On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock & roll devotee, and storyteller with a wit and sense of humor as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

“How are you feeling?” I ask my friend minutes after arriving at his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney—his nine-year-old barn cat—Ridley feels fine, a fact he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He wears tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt and, appropriately, a baseball cap with the words “Life Is Good” across the front.

Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, politician, lawyer and, before the war, one of the foremost slaveholders in the county. Ridley’s paternal great grandfather, who depended on mules for farming and was one of the county’s leading citizens, earned the nickname “Mule King”—Columbia, in fact, has long been touted as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need my history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church—a slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, across the road from the mostly empty field where Polk—an Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general—lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we have admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported eons ago from Japan and have poked about what little remains of brick kitchen for the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Today, though, we will explore far more humble construction. Near Ridley’s farm office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand three ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” Ridley calls the property, which is owned by his daughter, who lives in New Mexico, and a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-jokingly.

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades in Columbia. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these humble structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others. Many of them worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” Ridley says as we examine one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady who had a gift for cooking fried chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At another cabin yards away, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts strain to prop up its porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

What a contrast these antebellum structures make with Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill 750 yards away. In rich late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Peek through trees from the road leading to Ridley’s farm office and you’ll spot its imposing Ionic columns and impressive limestone porch.

From 1839 until the early years of the war, when the U.S. Army confiscated the property, the mansion served as centerpiece of Clifton Place, Pillow’s plantation that encompassed hundreds of acres. His slaves—most of whom lived in cabins at “The Quarters”—generated his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn, and other crops as well as tending to his cattle, sheep, and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens and one of the wealthiest men in the South, Pillow moved in elite social circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. Following the end of his presidency in 1849, Polk dined at Clifton Place with Gideon and his wife, Mary. Pillow himself dabbled in national politics, opposing secession initially in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, though, political general Pillow failed to measure up. During the Mexican War, the twice-wounded Pillow angered superiors—including Winfield Scott—for his self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given a massive painting of a heroic Pillow in military uniform greeted visitors in the front entrance of Clifton Place.

During the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, sneaking away from the beleaguered garrison under the cover of darkness before the Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At the Battle of Stones River nearly 10 months later, Pillow led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the battle has stained his résumé ever since.

Unsurprisingly, Scott—overall commander of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out—did not count himself among Pillow’s fans. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss And Feathers” described Pillow as “amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

As we walk from cabin to cabin, Ridley reflects only briefly on his connection to Pillow and the slaves who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

Ridley and I gingerly step into a cabin, home for Pillow’s field slaves. More than a year ago, he had brush and other vegetation cleared from around these remarkable survivors, giving us easy access.

Each cabin is roughly 15-by-15 feet with a small loft accessed by a rickety ladder. Each has a post-Civil War room out back. I’ve visited the site a half-dozen times but see something new each time.

Steps ahead of me, Ridley shines the narrow beam from his flashlight on a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper—used as insulation by postwar inhabitants—speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares from a March 1937 newspaper sports section. A decrepit floor, victimized by time and nature, crunches beneath my feet.

In another cabin, we find more reminders of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper adorned with blue- and aqua-colored floral designs, a chipped ax handle, and a barren clothes hook on a door. Pasted to the back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, we find no visible evidence they were here. No fragments of 19th-century pottery or shards of glass. No messages etched on bare, wooden walls.No privy to mine for secrets. Much is left for our imaginations.

And so, I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

Perhaps the 1870 U.S. census provides us hints. “Sarah” and “Randall”—listed as farm hands for the Pillow family in that census—appear on deeds as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what ultimately became of the slaves who toiled for Pillow. Were they buried in the nearby cemetery in the woods—the remote graveyard at the base of Ginger Hill that Ridley showed me months ago? Or were they buried in St. John’s Church Cemetery, far in the back, away from the final resting places of the White folks? Or perhaps they ended up in one of the scores of family cemeteries that dot the county.

And I wonder what will become of these historic treasures near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save the cabins, but that probably would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and more expertise than he has.

What would a professional archaeologist unearth here?

I also wonder what will happen to Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. It remained part of the Ridley family for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says. He recalls family gatherings in the 12-room Greek Revival-style mansion and 16-foot-high ceilings.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal purchased the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, aimed to restore the mansion, but their yearslong effort proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With The Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

The Clifton Place grounds include the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith, and quarters for “house” slaves. In the Pillow-era smokehouse stands the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs”—hollowed out poplar logs for the salting of hams. The smoky aroma in the small brick building still tantalizes.

“The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere,” a researcher once called Clifton Place.

John Neal died in 2018, but Clifton Place remains with his family. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied (and inaccessible to the public) for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it too could become nothing but a memory without significant preservation efforts.

Time may not be on the side of people like us who relish places like this. In an empty field across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers have plans for residential housing. “750 houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my, what will I see here a decade from now?

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). He also can be visited on Facebook at John Banks’ Civil War blog.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times.

Perhaps no place is better to begin an adventure in the footsteps of Samuel “Champ” Ferguson—the most notorious of Confederate guerrilla leaders—than a small brewery near Sparta, Tenn., roughly 100 miles east of Nashville. One’s mind can become a little numbed when pondering Ferguson, who a 19th-century writer called a “thief, robber, counterfeiter, and murderer.”  

Minutes after consuming the first of two Scorned Hooker IPAs at the eclectic Calfkiller Brewery, I meet my Ferguson guide, Craig Capps. He’s a 39-year-old Sparta resident, Tennessee law enforcement officer, U.S. Army veteran, part-time farmer, and ancestry.com aficionado.  

Capps is a distant relative of Ferguson, who the U.S. military hanged in Nashville for war crimes on October 20, 1865. He can also trace his ancestry to “Tinker Dave” Beaty—a Union guerrilla leader and Ferguson’s archenemy—as well as to Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and “Devil Anse” Hatfield of Hatfields and McCoys notoriety.  

Funny how the world works.  

Born and reared in Tennessee, Capps is knowledgeable about the obscure Battle of Dug Hill, in which the villainous Ferguson played a central role. The “battle” was a skirmish, really, fought in the winter of 1864 by Ferguson and his guerrillas and a few Confederate regulars near the Calfkiller River, roughly 10 miles northeast of Sparta.  

Alexander Fontaine Capps, Craig’s great-great-great-uncle—a guerrilla himself—fought under the man one of his 21st-century biographers called a “dim bulb.” John Alvern Capps—Alexander’s brother and Craig Capps’ great-great-great-grandfather—served in the 4th Tennessee Cavalry (CSA) and also fought at Dug Hill.  

We plan to examine the unmarked battlefield out here in the rugged and sparsely populated area near Sparta. But first there’s a trip to Ferguson’s homestead site deep in the woods, less than a mile from the battlefield. Capps has secured permission for us to visit the private property.  

Soon after departing the brewery, my guide parks his pickup on a muddy side road off two-lane Monterey Highway. For about 30 yards we walk along a red-clay trail—“good Tennessee dirt,” Capps says—and there it is.   

No, not Ferguson’s homesite. Instead, we find an abandoned, circa-1920s mansion once owned by a wealthy doctor. Ivy creeps over its sandstone exterior. Wooden boards in the windows and front entrance prevent the curious like me from peering inside. Stephen King would smile.  

“It’s haunted,” Capps says.  

Nearby, Capps points out a large wild hog trap, a contraption I never deployed while growing up in suburban Pittsburgh. After a circuitous walk through the woods, we arrive at Ferguson’s homestead site, an unremarkable, flat piece of ground among cedars and beech near the Calfkiller River. No visible trace remains of the place where Ferguson lived with his wife and children.  

It was here, shortly after the war, that the U.S. Army came for the notorious guerrilla leader, who had expected to be paroled. Instead, U.S. authorities put Ferguson under arrest in Nashville.  

Dark-skinned with curly black hair and black eyes, the Kentucky-born Ferguson weighed roughly 180 pounds, “without any surplus flesh.” A gambler, hard drinker, and a bully, he had a “tremendous voice” that could be “heard a long distance when in a rage”—which apparently was often. Ferguson had a rabid hatred for U.S. soldiers and enjoyed terrorizing Union sympathizers. Some say the hostility was fueled by the rape of his wife and daughter and death of his young son at the hands of Union soldiers, which Ferguson himself would deny occurred.  

In all, Ferguson may have killed as many as 120 men—all self-defense or acts of war, he claimed. But in actuality, he murdered dozens. In cold blood, Ferguson shot and killed a man bedridden with measles—a former friend of Champ’s whom he suspected of visiting a Union recruiting center—while his five-month-old child lay in a crib nearby. In the aftermath of the First Battle of Saltville, Va., in early October 1864, Ferguson took out his wrath on captured White and Black soldiers alike, shooting some of them dead.  

“We can’t judge those of the 19th century from the mindset of today,” Capps says. “But there’s no doubt Ferguson was a murderer.”  

John Alvern Capps—Craig’s great-great-great-grandfather—and his brother, Alexander, testified at Ferguson’s trial in Nashville. Both witnessed killings by the dastardly guerrilla.  

“They told the truth as they saw it,” Capps says of his ancestors.  

While a brief drizzle offers a respite from the heat, Capps talks about the guerrilla war in White County and beyond. He has a condition I call the “1,000-yard Civil War stare”—a single-minded focus on everything associated with 1861-65. It’s endearing and not uncommon among us kindred souls.  

“The war out here was truly brother versus brother, neighbor versus neighbor,” Capps says in a distinctive Upper Cumberland Appalachian twang.  

Many families who lived in isolated towns in the Cumberland Plateau intermarried. Few here—several worlds away from the state capital in Nashville—owned slaves. Many simply wanted to be left alone but took up sides anyway. The war divided Ferguson’s family, too. His brother, James, served in the 1st Kentucky Cavalry (U.S.). In 1861, a Confederate sympathizer killed him.  

Before visiting the Dug Hill battlefield site, Capps and I make our way to France Cemetery, where Ferguson’s remains lay beneath a comb grave. In 1909, an Oklahoma man claimed the guerrilla leader was alive, and, like similar stories about Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, had somehow escaped justice. But my guide and I agree that’s poppycock.  

