people were writing down their inventory as if you would for insurance purposes. That’s the kind of things that owners did with slaves. This was the most valuable property they owned, and they wanted to make sure it was recorded.
“Often there was a human connection, and they grew up with these people, and they recorded their birth dates and deaths. It’s an incredibly complicated and tragic institution that we’re just beginning to understand the dimensions of,” Levengood said.

The Society is offering workshops on using the databases. Budding genealogists are already exploring the data.

Amateur genealogist Crasty Johnson of Richmond said she hopes the sites will help her trace her roots back to the 1800s.

“I need to know my history,” she said, adding the site may help her prove or disprove many of the things she’s heard about her family’s past. “I wanted to really know. I wanted to be able to see and connect the dots.”


More Unsung Preservationist Heroes

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You’ll permit me one last public thank-you to those who go out of their way to preserve and present historical sites; this story made the Virginia news in early February, and I thought it worth a mention.

This week’s collapse of a Civil War-era tobacco warehouse on Dunbar Drive has thrust a spotlight on another Lynchburg building — which now stands as the city’s sole surviving warehouse-turned-war-hospital.

“It’s sad,” said Crystal Morris, of family-owned Morris Construction, which occupies what historians refer to as the “Knight Building.” “This is the last one.”

During the Civil War, dozens of Lynchburg buildings were converted into hospitals to care for the wounded pouring in from battlefields.

The Knight Building, named for tobacconist John P. Knight, was called into service along with its neighbor across the street, known as the Miller Building.

Together, the two structures witnessed the deaths of more than 200 soldiers.

Here’s a look at the last remaining building, and the restored structure.

In an era of cheap construction, monster homes and mindless development, this section of the news piece was really heartwarming:

The Knight Building is a circa-1845 four-story brick warehouse. When Crystal and Steve Morris bought it in 1997, it was vacant, run down and filled with long-abandoned junk.

The building needed an enormous amount of work. The night after they agreed to buy it, Steve Morris woke up in a panic, wondering what he had done.

Today, historic restoration is a specialty of Morris Construction.

“We reworked the roof, repointed the brick, put steel supports in where we thought it was weak, fixed every window,” he said. “It’s been a lot of work, but we wanted to preserve it.”

The upper levels of the warehouse have their original floors, beams and, in some cases, windowpanes. The Morris family has opened it up in the past for historic re-enactments.

“One neat thing about this building is, every five or six months, the doorbell will ring and it will be someone whose traced their ancestor back to the war and back to here,” said Crystal Morris, adding they always are happy to let people upstairs to see the old hospital rooms.

“It seems to help them make a real connection,” she said. “To be where their ancestors were.”

It would be easy (and likely cheaper) for this family to turn people away, or to gut the structure and develop the inside. Instead, they’ve chosen not only to foot the bill for the preservation, but to invite strangers in to experience the surroundings. I like to think there’s an express lane to heaven (or at least a fast-track to preservation grant approvals) for people like these.

http://www2.newsadvance.com/news/2012/feb/03/tobacco-warehouse-turned-civil-war-hospital-last-o-ar-1660602/

Giving Money as Well as Thanks

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Yesterday I posted about the idea of giving thanks to those volunteers and researchers in often thankless preservation jobs.  Today, I follow up with a different kind of giving, but one that is just as appreciated.  The Washington Post created this list at the close of 2011, encouraging readers to get last-minute charitable donations in under the tax-year deadline. I’m sure the organisations in question would happily take them at any time of year.

Like everyone else, I have been reminded repeatedly in the last week that my money is needed to help Civil War preservation efforts and an end-of-year donation or at least becoming a member would be a good thing. Here are a few to consider. They are all authorized 501c3 organizations and donations are tax deductible as allowed by law.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/house-divided/post/civil-war-preservation-groups-deserve-end-of-year-donations/2011/12/29/gIQA8i4BPP_blog.html

A Grateful Nation

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When I search the web for Civil War related items, I often come across small town papers whose “news” isn’t really newsworthy. This piece stood out, though, for the wonderful sentiments behind it, and because of the email from the Whitman Archive researcher that inspired yesterday’s post.

We’re in an economy troubled enough that museums are strapped, historical sites are threatened by development, and bankrupt states can’t find the funds for Sesquicentennial celebrations. Yet there are plenty of people out there who continue to do their utmost to usher others into a love of history, through their passion and effort and sheer goodheartedness. It’s worth sacrificing a blog post to tip our digital cap to the docents, curators, reenactors, interpreters, researchers and historians who keep our understanding of and interest in the war fresh and alive.

Get out there and check out the Museum of Culpeper History’s new exhibit, and when you do, be sure to thank the many volunteers that made it possible.

Architectural conservator Chris Mills deserves our thanks and a pat on the back for his painstaking work uncovering Civil War-era signatures, drawings and scribbling in and around Brandy Station’s Graffiti House.

Mills has been working 10 hours a day to find and protect clues into some of the Civil War’s most recognizable characters, such as J.E.B Stuart.

It’s obviously a labor of love for Mills, as trying to preserve ancient graffiti can’t be easy. Historians like Mills and countless others involved with the Museum of Culpeper History provide a valuable public service, and they all deserve our grattitude.

