Selected News Briefs from
Recent Issues of Civil War News
View our archives to read articles from previous issues.
Subscribe and get ALL the Civil War News!
(updated 08/24/2010)
Chambersburg Seminar In Sept. On Lee’s Life, Career
CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. — The Greater Chambersburg Chamber of Commerce’s last Civil War seminar of the year will begin on Sept. 24. “Lee: An Examination of One of America’s Great Commanders,” will conclude Sept. 26. Seminar proceeds benefit preservation.
Ted Alexander, chief historian at Antietam National Battlefield, is seminar host. He said the seminar features some of the top Lee scholars and will examine various aspects of his life and military career
On Sept. 24 Richard Sommers, senior historian at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, will analyze what went right and wrong at Gettysburg. Peter Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, will examine why Lee used aggressive tactics throughout the war.
Ed Bearss will lead the Sept. 25 bus tour of lesser-known area sites associated with Lee and his commanders, as well as Gettysburg Battlefield.
Sessions on Sept. 26 will include an examination of Lee’s political and social heritage and how his political views shaped his decision to resign from the U.S. Army in 1861. Historian Tom Clemens will discuss Lee’s successes and failures in Maryland in 1862. Sommers will cover “Lee and Grant at Petersburg.” There also will be a panel discussion.
The seminar will be based at Four Points Sheraton in Chambersburg and receives sponsorship support from the Franklin County Visitors Bureau.
Next year’s seminar series will feature “Jackson in the Lower Valley: Spring and Summer 1861,” with historians Ed Bearss and Dennis Frye on May 13-14; “First Blood: Manassas and Balls Bluff,” featuring Bearss and other historians, July 27-30; and “The Opening Guns” with Bearss and other historians, Sept. 30-Oct. 1.
To register and for information about the Lee seminar, or any others, call seminar coordinator Cindy Baker at (717) 264-7101. Seminar costs vary depending on the sessions attended. Price includes motor coach transportation for guided tours, seminar materials and some meals.
The Chambersburg Civil War Seminars and Tours brochure with the full schedule and costs is at www.chambersburgcivilwarseminars.org.
Pamplin Hours
PETERSBURG, Va. – Pamplin Historical Park and The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier will operate its fall schedule through Nov. 30. The park will maintain full operating hours and programming Wednesdays through Sundays and be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Guided tours, costumed interpretation and all museums will be offered to visitors each open day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Irish Road Bowling
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Small bore cannonballs will be bowled along Trough Road on Sept. 18 as the game of Irish Road Bowling is brought to West Virginia.
Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson withdrew into Virginia from Antietam on Trough Road. The Battle of Shepherdstown was at the river crossing, Pack Horse Ford, and along Trough Road. It was the state’s largest single-day battle and ended Lee’s Maryland Campaign.
For information about the inaugural competition. which begins at 1 p.m., contact Road Master Mary Wolfe, (304) 258-4958, mwolfe1@earthlink.net. For information about the battle go to www.battleofshepherdstown.org.
Lincoln Donations
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The memoir of a Co. A, 22nd Michigan, soldier who spent 15 months in Confederate prisons, and a Tad Lincoln photo and two Lincoln letters were recently donated to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
C. Judson Treat of Johns Island, S.C., donated the memoir of Silas Edwin Halsey, a native of West Stockbridge, Mass., who settled and farmed in Warren, Mich. He enlisted in August 1862, leaving his wife and children.
On Sept. 20, 1863, he was captured at Chickamauga. Halsey was imprisoned in Richmond and Danville, Va., Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C., before being paroled in December 1864, exchanged on March 20, 1865, and mustered out June 26. He wrote his memoir, describing all of the prisons, in 1886.
The Robert E. Myers Jr. Trust of St. Louis, Mo., donated an original colorized photo of Tad Lincoln at age 8, believed to be a Mathew Brady image. The Myers family descended from Col. Richard Dawson Goodwin, to whom the two donated letters were written about his wish to raise a New York regiment to be called the “President’s Life Guard.”
According to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story the regiment was formed and merged with the 39th New York Regiment. Historians knew of the letters, but not where they were. Goodwin was born in Ireland and became a U.S. citizen in 1852.