Although some believe the site is farther down the Monterey Highway, Capps believes the battlefield—our next stop—is less than a quarter-mile from the cemetery. Capps bases his conclusion on years of studying the fighting and hundreds of visits to the site. Decades ago, a local found battle relics here in the woods near our stop.  

“Look how steep that is,” Capps says after our arrival. He points to a thickly wooded hillside of mostly beech and cedar. Behind and well below us flows the Calfkiller River.   

At Dug Hill on February 22, 1864, from behind trees ideal for concealment, dozens of Ferguson’s guerrillas awaited two companies of 5th Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.). Fearing a surprise attack on his headquarters in Sparta, their colonel had sent 80–110 soldiers to rid the nearby woods of guerrillas.  

Serving as the tip of the cavalry’s spear, John W. Clark—a private in the 1st Tennessee Mounted Infantry riding with the 5th Tennessee Cavalry—advanced up a narrow mountain road with two comrades. Then, about 100 yards away, Clark spotted two guerrillas astride their horses—bait to lure the cavalrymen into a trap.  

“I sounded the double-quick charge signal, and lit out after them, and about the time the company caught up we spied two lines of battle formed,” Clark recalled years later. “One line was up to our right on high ground about 300 feet above us. We were in the Dug Hill road, which ranged around the mountain about 600 yards from where we entered it. At the loose end of a thin hill was another line of battle. By this time another line had formed behind us, and the johnnies were cross-firing on us three ways.”  

Dozens of U.S. soldiers tumbled from their saddles.  

“The smoke was so dense,” Clark remembered, “that you could not tell one man from the other.”  

“One of the most ridiculous battles ever fought,” a Rebel fighter recalled.  

Some U.S. soldiers scrambled down the hillside to the Calfkiller River. One hid in a log until the battle had ended before making his way back to Sparta. Others surrendered to a Confederate officer, who passed them to the rear to Ferguson, “who shot them in cold blood,” according to a U.S. soldier. Some of the cavalrymen had their throats slit.   Later, in a vacant storehouse, a local claimed to have examined the bodies of 41 U.S. Army dead—38 with bullet wounds in the head, three with crushed skulls. But the exact death toll is unknown. The guerrillas suffered far fewer casualties, if any. Months afterward, skeletons are said to have turned up by the road and in the woods.  

Although unmarked and largely forgotten, the battle site holds a power over those of us who relish walking in the footsteps of long-ago soldiers. For Capps, a U.S. Army veteran, the place is surreal.  

“When I learned my great-great-great-grandfather had fought here,” he tells me, “it was like a child going to Normandy with a D-Day veteran. If he had been killed here, I wouldn’t be here.”  

At Nashville State Prison in the fall of 1865, Ferguson posed for a photo with 11 of his guards. It reminds me of an image taken of Lee Harvey Oswald—another notorious figure in American history—while Dallas police held him in custody in 1963.  

Before his execution by hanging, Ferguson said he wanted his body sent to his family for burial in White County. “Don’t give me to the doctors,” the 43-year-old mass murderer said excitedly. “I don’t want to be cut up.”  

As he is today, Ferguson was a polarizing figure in 1865. A reporter at the guerrilla’s execution questioned citizens about him.  

“One man thought him a martyr, hunted down by his enemies and about to become a victim of a judicial murder,” the correspondent wrote. “Another was assured that a direr villain never went to the gallows, and declared that he ought to be hung when he was a little boy.”  

Before our adventure concludes, Capps shows me the trace through the woods that he believes is the wartime road used by U.S. cavalrymen at Dug Hill. But I steer our conversation to Ferguson, who, along with Andersonville commander Henry Wirz, was one of two men hanged by the United States for war crimes committed during the Civil War.  

“Do you think he got what he deserved?” I ask.  

“Idda hanged him, too,” his distant relative says with a smirk.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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John Banks is author of three Civil War books. His latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing), includes stories about the Battle of Dug Hill. E-mail him at jbankstx@comcast.net with your own story ideas. 

As we ascend beastly Rocky Face Ridge on a sultry afternoon, my battlefield guide Bob Jenkins—a 59-year-old lawyer, humorist, and Mississippi-born descendant of Confederate soldiers—stops and ponders which trail to take next.

Straight ahead we see what Jenkins calls the “idiot trail.” It’s especially steep and covered with loose rock, but it’s a more direct route to the crest of a ridge covered with hickory, oak, poplar, pine and silver and red maple. To our right is an easier but longer trail to the summit.

“Do you want to take the ‘idiot trail’?” Jenkins asks.

Not blessed with a particularly high IQ, I figure this one is a no-brainer. Yes, the “idiot trail” it is.

And so we trek onward on our excellent adventure, two sweaty Civil War enthusiasts eager to examine stone works and earthworks that snake throughout this ridge in northwestern Georgia. “America’s best-kept secret,” Jenkins says of the Rocky Face Ridge battlefield, “the crown jewel of the Atlanta Campaign.” Here, in the Crow Valley near Dalton, soldiers clashed from May 8-12, 1864, in an opening act of the campaign between Union Maj. Gen. William Sherman and Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee.

Now, I’ve visited Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Harpers Ferry, and other battlefields with earthworks. But my gawd, I’ve never seen any as impressive—and as numerous—as those at Rocky Face Ridge.

Thirty yards or so off a trail, Jenkins pointed to mounds of earth piled high—the remains of an Arkansas battery position, he believes—and a deep and lengthy trench for Confederate infantry. The artillery earthworks look as if you could still roll cannons behind them, as the Rebels did in spring 1864. 

“In Dalton and Whitfield County there are more undisturbed Civil War earthworks than anywhere else in the country, and that’s not just Bobby Jenkins saying that,” my guide says. “That’s coming from the people in the green hats”—National Park Service rangers.

These remarkable Civil War defenses have survived through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Jenkins says. For one, Whitfield Country isn’t densely populated, and over the years good stewards of the land have recognized the importance of the earthworks and stone works. The chief reason, however, may be that they are so hard to get to and thus have eluded destruction by humans.

This isn’t my first encounter with 1,435-foot Rocky Face Ridge. Weeks earlier, following a bike ride at nearby Chickamauga battlefield, I drove to Rocky Face Ridge Park, a few miles from dreaded Interstate 75 and a world away from Atlanta far to the south.

Short on time, I walked a trail a thousand or so yards into the woods but turned back and returned home. To fully absorb this unheralded battlefield, you need at least five or six hours and a great guide like Jenkins—the author of two published Atlanta Campaign books.

Opened unofficially in spring 2021, the 1,000-acre park is a result of remarkable work by preservation groups, including Save the Dalton Battlefields, as well as county commissioner Mike Babb. Once farmland, the park is now popular with hikers and history and nature lovers. With avid mountain bikers, too.

A sign in the parking lot warns them about the “extremely dangerous” double orange diamond trail. Months ago, a friend of mine left his broken mountain bike on the far side of the ridge and blazed a trail back to civilization. If luck is on my side, maybe I’ll find the bike’s rusty carcass.

“Are we having fun yet?” While Jenkins and I trudge along a stony, serpentine trail, he wonders about my welfare. My calves and knees ache. So do my toes in a cheap pair of hiking boots. My Fitbit registers 130 heartbeats a minute. But what an epic experience this is. Jenkins brought an 80-year-old battlefield tramper with a heart condition up here once. Lord, how did that man endure? This is a haul.

Jenkins and I limbo dance underneath a fallen tree blocking our path. Then, as we continue our march to the crest, he invites me to take the lead.

“I want you to see what’s next,” he says.

An untimely haze prevents a perfect view to the south, but it’s special, nonetheless.

“On a clear day you can see 65 miles,” Jenkins insists, “all the way to Kennesaw Mountain.” That’s where 4,000 soldiers—3,000 Union, 1,000 Confederate—became casualties in an especially bloody Atlanta Campaign battle on June 27, 1864.

To our right, Jenkins points to the craggy face of Rocky Face Ridge, jutting out like the jaw of a prizefighter among greenery. In a field far below, 14 soldiers from the 58th and 60th North Carolina (CSA) paid the ultimate price for desertion on May 4, 1864.

I wonder how much more trudging we have before we reach the far side of the ridge. “Not much farther,” he says.

Then, Jenkins, an asthmatic, pauses briefly to catch his breath.

“But don’t trust me,” he says. “I’m a lawyer.”

Finally, we arrive at Buzzard’s Roost. The steady roar of traffic on I-75 way below can’t spoil this moment. True to the name of the place, a solitary buzzard circles in the near distance. On a clear day from our lofty perch, we could see all the way to Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga—roughly 28 miles away as a buzzard flies.

“From up here,” Jenkins says, admiring the view, “we can see how the Atlanta Campaign unfolded.”

In the near distance stands Blue Mountain, where Sherman eyeballed Confederate defenses on Rocky Face Ridge before returning to his headquarters near Tunnel Hill. That’s off to our right, in the far distance. To our left, beyond a #! @*&% cell phone tower, is Dug Gap, where the armies clashed on May 8, 1864.

“This is where the ball opened,” Jenkins says of the Atlanta Campaign.

After a brief rest at the former site of a Confederate signal station, we reach the narrow spine atop Rocky Face Ridge. Alas, I have no time or energy to find whatever remains of my friend’s bike—if it’s still there.

Up here, where 2023 seems a distant memory, I marvel at stone works built by the Confederate Army. Some look as if the soldiers created them days ago. Stretches of the defenses are covered by summer growth and would be more visible in the fall.

“Aren’t 10 people in a month who see this,” Jenkins says as we walk along the spine, “and you’re one of them.”

A bear or two occasionally wander up here. Sometimes a fox, deer, and bobcat, too. And after a rainfall, it can get a “little snaky,” says Jenkins—venomous copperheads, maybe a timber rattlesnake or three. But we’re the only humans in sight advancing along the spine.

Sam Watkins, the famous Confederate memoirist, served on Rocky Face Ridge with the 1st Tennessee. I try to imagine the 24-year-old private piling rocks with his comrades and preparing for battle.

“We form a line of battle on top of Rocky Face Ridge,” he wrote in Company Aytch, his memoir, “and here we are to face the enemy. Why don’t you unbottle your thunderbolts and dash us to pieces? Ha! Here it comes; the boom of cannon and the bursting of shell in our midst. Ha! Ha! Give us another blizzard. Boom! Boom! That’s all right, you ain’t hurting nothing.”