(I can’t resist a poke at the paper’s typo of “grattitude”. To paraphrase Sherman, historical glory is to be thanked for our field of service, and to have the acknowledgement spelled wrong in the newspapers.)

http://www2.starexponent.com/news/2012/feb/05/our-view-thank-those-preserve-history-ar-1664547/

Civil War Washington

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After posting the entry about the Whitman Archive, I received a note from Archive employee Bev Rilett.

Thanks for the kind notice of the Whitman Archive. I work there for Ken Price, who has been supporting grad students in English with this monumental project for more than 10 years. Try our bibliography search feature for any Whitman-related topic you can think of! You might also be interested in our newer related project, Civil War Washington, available here: http://civilwardc.org/

All this work is supported through the University of Nebraska and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other government funding for public education.

I’ve had a look at the Civil War Washington site, and it is absolutely worth checking out. Maps, texts, and images galore, emphasising a development that gets overshadowed by the hubbub of the war years: That those four years of struggle changed DC from a kind of rural backwater to the Nation’s-Capital-note-caps seat of power. I’m not enough of a historian to know when the “Presidential power” tradition began, but it’d be interesting mapping that trend on a chart along with this!

http://civilwardc.org/

The Atlantic on Gettysburg’s Cyclorama

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As I mentioned yesterday, The Atlantic Monthly is knocking the sesquicentennial celebrations out of the park. This piece on the Gettysburg Cyclorama is fantastic, and is making me greatly regret declining a ticket on both my trips to the park.

Four hundred feet long. Fifty feet high. It was art on an astonishing scale. All four versions were housed in massive, purpose-built rotundas. In Boston, for example, visitors walked through a grand crenelated archway, paid for their tickets, and proceeded along a dark winding passage toward the viewing platform. They ascended a winding staircase to another time and place. “The impression upon the beholder as he steps upon this platform,” one reviewer wrote, “is one of mingled astonishment and awe.”

July 3, 1863. The Battle of Gettysburg rages on for a third day. From just behind Cemetery Ridge, visitors watched Pickett’s Charge crash against the Union lines. There, in the distance! General Lee and his staff. Much closer, an artillery caisson explodes. All around, soldiers crouch, charge, level rifles, bare bayonets, fight, die.

A dozen different twists heightened the illusion. Drapes hung over the platform from the ceiling, limiting and directing the view and leaving the viewers shrouded in shadows. The indirect lighting shone most brightly on the top of the canvas, illuminating the sky in brilliant blue. The canvas bowed outward by a foot in the middle, receding as it approached the ground and horizon. Tinsel lent a convincing gleam to the bayonets and buckles in the painting.

What most astonished observers, though, was the diorama, which began near the edge of the platform and ended at the painting, 45 feet away. Hundreds of cartloads of earth were covered in sod and studded with vegetation, then topped with the detritus of the battlefield. Shoes, canteens, fences, walls, corpses: near the canvas, these props were cunningly arranged to blend seamlessly into the painting. Two wooden poles, painted on the canvas, met a third leaned against it to form a tripod. A dirt road ran out into the diorama. A stretcher borne by two men, one painted and the other formed of boards, had its poles inserted through holes in the painting. “So perfect is the illusion,” as the Boston Advertiser voiced the common sentiment, “that it is impossible to tell where reality ends and the painting begins.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/the-great-illusion-of-gettysburg/238870/

The Hunley – Photo Gallery

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National Geographic offers a small photo gallery of the newly restored and displayed Hunley. If you’ve read any of the previous Hunley posts, you’ve probably seen most of these pictures, but the first is pretty revealing: The fully “restored” (it looks extra crumbly) sub with a restorer or museum staffer next to it. It’s bad enough to think about what the Hunley crews went through, but to have suffocated after spending hours trapped in that claustrophobic tin can makes it all the worse.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/01/pictures/120131-hunley-civil-war-first-submarine-science-nation/#/civil-war-submarine-revealed-hunley-side_48007_600x450.jpg

Sea Shanties

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The past days’ accounts of Confederate exiles sailing to safe harbours put me in a sailing mood, so here’s an unusual blog post for today.

I stumbled across this CD a few years ago while on a quest for Civil War music, and it’s one of my favourite period performances. The band describes themselves as,

An actual string band of the Civil War Era singing a wide variety of traditional American songs in authentic, “living history” style.

“Living” is the key word, there – these guys sound like they’ve been issued double grog rations and the promise of some weekend shore leave in a bordello-lousy port. While Bobby Horton’s catalogue of songs is impressive, his singing leaves a lot to be desired. Such is not the case here. The shanties are rollicking and well-performed.

I didn’t recognise any of the titles except for Shenandoah and Drunken Sailor, but the Navy songs never got the kind of publicity that the Army’s marching songs did, so that’s understandable. The Mermaid is now a personal favourite, and I dare anyone to refrain from singing along to Jolly Grog.

The best part about writing this post is that I’ve just noticed the band has a whole series of other Civil War CDs. If I ever figure out how to make money off this site, I know how I’m blowing my first paycheque.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/97thrsb8