The presidential library has 123 Civil War diaries and 400 collections with a Civil War component. For information go to www.presidentlincoln.org
Bizarre Exhibit
RICHMOND, Va. — The Virginia Historical Society’s new exhibit, “Bizarre Bits: Oddities from the Collection,” will be on view through Feb. 13.
Among the 40 unusual holdings on display are Jefferson Davis’ cigar, the bullet that killed the first Confederate officer in the Civil War and nails from the part of the Virginia State Capitol that collapsed in 1870.
The society is open free Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday 1–5 p.m. (shop and museum galleries only). For information, call (804) 358-4901 or visit www.vahistorical.org.
Parrott’s Foundry
COLD SPRING, N.Y. — West Point Foundry, famous for Robert B. Parrott’s development of the Parrott Rifle, recently received Department of Interior designation as a “nationally significant” site on the National Register and promise of $600,000 in state funds.
Plans are to improve the site, which Scenic Hudson owns, with new entrances, trails and informational displays. Scenic Hudson has raised $2.3 million to develop the foundry as a heritage-tourism site.
The foundry is across the Hudson River from the U.S. Military Academy. According to Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War (Hazlett, Olmstead and Parks, 1983), Parrott resigned as a captain in the Ordnance Department to become foundry superintendent in 1836.
He invented the cast iron, rifled gun with the wrought iron reinforcing band. The first ones were sold to Virginia in 1860. Confederates used one against U.S. troops at Big Bethel on June 10, 1861.
The U.S. government’s first purchase was in May 1861. They were 2.9-inch 10 pdrs. It is assumed the Virginia Parrotts were the same.
Chickamauga Memorial
GRAYSON COUNTY, Va. — The new 63rd and 54th Virginia Military Descendants Association aims to raise about $60,000 for a state monument on Chickamauga Battlefield.
According to press reports the group aims to do what the Virginia legislature voted to do in 1895, but never funded. The Virginia House of Delegates recently named the association as an authorized state agent for the project.
Park historian James Ogden told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi and West Virginia also do not have monuments at Chickamauga.
Book Honored
HILLSBORO, N.C. — Undaunted Heart: the True Story of a Southern Belle & a Yankee General, by Suzy Barile, received a Silver IPPY Award for Best Regional Non-Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
The book, published by Eno Publishers, tells the story of Ella Swain, daughter of University of North Carolina President and former Governor David Swain.
Ella fell in love with and married Illinois Gen. Smith D. Atkins, whose troops occupied Chapel Hill on April 17, 1865. The wedding outraged the city and university community which hung president Swain and Smith in effigy. Swain was removed from office in 1868 and died a month later.
Author Barile, an English and journalism teacher, is the couple’s great-great-granddaughter. Eno Publishers is a non-profit publisher of books about the Carolinas and South.
Wisconsin Forum
KENOSHA, Wis. —Civil War Preservation Trust President James Lighthizer will be the keynote speaker at the Third Annual Great Lakes Civil War Forum at the Civil War Museum on Sept. 11.
The forum’s focus will be the three major battles which took place in and around the Fredericksburg, Va. Lighthizer will speak about the challenges his group faced in attempting to preserve and protect these battlefields from development.
Also speaking will be Robert Girardi on the engineers at Fredericksburg, Dan Nettesheim about Grant’s Wilderness Campaign and Tom Finley on Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville.
For information go to www.thecivilwarmuseum.org.
Zouave Honored
BARRE, Vt. — A headstone was recently dedicated to a member of the 5th New York, Duryee’s Zouaves, who is buried in Barre’s Hope Cemetery, thanks to Civil War buff and reenactor Whitney Maxfield.
The Times Argus reported that several years ago he found a Maltese cross flag stand marked “Duryee Zouaves” near a granite marker for Andrew Whitehead who died in 1897 at age 65. Before the assumption could be made that the marker was correctly placed Maxfield had to prove Whitehead was in the famous Zouave unit.
He found Whitehead mentioned in a book about the unit at the Gettysburg park book store last November. Members of Co. A, 5th New York reenactors, supplied more information.
Whitehead was born in Scotland, joined the U.S. Navy in 1858 and then Co. H of Duryee’s Zouaves on April 25, 1861. During his two years of service Whitehead was at Big Bethel, Gaines’ Mill, where he was cited in dispatches for gallantry, Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
He moved his family to Barre in 1882 during the wave of Scottish immigration to work in the granite quarries.
(updated 08/24/2010) |