On May 9, 1864, up here where the buzzards fly, Alabama infantry and artillery mowed down soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky who charged four abreast along the narrow spine of the ridge.

“One of the hardest places I ever saw,” a 64th Ohio corporal said of this battlefield.

In less than 30 minutes, 40 U.S. Army soldiers were killed and 110 wounded. Benjamin McCoy, a 21-year-old corporal in the 64th Ohio, fell with a mortal wound through the lungs. He lingered for more than a week.

“Benjamin, as a soldier, was free from the many vices that constantly beset the path of young men in the army, and knew only his duty in the cause which he so early espoused, and for which he offered up his youthful life,” a lieutenant in McCoy’s regiment wrote the soldier’s parents.

We reach the site of the high water mark of the U.S. Army’s advance. It’s the most remote battlefield I have ever visited. For several yards we see palmettos, each about two feet high, sprouting from the ground. Jenkins likes to think they symbolize where the bluecoats fell.

“You are standing right now in no-man’s land,” he tells me. “This is a killing zone.”

We briefly rest on a huge boulder. Then Jenkins tells the story that for me at least speaks to the futility of war. Following the doomed charge of Brig. Gen. Charles Harker’s brigade on May 9, a wounded Union soldier cried out from the unforgiving terrain.

Alexander McIlvaine, the 45-year-old colonel of the 64th Ohio, ordered a captain to rescue the soldier in no-man’s land.

“Colonel, it will be certain death to any man who attempts to pass between those rocks,” the officer said. “If you order me to go, I will obey, but I will not send any one of my men. If you wish to put me in arrest, here is my sword.”

“I will go myself!” McIlvaine replied.

As the colonel walked along a narrow path between boulders—the path we had just followed—a bullet crashed into his bowels, mortally wounding him.

Our descent becomes a blur of more stone works—including those for Union artillery this time—and slips and slides along the trail. A mountain biker rumbles up our path, destination unknown.

More than four hours after we had begun, Jenkins and I spy our starting point in the Rocky Face Ridge Park lot. Our epic 8.5-mile hike is on the cusp of completion.

“Hallelujah,” he says.

Hallelujah, indeed.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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John Banks, a longtime journalist, is the author of three Civil War books and a popular Civil War blog. His latest book is A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing).

On a brisk morning, Chuck Byrn and I plop ourselves on a bench that often serves as his refuge from the 21st century. During the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., on November 30, 1864, the ground before us became a hellscape of bloody and broken bodies and shattered lives. A decade ago, two pizza restaurants and other urban schlock stood here. Now it’s a small park thanks to remarkable work by battlefield preservationists.

As two American flags flutter nearby, Byrn and I swap Civil War stories and a few fibs. He’s proud of his Jewish heritage as well as the Algonquin, Cherokee, Creek, Welsh, Scotch Irish, and Spanish in his blood. The 68-year-old Tennessee native—a retired history teacher, Grateful Dead and Doors fan, and docent at the historic Lotz House nearby—is also 100 percent character. I relish character, characters, and beards like Byrn’s milky-white extravaganza.

And Civil War stories, too. Byrn dispenses his in shotgun-like bursts.

In between tokes of house blend whiskey tobacco from his epic, carved Richard Nixon meerschaum pipe, he tells me about another character, Franklin’s own “Miss Annie.” Annie May Gatlin was her full name—her home once stood across Columbia Pike near the Fountain Carter House, vortex of the battle. She liked to remind Byrn that her grandaddy fought at Franklin and Confederate Brig. Gen. Otho F. Strahl died in her backyard.

In the late 1970s, Byrn served as a docent at the Carter farmhouse, which remains a popular battlefield attraction today. The bullet-riddled farm office yards away served as the de facto battlefield visitors center. Byrn remembers bullets from the battle filling a large terra cotta bowl there. Before he began his Sunday shift, Byrn would visit “Miss Annie,” who served him mai tais.

“And this woman could pour one,” Byrn says while a cloud of smoke from his pipe drifts into the cool Tennessee air.

Good gawd, we all need a “Miss Annie” in our lives.

Besides a mai tai buzz, Byrn’s docent shift sometimes included a surprise or two. A man once beckoned him to his car and opened the trunk, revealing a bayonet wrapped in a near-pristine Goodyear rubber blanket from the war. The edged weapon, the man insisted, lay atop the belly of his 20th Tennessee ancestor, Colonel Bill Shy, who died at the Battle of Nashville. The blanket, he said, wrapped Shy’s body.

“Mind-blowing,” Byrn says.

Byrn recalls another visitor, a man in his late 90s, who said he had lived in the Carter House in the early 1900s.

“We couldn’t walk barefoot out in the yard without stepping on bone fragments and teeth,” the old man told Byrn.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Byrn works at the Lotz House astride the Columbia Pike. During the battle, the frightened Lotz and Carter families and others huddled in the Carters’ basement while the gates of hell opened outside. In a pivotal moment of the battle, Colonel Emerson Opdycke’s brigade charged past the Lotz House to plug a hole in the U.S. Army line.

About 70 minutes before his shift starts, Byrn readies the Lotz House for visitors. Then, carrying a bacon cheeseburger, coffee, and his ornate cane, he walks the short distance for a respite in the park. Yards away from his bench are foundation stones of the old Carter cotton gin, all that remains from the landmark that stood only yards behind Union lines. After parking himself on the bench, Byrn envisions a beautiful Indian summer day in November 1864. 

For a few minutes, Byrn blots out the sound of all modern intrusions. Then he imagines the thunderous roar of gunfire of this often-overlooked Western Theater battle. The five-hour brawl resulted in roughly 8,500 casualties—2,300 for the U.S. Army, 6,200 for John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee. It was one of the rare Civil War battles fought almost entirely at night.

“Thousands of screaming Confederates were rushing toward us right here,” Byrn says, pointing his cane toward a modern, residential neighborhood. Behind their earthworks, Union soldiers five and six deep fired into the charging mass.

Often alone and deep in thought during these park visits, Byrn occasionally hears a strange rustling behind him. But no one’s ever there. Sometimes he even smells sweaty horses. We both marvel at the humanity lost in this small park.

Near us, in front of the 6th Ohio Light Battery position that’s marked today by two cannons, the “ground was literally covered with human bodies,” a 104th Ohio soldier remembered.

Another Union soldier said he “could scarcely walk without stepping on a body.”

Near U.S. Army earthworks, a Union soldier recalled a poor Confederate soldier begging “for the love of Christ” to have a pile of corpses pulled off him.

Another Ohioan recalled the dead “laid in every position imaginable.”

On this cloudless, deep-blue sky morning, a couple walks their dog over the same ground, near a gravel pathway that marks the line of Union earthworks. It is surreal.

If we expand our scope just a little beyond the park, tragic stories lurk everywhere.

To our right, across Columbia Pike, 20th Tennessee officer Tod Carter fell near his boyhood home. The 24-year-old soldier died in the house where he was born.

Across Cleburne Street in front of us, near a monument of faux cannonballs forming a pyramid, Irish-born division commander Patrick Cleburne suffered a mortal wound. Confederate soldiers  found the general the next morning, his kepi partly covering his eyes.

In the far distance to our left, in the heart of what today is another modern, residential neighborhood, bullets riddled Brig. Gen. John Adams. He charged the Federals’ line astride his white steed, “Old Charley.” Strahl, Adams, and Cleburne—the “Stonewall of the West”—were three of the six Confederate generals to suffer mortal wounds at Franklin. All of them have streets named after them near where we sit.

Byrn especially admires Tod Carter, Adams, and Cleburne—“good God what balls he had,” he says of the Irishman—but prefers to focus on the “Willies and Joes.” That’s his term for the common soldiers who often reside in the shadows of history. 

“I can feel their presence everywhere here,” he says of them.

One of those “Willies and Joes” is Henry Walters Cowman, a private in the 175th Ohio. The bushy-haired Cowman was just a kid, eight months shy of 17, when he enlisted in September 1864. He apparently lied about his age. Mom was a widow. Henry’s older brother, John, served with the 2nd Ohio Heavy Artillery.

At Franklin, the 175th Ohio’s first battle of the war, a bullet crashed into Cowman’s right arm —“over where the Bunganut Pig is today,” says Byrn. It’s a popular restaurant/beer joint about 50 yards behind us. Perhaps Cowman suffered the wound in his regiment’s desperate charge to the front.

 “I tell you papa, that was a trying time for new men but I thought there was a chance for a new laurel so I started and so did all the rest,” a 175th Ohio soldier recalled of the charge. “Papa, I went mad, I did not think of danger.”

Cowman’s sister helped care for Henry in a hospital in Jeffersonville, Ind., where the teen died from a gangrene infection on January 24, 1865.

Day Elmore of the 36th Illinois is another of Byrn’s boys. A farmer, he enlisted as a drummer in August 1861. Like Cowman, he was just a kid, only 17 when he joined the army. Elmore stood 5-foot-4 and had dark complexion with brown eyes and brown hair. In a wartime image, he posed with a Colt New Model Revolving rifle that was nearly as tall as he was.

At Chickamauga in September 1863, he suffered a serious lung wound. At Franklin, he suffered another wound, this time fatal. Elmore died a little more than a week after the battle. He was 20.

George W. Heckman of the 104th Ohio was in the fight at the cotton gin. The private is one of Byrn’s guys, too.

Heckman’s son, Walter, served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Decades after the war, he became a liaison for WWI veterans for the VA in Nashville. In 1970, Walter—who grew up in a Grand Army of the Republic orphans’ home—told stories about his dad to Byrn and his mother.

“Brother Heckman,” Byrn calls his fellow Mason.

That’s how close we are to the Civil War.

Before we depart his refuge, Byrn points to a photo on a historical marker. 

“Don’t forget about him,” he says.

The image is of a bull terrier named Harvey, the beloved mascot of the 104th Ohio—“The Barking Dog Regiment.” The unit had several dogs, raccoons, and at least two squirrels as pets.

Despite the 104th Ohio’s precarious position at Franklin, Harvey somehow survived. So did his master. It was a rare glimmer of sunshine amid the gloom of late November 1864.

“I love Harvey,” Byrn says.

Then, pipe in his mouth and cane in hand, he returns to the Lotz House. For now, Byrn leaves his haven and the spirits of the “Willies and Joes” behind but never forgotten.

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). Banks frequently posts to his Civil War Facebook page, John Banks’ Civil War blog.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Immediately following the repulse of Pickett’s Charge at the Gettysburg reenactment in 1988, an eerie quiet fell over the field. Thousands of participants, as well as tens of thousands of spectators, stood silently on the sun-drenched former cattle farm about six miles south of the Pennsylvania town.

Then, at the representation of the Angle—the vortex of the battle on July 3, 1863—a lone, mounted bugler rode out from the Union lines and played Taps answered by another bugler somewhere on the Confederate side. When they finished, a roar reverberated from the Union reenactors, co-mingled with a Rebel Yell. Reenactors and spectators alike wept.

“A mystical thing,” recalls Tom Downes, a 1988 reenactor.

“We knew that we were a part of something that was very, very big,” another participant says.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Civil War reenacting reached a high-water mark with thousands of living historians fighting pretend battles and camping near Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and other national military parks. (The federal government bans reenactments at all national military parks, except Cedar Creek in Virginia.) But with hundreds of middle-aged and older reenactors putting away their muskets, kepis, and woolen garments for good, reenactments today rarely draw more than 1,000 participants. Reenactors from younger generations, meanwhile, have failed to swell the ranks.

Two Gettysburg reenactments—one in 1988 for the 125th anniversary, another 10 years later for the 135th—marked the hobby’s zenith. The 1998 event was the largest Civil War reenactment of all, with more than 28,000 participants.

But former and current reenactors speak more reverentially about the smaller event of 1988—among the first of the multi-thousand participant reenactments. About 10,000 reenactors, mostly male, endured oppressive heat, lengthy marches, omnipresent dust, thick battle smoke, and the rancid odor of sweat-stained uniforms. Some traveled from as far as West Germany, England, Poland, and Australia. An estimated 60,000–78,000 spectators watched the climactic battle, highlighted by Pickett’s Charge. The movie Glory, in which Hollywood spotlighted the courage of Black Civil War soldiers, would debut the next year. Few, if any, Black reenactors participated at Gettysburg.

“Civil War Disneyland,” Richard Smith calls the 1988 Gettysburg event. The Ohio native served in the 5th Texas at Gettysburg.

“A real powder burner,” remembers another participant.

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A Gettysburg newspaper called the event “a beach party with cannons.” Spectators may have used more colorful words to describe the scene, especially the traffic jams. On U.S. Route 15 heading into Gettysburg, traffic backed up seven miles. A reporter likened reenactment weekend at Gettysburg to “cramming seven families into a two-bedroom house at the shore.”

Over three searing days in late June, the event transported reenactors to July 1863 and produced enduring memories. Some of them were all-too real. Following a battle, one reenactor—a Vietnam veteran—approached his fellow reenactor, Downes.

“This is just a little too realistic,” he said. “I need to sit out the weekend.”

Doug Lape, then 24, was fresh out of college and had only been reenacting for four years. “Green as all get-out,” he says. “I wasn’t even familiar with camping.” Lape had traveled from Ohio for the event with his unit, the 8th Ohio. He soon discovered it was serious business.

“When we came off the road and rolled into camp, we were immediately given orders for guard duty,” Lape says. “‘Hey, I have road rash here from traveling and you want us to do guard duty?,’ I said.”

Hardcore living historian Robert Lee Hodge—a lead character in author Tony Horwitz’s rollicking 1998 best-seller Confederates in the Attic—became semi-famous in Civil War circles for urinating on his uniform buttons for the optimal patina. Neither Smith—who portrayed 5th Texas Private James Downey of Company A—nor Lape achieved that level of hardcore reenacting. But they and their comrades strived for realism.

Lape transferred his peach schnapps, his camp refreshment, from a modern glass to a hand-blown bottle. Smith and his comrades stripped their Enfield muskets of modern markings, replacing them with 1860 stamps. If someone in the company needed eyeglasses, he wore a pair appropriate for the era. In May or June 1863, the 5th Texas got new shell jackets, so Smith and his comrades made sure they did, too.

“And we would not wash any of our stuff,” he recalls. “When we got into the car, we’d go, ‘What is that smell? Is that us?’ I think we achieved the proper odor.” For the reenactment, Smith’s Company A had 33 soldiers, just as it did in July 1863. “We were really proud of that,” he says.

During battle scenarios, Lape got theatrical. Sometimes he threw caution—and even his musket—into the wind. If opposing sides were firing from 50 yards, he expected soldiers to fall.

“I didn’t mean to be over the top,” says Lape, who has two Union ancestors who fought under William Tecumseh Sherman in the Western Theater. “But guys around me knew Lape might go flopping around like a flounder.”

Levity aside, Lape and his comrades were committed to portraying soldiers accurately and honoring their sacrifices. At Gettysburg in 1988, reenactors saw flickers of the summer of 1863. Sometimes it could be something mundane, like a dusty march, or sweat running from a soldier’s dust-covered face, or a meal of hardtack cooked with bacon and topped with dried apples. (“So freakin’ good,” Union reenactor Mick Bedard, then 40, says of that feast.)

Other times it was something jaw-dropping—the sight of the tips of Confederate battle flags rising on a ridge, or horse artillery racing across a field, or a marching column of Black Hats of the Iron Brigade. The immense scale of the event—a rarity for most reenactors—energized them.

Pennsylvanian Chuck Young, then a 29-year-old teacher, portrayed a private in the 27th Virginia of the famous Stonewall Jackson Brigade. From a ridgeline one evening, he looked in awe over the encampment of thousands of soldiers below.

“Can you imagine what it looked like if it was an army?” he told a friend.

Smith remembers patrolling as a sentry from midnight to 4 a.m. with a handful of others. In the distance before him stood hundreds of dog tents. Flickering lanterns cast a spectral glow. The noise of snoring and coughing soldiers drifted into the hazy night air.

“I was standing there thinking, ‘I made the leap, man. It’s 1863.’” Smith recalls.

One day a reenactor portraying Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee rode into camp astride “Traveller.” The tourists, who often shot pictures and peppered reenactors with questions, were nowhere to be found. As Lee and his aides left the encampment, dozens of Confederate reenactors gathered around him.

“God bless you, General Lee,” they said.

“We love you, Marse Robert.”

Lee took off his hat and waved. Smith became teary-eyed. He swears other Rebels did, too.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is why we do this stupid hobby.’”

In the local newspaper, a National Park Service historian likened a real Civil War battle to “an unsupervised kindergarten class at recess, with the children going in all directions, falling, running, shouting.” The pretend Gettysburg battles produced a level of realism—and sometimes chaos—that often shook the participants.

At the 1988 reenactment, no one suffered a bullet wound, as a 22-year-old reenactor would 10 years later at Gettysburg. A French reenactor had unknowingly fired a .44-caliber ball into the neck of the man, who survived but soon left the hobby. Officers and others at the 1988 event enforced safety standards.

But damn, this was no recess.

“It was almost a continuous roar,” Young says of the battles. “You could make out individual rifle shots, a volley even. But the background behind that was a roar, a constant noise.

“It was as close to an experience of war as possible without having Minié balls whistle past my ear.”

During the Day 1 reenactment fighting, battle smoke obscured the enemy. Then, as if via a time machine, a Union regiment, its colonel, and a flag whipping in the breeze appeared in the sunlight.

“It was chilling,” says Young, the Rebel reenactor.

Few fighters knew what was happening beyond a 15-foot radius around them. Reenactors, teleported to another century, ignored spectators. Smith, portraying a file closer, rolled over a “wounded” Yankee, a friend of his from Akron, Ohio.

“Hey, Richard,” the prone reenactor said.

“Hey, Tom,” Smith replied.

When Smith swiped his friend’s shoes, spectators booed.

“That’s the only time I really noticed them,” he says.

The booming of cannons preceding Pickett’s Charge on the final day rocked the battlefield. “One of the loudest I ever heard,” Smith says of the barrage.

Through the battle smoke, many spectators who jammed the battlefield caught only glimpses of the fighting. Some drank a beer or two. On came the Rebels, thousands of them.

A frazzled Union lieutenant turned to Downes.

“Hey, Tom, now you know why I wore my dark trousers today.”

The man had peed in his pants.

“We had never seen so many soldiers before,” Downes says.

The main Union line looked like a volcano of musketry and cannonading—albeit no real gunfire of course.

“I remember going up to a lieutenant and putting my mouth up to his ear,” Downes says. “He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. He could not hear me.”

Lape and his 8th Ohio comrades received orders to advance to an area where ground charges had been set up to simulate artillery. “It was a hot place,” he recalls. Literally. The grass and hay briefly caught fire.

To simulate receiving a head wound, Lape threw himself backward, unfortunately striking a rock on the ground.

“Our flag-bearer saw me go down,” he says. “I was out for a second or two, no intense pain. The flag-bearer calls over Surgeon Steve, who actually had a medical background. They get me to my feet, and I end up on a tree trunk. Real blood is coming from my head.”

“Can I just go home with this?” Lape asked.

“No, you have to go to the hospital,” Surgeon Steve replied.

Shortly after the battle wrapped up, Lape found himself in an ambulance heading to a Gettysburg hospital with other wounded reenactors. A Yankee reenactor’s hand was bleeding from an accidental wound. As he was cutting a sliver from a modern wooden fence as a souvenir, the knife had slipped, gashing his hand.

“Why would you even want that?” Lape says, chuckling.

At a local hospital, modern physicians dressed the wounds of Civil War reenactors. A Confederate reenactor received treatment for powder burns after a Union reenactor reportedly fired a weapon into his face.

“It was almost like a movie set,” Lape says of the surreal hospital scene. “Twenty reenactors. Most were sitting up. No one was prostrate. I got seven stitches in the left side of my head. It was a glancing blow on the rock. My scalp had enough give. A full-on shot to my skull and I could have had a concussion.”

After a 1988 reenactment at Appomattox, Lape retired from the hobby. Young’s last reenactment came in 1994. Bedard fought his last battle in the 1990s. Smith, now 62, parlayed his interest in reenacting into a career as a public historian, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the American poet, philosopher, and abolitionist. Downes, now 72, is still going strong.

“Most of the rest of my friends who were doing this are now dead,” he says. “Maybe I should join a Grand Army of the Republic unit.”

The memories of the reenactment—“the enormity of it all,” says Downes—remains seared into the reenactors’ brains. He says the event, managed by a history consulting firm, took two years to plan.

“Wish I had a drone to record it all,” he says.

Sweaty and satisfied, Smith surveyed the battlefield at Gettysburg 1988. Battle smoke and dust lingered. The air smelled of sulfur and musty wool. The playing of martial music by brass bands and the singing of soldiers around campfires—all that was long over.

“Why,” Smith wondered, “can’t all the reenactments be like this one?”

John Banks writes from Nashville, Tenn., and is a frequent contributor for HistoryNet’s magazines. He has never reenacted. Nor will he if he wants to remain married to his beloved Mrs. B.

Gettysburg Souvenirs

The spectators and living historians who attended the 1988 reenactment were part of a long and unending fascination with the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the largest engagement of the Civil War. Over the decades following the battle, myriad souvenirs have been produced so the hordes of visitors to the hallowed ground, often more than one million a year, could take home a memory-triggering knick knack. The objects below, some handmade but most mass produced, are just a small sample of what has been available over the years in Gettysburg-area stores.

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In his sprawling house on the outskirts of Murfreesboro, Tenn., Chris Utley shows me his second-floor office—the nerve center of his business for 19th-century reproduction clothing. Atop a bookcase rest 150-plus year-old boots and shoes. To our left stands a display of original U.S. Christian Commission ephemera. To our right, in a closet, hang some of the repro clothing Utley sells.

But I’m not here for the old-style vests and overshirts or the denim and linen jackets. I’m here to learn about handkerchiefs. Utley, a 47-year-old healthcare investigator, is the only person I know who collects original hankies from the Civil War. Of the 14 in his collection, seven belonged to identified soldiers.

For nearly a decade, Utley has reproduced and sold copies of original Civil War hankies—a business that spawned his reproduction clothing business called South Union Mills.

The war has enthralled Utley since he first read Bruce Catton’s books as a kid. As he grew older, the Kentucky native caught the reenacting bug. In 1998, Utley and hundreds of his reenacting pards—including Robert Lee Hodge of Confederates in the Attic fame—re-created Stonewall Jackson’s famous Flank March on the very ground where the general’s soldiers advanced at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863.

Utley owns roughly 20 books on “Old Jack,” whom he admires for his devout Christian beliefs. In the back yard of his 10-acre spread, Utley raises chickens, just as Jackson did at his farm outside Lexington, Va., when he served as a professor at Virginia Military Institute.

“A lot of the ways he led his life, I lead mine,” says Utley, a devout Christian himself. 

In 2013, the idea to reproduce and sell Civil War handkerchiefs came to Utley while he was taking a lunch break at his cubicle at work.

“What is something I can do that nobody else can do?” the former patrol officer thought. “I want to find a niche that’s mine.”

At the time, Utley didn’t know anything about textiles and little about Civil War-era handkerchiefs. Reenactors used handkerchiefs as an added touch of authenticity for their uniforms. But no one, as far as Utley could tell, made versions that were true to the period.

“The big thing for me is I wanted to be as authentic as possible,” he says.

In 2014, Utley bought his first original Civil War handkerchief from a Virginia antiques/relics dealer. The 18- by 16-inch cotton hanky belonged to Lieutenant S. Millet Thompson of the 13th New Hampshire. On the handkerchief —which features black, red, and tan patterns—the officer had stenciled his name and regiment. Thompson survived the war, including a wound at the siege of Petersburg. He died in 1911.

Over the years, Utley purchased other handkerchiefs on eBay and from Civil War dealers from $500 to $1,000. In an online auction, Utley spotted a handkerchief carried by U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield at Gettysburg, but he dropped out of the bidding when it soared to several thousand dollars.

All Utley’s originals belonged to U.S. Army soldiers except for one. When new, most featured vibrant colors, now dulled by time. Some have intricate patterns. All are made of either cotton or silk. A soldier paid about $1.50 for a silk hanky, less for cotton. Utley’s reproductions sell for $15 to $30 apiece.

One of Utley’s originals was carried by Lincoln Ripley Stone, a surgeon in the 54th Massachusetts, the most famous Black regiment of the war. The Harvard Medical School graduate served with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was killed in the 54th Massachusetts’ epic night attack at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863.

Corporal Cyrus Dennis of the 1st Maryland “Potomac Home Brigade” Cavalry (U.S.) carried another. Utley owns his wartime Bible, too. Another belonged to Private Reuben Sweet of the 5th Wisconsin, who served under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman during his March to the Sea.

The only non-soldier handkerchief in Utley’s collection was carried by a Philadelphia man named George Johnson, a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Escaped slaves used the network of clandestine routes and safe houses to escape to free states and freedom.

The first original soldier handkerchief Utley re-created for sale came from the collection of an Idaho doctor. That hanky is named the “Galloway” after the collector’s surname.

For a nominal fee, Utley has purchased the reproduction rights of other soldier handkerchiefs from the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va.; the Adams County (Pa.) Historical Society in Gettysburg; the Ohio Historical Society; the Oshkosh (Wis.) Public Museum, and elsewhere.

After receiving photos of handkerchiefs from Utley, a designer in Europe re-creates the hankies in digital form in their original, striking colors.

“My aim was to make them look like new,” Utley says.

An overseas mill makes the cotton or silk handkerchiefs for Utley, who sells them on his website and at Civil War shows. They’re also available at the Chickamauga battlefield in Georgia and at two outlets in Gettysburg.

Besides living historians, Utley says the handkerchiefs are popular with attorneys and cowboy action shooters who participate in Old West target competitions.

Hollywood likes Utley’s hankies and reproduction clothing, too. He has spotted his goods in movies such as The Free State of Jones, Nightmare Alley, and Jane Got a Gun. 

“It’s gotten to be so common that I no longer make a mental note of it,” he says.

In a display case on a bottom shelf in the nerve center, I stare at one of Utley’s original handkerchiefs—probably his favorite, he tells me. “Norman Hastings,” reads the name stenciled on the handkerchief in neat, block letters. “Co. C 45th Reg. Mass. V.”

In mid-September 1862, the 29-year-old married farmer enlisted as a private in the 45th Massachusetts, a nine-month regiment. On November 5, 1862, his regiment departed from Boston on the steamship Mississippi, bound for North Carolina to reinforce U.S. Army occupation forces.

In North Carolina, 45th Massachusetts soldiers suffered from yellow fever, typhoid, and dysentery. As the weather turned brutally hot—a “fiery furnace,” a 45th Massachusetts veteran recalled—the already debilitating conditions turned worse.

“The sickness increased daily, and some poor fellows passed on to their resting-place above, when almost in reach of that earthly home towards which their thoughts and dreams had so long been directed,” a regimental historian wrote.

On June 24, 1863, Hastings and his bedraggled 45th Massachusetts comrades jammed aboard the steamer S.R. Spaulding, bound for Boston and their families.

“Forlorn and weary,” an observer described the soldiers.

On the journey from Fort Monroe, a stop in Virginia en route to Massachusetts, Hastings and another 45th Massachusetts man died from disease, probably dysentery. They were only several days’ travel from home.

“Their bodies will be forwarded to their friends,” a contemporaneous newspaper account noted. On Hastings’ “Casualty Sheet,” a clerk wrote: “Effects sent [to] wife.” Hastings’ cotton handkerchief probably was among them.

On the shelf near the Hastings hanky, another display case catches my eye. It contains two handkerchiefs—one plain white with a pattern along the edges and another featuring a maroon design—as well as a small tobacco box and an old metal chain, perhaps for a watch.

The relics belonged to Ira Lindsay, a 38-year-old machinist and shoemaker from Worcester, Mass. In 1857, he married a woman named Mary Estabrook, who bore him three children: Ellen, Kate, and Joseph Jr. On March 17, 1864, their father enlisted in the 25th Massachusetts as a private.

In early June 1864, Lindsay and his comrades found themselves at Cold Harbor, a dusty hamlet 10 miles northeast of Richmond. On June 3, in Ulysses Grant’s infamous, poorly coordinated charge, the 25th Massachusetts was among the Army of the Potomac regiments cut to pieces.

“[Our] lines were broken [and] the flying iron crushed bones like glass, and men and officers seemed to be staggered,” a 25th Massachusetts soldier recalled.

In the assault, Lindsay and 74 other soldiers in his regiment suffered mortal wounds. He may have bled on the chain in the display case. An old tag with it reads: “Blood was never washed off” and “Chain worn by father in the army.”

I wonder about those handkerchiefs.

Did Lindsay use them to wipe away tears after he received a letter from his wife, Mary?

Did he wrap one of them around a tintype of his children? Joseph Jr. was only nine months old when he lost his father.

Did Lindsay or someone else use them to stanch his wounds as he lay dying at Cold Harbor?

Who sent the relics home to Lindsay’s family?

I ask Utley if he visits his handkerchiefs late at night, as I probably would, perhaps to commune with the spirit of their owners.

“I think about what these have seen and whose pockets they were in,” he tells me. Then he pauses.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it just seems surreal that I own them.”

John Banks, author of two Civil War books, has another one coming in late-spring 2023. Check out A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). Banks’ home base is Nashville, Tenn.

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On December 31, 1862, the same day the much-bloodier Battle of Stones River raged to the east in Murfreesboro, Tenn., 1,800 Confederate cavalrymen under Nathan Bedford Forrest fought two Union brigades of Midwesterners at the hamlet of Parker’s Crossroads. In the preceding days, Forrest’s aim had been to disrupt Union supply lines in West Tennessee and Mississippi.

The battle resulted in roughly 750 casualties and almost the capture of Forrest, who ended up burnishing his reputation in this unheralded fight. Both sides claimed victory, but the battle is considered a Confederate triumph.

In the late 1960s, the construction of Interstate 40 bisected the battlefield, which today is maintained by the town of Parker’s Crossroads. Of the 1,400 acres encompassing the battlefield, 370 acres are preserved—all core hallowed ground, according to Steve McDaniel, a battlefield guide and longtime city manager. McDaniel is a lifelong Parker’s Crossroads resident whose family roots in the area date to 1820.

Battlefield walkers can explore four miles of paved trails and examine more than 50 interpretive markers in park areas on the north and south sides of the interstate. No historic homes remain standing on the battlefield.

About 85 miles west of Nashville, this remains a small town (pop. 284). From Parker’s Crossroads, visitors can travel to the Shiloh and Fort Donelson battlefields, each a little more than an hour’s drive away, or visit nearby Jackson, Tenn., where Forrest’s cavalry clashed earlier in December 1862 with Federal soldiers stationed at Salem Cemetery. For Civil War Trails sites to see in Jackson, visit historynet.com/jackson-tenn.

Visitor Center

A short distance off Exit 108 on Interstate 40 stands the small battlefield visitor center and museum. A display inside includes the Colt Model 1860 .44-caliber revolver of 3rd Tennessee Private Gideon Richardson (CSA), who suffered a mortal wound at Parker’s Crossroads, as well as a replica of a mountain howitzer used by Forrest’s troops. Visitors can watch an 18-minute movie about the battle in the museum. Outside, a Civil War Trails marker explains the action.

Rev. John Parker House Site

Parker’s house, which no longer stands, and his surrounding fields and nearby orchard became the vortex of the battle. A slave holder and Baptist minister, Parker farmed cotton, corn, and tobacco. In the chaos of battle near the house, a U.S. soldier held Forrest at gunpoint and demanded his surrender. The wily Forrest told the Federal he had already surrendered and his men were stacking arms near the house. A trace of the old Lexington-Huntingdon Road—a vital battlefield route—can still be seen nearby.

“Charge ’em both ways!”

In this field, on the north end of the battlefield park, Forrest supposedly uttered his famous four words when caught between Union brigades: “Charge ’em both ways!” Years ago, an archaeological survey in these fields turned up nothing but a piece of ancient pottery. “Bodies are out here,” McDaniel insists about battle casualties, “but we just don’t know where they are.”

John Parker’s grave in Jones Cemetery

A Unionist before the war, Parker died in 1864. His wife, Rebecca, died in 1871 and was buried next to him. The Rev. Parker supposedly switched allegiance to the Confederacy after a U.S. officer refused to move artillery placed in his yard during the battle. The Parkers’ graves are the only ones facing north in the cemetery. According to family lore, the doctor wanted to be buried facing that direction so he could kick the Yankees back home upon his call to heaven.

Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery

Near Jones Cemetery is a cemetery for 21st-century interments of veterans. But this burial ground has a connection to the Civil War, too. A Texas man had a marker placed here in memory of Addison H. White, who served in the 13th Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.). On April 12, 1863, he was killed at Fort Pillow, near Memphis, Tenn. White’s burial site is unknown.

Burial site for Union soldiers

This gray-granite slab in a strip of woods near Interstate 40 denotes the location of a burial site for Union fallen. Two years after the war, remains were exhumed for reburial in a national cemetery in Corinth, Miss. In 1993, an archaeological excavation uncovered remains of a soldier as well as a piece of blue wool. More bodies probably remain. “You don’t know where you’ll find a body out here,” McDaniel says. “It’s all hallowed ground.”

Confederate artillery position

From this site on the south end of the battlefield, Confederate artillery enfiladed the U.S. Army line. It’s a battlefield interpretive area in a neighborhood of modern houses today. Years ago, a metal detectorist unearthed friction primers for artillery here. At the dedication of the battlefield in 2006, the concussion of a replica cannon fired at the interpretive area toppled a dogwood.

B.E. Scott Bar-B-Que
10880 US-412, Lexington

After a trek around the battlefield, grab a bite at “the best at Parker’s Crossroads,” according to one reviewer. B.E. Scott was founded in 1962 to “make the best whole hog hickory smoked pit barbeque anywhere.” You can be the judge! 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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After spending a sleepless Saturday night in a sketchy Richmond hotel, I drive surprisingly uncongested highways to the unheralded New Market Heights battlefield, where U.S. Colored Troops made history. Promptly at 8:30 a.m., I arrive at the already crowded Four Mile Creek Park parking lot, located behind a snake-rail fence astride New Market Road. All my deep-weeds battlefield walk essentials are accounted for: bug spray, long pants, hiking boots, water, snacks, a cellphone and backpack, and curiosity.

Days earlier, Tim Talbott—my New Market Heights guide—had messaged me a warning: “It’s supposed to be as hot as blue blazes.” His forecast proves spot-on. Virginia in late July is hell with the lid off. But I figure Talbott—the 52-year-old Central Virginia Battlefields Trust chief administrative officer—won’t mind.

“It’s always an honor to be on that ground,” he messaged me in a follow-up to his weather report.

In the parking lot in Henrico, 10 miles southeast of downtown Richmond, Talbott and I exchange pleasantries. This is our first meeting in person, although we’ve made dozens of Civil War–related connections online. Talbott wears blue jeans, an olive ballcap with the CVBT logo, and a maroon T-shirt. Strands of gray appear in the soft-spoken Tennessee native’s black goatee. He lives in Fredericksburg, Va., a 70-mile drive north on beastly Interstate 95.

Talbott has secured permission from Henrico County for us to walk the core New Market Heights battlefield, where, on September 29, 1864, 14 U.S. Colored Troops soldiers and two of their white officers earned the Medal of Honor. The county owns the most important swath of the battlefield, now blanketed by a forest of pine, holly, gum, and oak.

Our battlefield walk begins at a large garbage dumpster, behind a Dairy Queen on the opposite side of New Market Road. Three feral cats—two black, one gray—scatter as we walk toward them and disappear into the woods.

New Market Heights has been stiff-armed in the history books, but it is Talbott’s favorite battlefield. Armchair historians sometimes confuse it with the Battle of New Market, fought in the Shenandoah Valley in mid-May 1864. Talbott’s interest in the battle stems from a talk given by a professional historian nearly 20 years ago.

“The way he told the story made it come alive,” he says while brushing away pine branches along our narrow path through the woods.

My interest in New Market Heights stems from a meeting at nearby Fort Harrison weeks earlier with Damon Radcliffe, the great-great-grandson of Edward Ratcliff. A former slave, Edward served in the 38th U.S. Colored Troops and received one of those 14 Medals of Honor. Damon and I couldn’t walk the battlefield that day, but I vowed to return. My mantra: If you want to understand a battle, you must walk the ground.

Fifteen minutes into our walk, we reach a section of woods where the earth undulates, like a haphazardly tossed brown blanket. We have arrived at the remains of earthworks created by the famed Texas Brigade.

“Used to be chest high,” Talbott says of defenses, now only as high as three feet in places.

Piles of brown leaves, as well as gnarly tree roots, scattered broken twigs, tree branches and limbs, carpet the forest floor. Mayflies make pests of themselves while cicadas buzz and click. About a half-mile away, traffic hums on six lanes of Interstate 295, which slices through the battlefield like a bayonet through the heart.

In a charge about daybreak toward the earthworks, Black troops shouted: “Remember Fort Pillow! No quarter for the Rebels.” Nearly six months earlier, troops commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest had massacred USCT at Fort Pillow in Tennessee.

On that bleak, foggy morning at New Market Heights, Black soldiers were out for revenge and a chance to prove their mettle. With one great push by the Union Army, USCT soldiers could soon be marching into the capital of the Confederacy.

Behind earthworks, the Texas Brigade, some 2,000-strong, fired thousands of rounds into the oncoming USCT soldiers they despised. Meanwhile, Rebel artillery, positioned at opposite ends of the heights behind the brigade, poured iron into the USCT.

Fifty to 75 yards in front of their earthworks, the Rebels had placed abatis—sharpened tree branches—and wooden chevaux de fries, the distant cousin of barbed wire. Gaps in the defenses funneled the Black soldiers into a kill zone.

“The Texans,” a Georgia officer wrote, “killed n——s galore.”

Confederate soldiers occasionally advanced beyond their earthworks to strip the dead of shoes, weapons, and ammunition. They murdered at least one captured USCT soldier behind their lines.

Talbott and I venture deeper into the woods, to get a USCT soldier’s perspective of the battlefield.

Perspiration pours down my arm, soaking my reporter’s notebook and blurring my scribbled words. I’ve never sweat so much on a battlefield—even in Resaca, Ga., during a reenactment on a blistering mid-May afternoon.

Soon, the drone of interstate traffic becomes a memory. The ground slopes gently up toward the Texas Brigade’s earthworks, which stretched for roughly ¾ of a mile. But the tree-covered landscape—largely open ground in 1864—makes New Market Heights mostly a battlefield of the mind.

To create a path through the woods, Talbott uses a long stick to swat away holly branches and spider webs. Neither of us wants to take home a blood-sucking tick as a memory of this experience.

“Is this remote enough for you?” Talbott asks.

Eighty yards or so beyond Rebel earthworks, we stop at the edge of a 50-acre rock quarry filled with water—a nasty 20th-century scar on hallowed ground.

“A friend of mine jokes that you could only give kayak tours here now,” Talbott says. 

In Talbott’s perfect world, the quarry would be emptied and filled in. The battlefield where hundreds of Black soldiers and their White officers shed blood would be restored to its 1864 appearance and interpreted. Soldiers such as Corporal Miles James of the 36th USCT, among the 14 Medal of Honor recipients from this battle, would be at least as well-known as Benjamin Butler—the Army of the James general who commanded them.

Born in Princess Anne County, Va., James had enlisted in Norfolk in November 1863. A 34-year-old farmer, he probably was enslaved before the war. He stood 5 feet 7 with black eyes and hair.

Within 30 yards of Texas Brigade defenses, a bullet burrowed into James’ upper left arm, shattering bone. Somehow the corporal continued to load and fire his weapon with his good arm, urging on comrades as the battle swirled. James endured the amputation of his useless limb on the battlefield. Later, the corporal received treatment at Fort Monroe, 75 miles east in the Virginia coast, and a promotion to sergeant.

Despite losing an arm—a golden ticket out of the service if he wanted it—James refused to leave the army. In February 1865, Colonel Alonzo Draper—who commanded James’ brigade at New Market Heights—wrote Fort Monroe’s chief surgeon:

“He is one of the bravest men I ever saw; and is in every respect a model soldier. He is worth more with his single arm, than half a dozen ordinary men.”

James served in the U.S. Army until a disability discharge in October 1865. Hundreds of other Black soldiers like him, nearly all of them former slaves, fought as well as James at New Market Heights.

“Unbelievable bravery,” Talbott says of the USCT.

At Four Mile Creek, which snakes its way through the battlefield before dumping into the James River, Talbott and I talk about the white officers on horseback who became prime targets of the Rebels.

“This is where the Rebels thought the USCT would become nothing but rabble after the officers fell,” Talbott says. The creek itself became a devilish impediment to USCT soldiers under withering fire.

At creekside, I learn more about Talbott, too.

He grew up in Madison, Ind., a stop on the Underground Railroad—the network escaped slaves used to flee to free states and Canada. At his 1,000-student high school, he played football (“not very well”) and grew to enjoy rap and hip-hop—which some of his white peers thought strange.

Talbott’s high school history teacher—“a 1960s hippie”—exposed him to “all the cultural stuff,” including the Civil Rights era and two of its leading personalities, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. For the past 30 years, he has immersed himself in the experiences of Black people during the Civil War.

On his phone, Talbott displays wallpaper of Frederick Douglass—the famous Black orator, abolitionist, writer, and reformer. The copy of the painting on his maroon T-shirt, now drenched with sweat, is of a one-legged USCT soldier on crutches. Talbott dreams of a monument at Four Mile Creek Park to honor the USCT, who forced the Texas Brigade to fall back to a secondary line. The Black troops ultimately entered Richmond, but not until after the capital’s fall in April 1865.

As we walk through the Virginia forest, Talbott and I wonder why this battle—and this battlefield—have been consigned to the shadows of history. Racism? Indifference? Ignorance? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an effort failed by a Black military history group to have the battlefield named a National Historic Landmark.

Thankfully, hundreds of acres of the New Market Heights battlefield have been saved by the American Battlefield Trust and other preservation groups. But much has been lost forever because of modern development.

Two hours after our walk began, sweaty and dirty, we leave the woods and September 1864 behind. On a pathway along New Market Road to the Four Mile Creek Park parking lot, Talbott and I talk about the battle, preservation, and Civil War memory.

“Many people say they love history, but what they really love is nostalgia,” he says. “I love messy history. That’s where the good stuff is.”

Messy history—that’s a perfect encapsulation of the Battle of New Market Heights.

John Banks, author of two Civil War books, has another one coming in 2023. Check out A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing) for more on this story. For more on New Market Heights, including soldier stories, go to battleofnewmarketheights.org

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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The Amos Humiston story resonates like few others from Gettysburg. On July 1, 1863 — Day 1 of the epic, three-day battle — a local resident discovered the body of the 154th New York Infantry sergeant near John Kuhn’s brickyard, north of the town square. The soldier clutched in his hand an image of three children. He carried no identification.

To identify the children and thus reveal the soldier’s name, a doctor had hundreds of cartes-de-visite of the photograph created and distributed. “Whose Father Was He?” read the headline above a story about the image in The Philadelphia Inquirer and other Northern newspapers. The publicity effort worked. Months after the battle, Humiston’s widow identified him after reading a detailed description of the photograph of the children in a religious publication.

More Gettysburg Photo Mysteries

But the Humiston saga wasn’t the only mystery involving Gettysburg photographs. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, burial crews discovered other poignant images — a torn portrait of a fiancée, a blood-spattered image in a captain’s stiff fingers, a baby’s likeness smeared with blood and many others — among bodies, Bibles, scraps of letters, clothing, and weaponry.

In November 1867, a daguerreotype of a woman — in her early 20s with “dark hair, combed back and falling loosely over her shoulders” — was unearthed, along with a soldier’s remains and a cartridge box containing 43 bullet, near the Emmitsburg Road at Gettysburg Based on the location on the battlefield, the grave was believed to belong to a fallen Confederate. As one newspaper reported: “We have been particular in describing the daguerreotype, as it may lead to its identification.”

Identification of this soldier and the image of the young woman, however, were not ascertained. The names of other subjects in photographs found on the battlefield also have been lost to history.

CLoser to Answers

But enough clues have surfaced for us to inch closer to solving two other Amos Humiston-like Gettysburg mysteries. Each involves a Confederate soldier, whose remains — like Humiston’s — were found with a mysterious photograph. We don’t have all the answers yet.

So, jumpstart your brains, log on to genealogy sites, and scour old newspapers. More than 158 years after one Gettysburg photo mystery was settled, you can assist in solving two more.

A Bloody Souvenir

At about dawn on July 4, 1863, the 87th anniversary of the creation of the United States and the day after Pickett’s Charge, Russell Glenn of the 14th Connecticut Infantry searched the battlefield with comrades near the Bloody Angle. The soldiers found a “terrible valley of death”: bloodied and battered enemies, body parts, and the detritus of war.

While some of Glenn’s comrades assisted wounded Rebels, others searched for war trophies, a common activity of soldiers following a battle. Then the 19-year-old corporal happened upon a Confederate lying face up near a boulder, his blue eyes wide open as if staring at the sky.

He is handsome — even noble-looking — and so lifelike that he appears he can speak, Glenn thought to himself about the fallen enemy, perhaps a teen. Then he noticed the gruesome, bloody hole in the Rebel’s chest, perhaps from a bullet or canister, and knew death must have come quickly.

When Glenn stooped to examine the curly-haired Confederate, clad in a gray blouse and coat, he noticed something in his hand, near his left breast. He broke the death grip and examined the object, a daguerreotype of a young woman in her late teens or early 20s. She was clad in a high-necked dress with what appeared to be a brooch pinned near the top. Her hair, parted in the middle, formed a bun. With a Mona Lisa–like hint of a smile, she stared straight ahead. The case was battle-damaged, but the image itself remained unscathed.

Glenn wondered if the photograph was a sweetheart: Did this man stare at the image as he died? Using the Confederate’s coat, the teen wiped blood from the photograph’s glass cover and slipped the souvenir into his coat pocket. Burial crews tossed the remains of the unknown soldier — perhaps from the 16th North Carolina or an Alabama regiment — into a long trench with dozens of his comrades.

Glenn After the Find

Glenn was slightly wounded in the head and face at Gettysburg, severely wounded in the breast at Hatcher’s Run, near Petersburg, and suffered two other war wounds. By February 1865, he had become a 1st sergeant for the hard-fighting unit that had seen action at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Morton’s Ford and elsewhere. But Glenn survived the war and returned to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

As a civilian, Glenn served as a police officer and a truant officer and became an influential member of veterans’ organizations. The war — and the Gettysburg photograph he had brought home with him — remained seared into his brain. In 1911, Glenn gave such a graphic description of Pickett’s Charge to a Grand Army of the Republic gathering that “the audience had but little difficulty in seeing why” Confederates “gladly surrendered after their awful experience.”

Two years later, weeks before Glenn attended a 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg with 14th Connecticut comrades, a Bridgeport newspaper made the daguerreotype subject of a page-one story. “Glenn’s Trophy Tells Tragedy of the Civil War,” the headline read, followed by “Worn Daguerreotype Is Token of Romance Blighted by Conflict” and “Bridgeport Soldier Has Not Sought to Restore It Fearful of Causing Heartaches.”

Concluded the newspaper: “This little incident of a terrible battle, one of a thousand too trivial to be noticed by the historian yet a mighty reason why there should be no more war, remained to be told by the camp-fire and after the war about the fireside.”

After the war, the story explained, Glenn tried to find the young lady in the daguerreotype, which had remained in the veteran’s possession since its discovery. “A woman who lost [a] father, brothers and [a] sweetheart at Gettysburg is believed to be the original of the picture,” the newspaper reported. Glenn was certain of her identity, but he was “fearful of reopening an old wound [and] he refrained from communicating with her.”

Frustrating future historians and amateur detectives, the newspaper offered no name or other clues that could lead to the identification of the woman or the fallen Confederate found with the photo.

In 1906, a copy of the image appeared in the 14th Connecticut regimental history. In the accompanying text, Glenn called the photograph “the most valuable relic of his war experience.”

On Nov. 29, 1919, the morning after he attended the funeral of a friend, Glenn died of heart disease at 74. He left a widow and two sons. No mention of the veteran’s prized Civil War souvenir appeared in his obituary in The Republic Farmer, a local newspaper.

The fate of the image, as well as the names of the subject and owner, remains unknown. Perhaps with deeper research, more information will surface about Glenn and the photograph that had such an impact on his life. He, of course, wasn’t the only veteran to have an extraordinary experience involving an image found on the battlefield.

Postwar Discovery

On a warm day in late July 1878, as Confederate fallen were exhumed on William Blocher’s farm north of Gettysburg, a skull surfaced from a grave; so did a “C.S.A”-stamped belt buckle, a brass “3,” “1,” and “F” from a kepi, and other accoutrements. And, as a Civil War veteran Henry Mark Mingay watched the tedious work, a remarkable artifact appeared between two rib bones: an ambrotype — a photograph produced on a glass plate — of two girls and a young lady.

The woman, with jet-black hair and red-tinted cheeks, appeared to be in her late 20s. The children, between 4 and 10 years old, had the same features as the young lady. Newspapers published contradictory reports on how the photo ended up with Mingay, who was visiting Gettysburg with comrades.

“The case had decayed,” a Gettysburg newspaper reported days after the discovery, “but the picture is still perfect, showing features, clothing, coloring and gilding with the clearness of recent taking.”

Based on the etching on an old grave marker and the company and regimental designations from the kepi, the Confederate served with the 31st Georgia. (Another newspaper account noted that the fallen Rebel served with the 7th Georgia, but Blocher said he was a 31st Georgia soldier.)

On July 1, the 31st Georgia fought across the Blocher Farm north of Gettysburg. But no identification was found with the fallen soldier in Company F, a unit raised in Pulaski County. Could the soldier’s wife and children be the subjects in the ambrotype — “their last gift to papa,” as a Pennsylvania newspaper speculated days after its discovery?

The Story Behind the Blocher Farm Photo

Like Russell Glenn’s relic, the Blocher Farm photograph has a tantalizing history — one intertwined with Mingay, a diminutive man with a keen sense of humor. “A natural ham,” a newspaper reporter once called him.

Born on Dec. 3, 1846, in Filby, England, Mingay immigrated to the United States with his family in 1850, eventually settling in Saratoga, New York. In 1860, he left school to become a shoe shiner and a “printer’s devil” — an apprentice in a newspaper’s printing department. In April 1861, he heard news of the shelling of Fort Sumter from a telegrapher, who told him to sprint like hell to deliver word to his employer.

On Aug. 29, 1864, 17-year-old Mingay enlisted as a private in Company D of the 69th New York — part of the famed Irish Brigade — and served through the rest of the war. In June 1865, he mustered out as a sergeant.

After the war, Mingay was active in veterans’ organizations — it was at Grand Army of the Republic event in Gettysburg that he acquired the ambrotype, possibly from Blocher, who reportedly witnessed the 31st Georgia soldier’s burial by U.S. Army soldiers in 1863. Mingay took the treasure home to Penn-Yann, New York, intent on returning it to the fallen Georgian’s family.

In August 1878, a Gettysburg newspaper reported Mingay planned to “have the facts [about the image] well published, with the view to the restoration of the picture to the family of the deceased.” According to another Pennsylvania newspaper, the photograph was taken to Philadelphia, where copies were to be made and then sent to Georgia “in the hope of discovering the relatives of the dead soldier.” But it’s unknown whether the ambrotype ever made it to Philadelphia or any copies were made and distributed.

In 1897, the photograph’s trail picks up in Colorado, where Mingay had moved 12 years earlier. By the late 1890s, the successful newspaperman was interested in finding a home for his collection of other war relics — mementos that included not only the photograph, but a piece of the tree near where a bullet fatally wounded Union Maj. Gen. John Reynolds at Gettysburg; a penny dug up at Dutch Gap Canal in Virginia; a pen-holder Mingay used at Petersburg; slivers of the 77th New York’s regimental and battle flags; and a piece of overcoat, with the button attached, from the 31st Georgia soldier’s grave.

In August 1897, Mingay donated artifacts — including the prized ambrotype and the button attached to the overcoat— to the State of Colorado for inclusion in a display of war relics at the state capitol in Denver. Even 34 years after the battle, Mingay hoped the soldier’s relatives might claim the photograph.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Colorado Clues

In the Rocky Mountain News on Aug. 16, 1897, a story about the veteran’s donations included an illustration of the ambrotype with this description: 

“The center person is a lady of apparently 30 years of age, with dark hair, and wearing a check dress, with a white collar. She wears a gold breast-pin and a ring on the third finger of her left hand. On either side of her are two girls … one with dark hair of a lighter tint …. Each of the girls has a gold chain around her neck.”

The frame of the ambrotype was “somewhat discolored,” the newspaper reported, “but the features of the sitters in the portrait are still distinct.”

The day of the story’s publication, the custodian of Colorado’s war relics mailed a copy of the Rocky Mountain News article to Georgia’s adjutant general with a letter seeking assistance in identifying the subjects of the portrait. “I was a soldier in the federal army,” wrote Cecil A. Deane, “and know how greatly the ambrotype will be regarded if its rightful owner can be found. It will afford me great pleasure to assist in restoring it to such person.”

A week later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reprinted the illustration with details about the ambrotype’s discovery. “Who Claims This Picture?” read the headline. The answer was in the veteran’s own backyard.

In a front-page story in The Denver Post on November 24, 1897, “Mrs. Frank Smith” wept as she stared at the ambrotype during a visit to the war relic museum in Denver. Those are my sisters, the Como, Colorado, woman declared. The soldier it was found with is my brother. One of the sisters in the ambrotype also lived in Como. The newspaper did not report the whereabouts of the other sister.

In 1861, “Mrs. Smith’s brother enlisted in the Confederate army, taking with him the picture answering identically this description of this one,” the Post reported. Added the newspaper: “A peculiar feature of this case is the fact that the man who found the picture, and two of the women whose portraits are on it, live in Colorado.”

But the Post left out many vital details, including: Who was Mrs. Frank Smith? What was her maiden name and names of her sisters and fallen brother? Neither the News nor the Post followed up on their Gettysburg photo stories.

At Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, only three soldiers in the 31st Georgia in Company F — the “Pulaski Blues” — suffered mortal wounds: Privates Samuel Jackson and Thomas Lupo and Sergeant George H. Gamble. Could one of these soldiers be linked to “Mrs. Frank Smith”? Searches on ancestry.com and other genealogy sites have failed to yield a definitive answer. 

In 1914, Mingay — one of the men who inspired this hunt — moved from Colorado to California. Thirty-one years later, the blind widower married again, after a 12-year courtship — his new bride was 68; he was 98. “I’m the luckiest boy in the world,” the oldest member of the Nathaniel Banks Grand Army of the Republic Post of Glendale, California, told reporters after the nuptials.

When Mingay died at 100 in 1947, the local celebrity left behind a daughter, three grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and a Burbank (Calif.) elementary school that bore his name. Like the fallen 31st Georgia soldier, the “Three Young Ladies in the Gettysburg Grave” photograph remained an enigma.

A Big Clue in 2021

In 2021, the most tantalizing clue of all surfaced online — the location of our mystery photograph was revealed as the History Colorado Center museum in Denver. An examination of the image could uncover a name on the plate or another clue. But like wisps of gun smoke on a battlefield, the photograph has disappeared in the museum’s collection. “[A digital copy] of the image that you have requested and paid for is inaccessible to us at this time,” wrote a museum representative.

John Banks is the author of two Civil War books and his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com). Banks, who never misses an episode of the crime show “Dateline,” loves mysteries. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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While Dirk Warner toils on his 127-acre farm—the heart of the Cumberland Church battlefield—he often envisions April 7, 1865. Cannons boom, musketry rattles, battle smoke lingers, soldiers shout, blood flows. Then a spade plunges into the rich Virginia earth. A soldier rolls a friend into a grave. The cycle of war and death. How benumbing. How timeless.

Warner plans to be buried on the battlefield, too—“over by those redbuds,” he tells me as we walk his hallowed ground. Until then, Warner has a battlefield to nurture, protect, and interpret. Artifacts to unearth. A battle book to write. Dreams to turn into reality. A mystery to solve. I have one, too:

Why did it take me so long to hear about the Battle of Cumberland Church?

Before my journey to rural, south-central Virginia, I knew nothing about this battle fought in the war’s waning days. The five-hour brawl five miles north of Farmville became the last bullet point on Robert E. Lee’s military resume, his final victory. It resulted in 900 casualties—650 Union and 250 Confederate—but earned only a brief mention in the Official Records. Two days later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

“History makes but little mention of the battle … as events of greater importance followed so closely,” a Union veteran recalled, “but the participants know that troops never fought more valiantly than did Lee’s soldiers in their last effort when they repulsed the assault of the veterans of the 2d Corps.”

The previous night, I meet Warner for the first time to get a bead on him and the lay of his land. I step into a pile of cow manure but remain unfazed. It’s clear almost instantly this will be an epic visit.

Warner is a cattle farmer and a longtime producer and director for a Richmond TV station. We bond over a mutual enthusiasm for Civil War history. He introduces me to his Siberian Husky and American Eskimo mix named Izzy, who wants to kiss me. I shoot a selfie with his pet black Angus steer named Nibbles. 

Until his death in 2010, Warner’s father-in-law, Dr. Woodrow Wilson Taylor—a veterinarian and World War II vet—owned the farm and lived in the post-battle house on the property. Warner lives in Doc’s place now with his wife, Jane.

“He made two requests of me when I married his daughter,” Warner says of Doc. “Look after her and look after his place.” No problem. Married since 1992, Warner still cherishes Wilson’s farm. 

“Sacred ground,” he calls the battlefield. “Incredible.”

As we walk the farm on a frosty morning, Warner shows me where Union troops formed. Andrew Humphreys, the 2nd Corps commander, made his headquarters here. U.S. Army cannons belched iron and death from the farm.

Confederate General William Mahone—all 5-foot-6 and 100 pounds of him—made his headquarters a mile away at Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The commander of Lee’s rearguard may have sought aid from a higher power. The Yankees outnumbered “Little Billy” and the rest of Lee’s army at Cumberland Church by nearly 2-to-1.

Cumberland Church, a brilliant, white beacon in morning sunlight, still holds services. But don’t bring your metal detector. “No Relic Hunting,” warns a sign out front. 

“See that high ground. The Confederates commanded all that.”

As we stand in a field in front of his house, Warner points into the distance, to a ridge beyond Bad Luck Creek and the Jamestown Road. That’s where Rebel soldiers manned a strong line. Warner’s sister-in-law sold land there that encompasses part of the Confederates’ position to the American Battlefield Trust, protecting it forever. 

Across Jamestown Road, at the apex of a Confederate line shaped roughly like a horseshoe, Colonel William Poague placed an artillery battery. Rebel gunners gave the Yankees “hell with grape and canister trimmings thrown in,” a Union veteran recalled. Remains of earthworks stand in a front yard of a modern house there.

Near the corner of Jamestown and Cumberland roads, 200 yards from Warner’s farm, hand-to-hand fighting broke out at the Huddleston place. The owner hid in the hearth of a fireplace with a slave during the battle, according to local lore. 

To bring this obscure battle into focus, Warner mines regimental histories, manuscripts, and soldier letters—anything he can find—for a book he wants to write. He mines his battlefield, too. In 1989, Warner began finding Miniés while digging post holes on the farm for “Doc.” He has since unearthed between 2,000 to 3,000 bullets—15 different varieties in all, including a rare Confederate Whitworth round.

“See where those cows are?” Warner points to ground near a tree line. “I found the Whitworth, a medical phalange, and a picture frame right there. Confederate shelling got so bad here, the Union soldiers had to vacate.” Fifty feet from his front door, Warner uncovered a Union spur. Near it, he found a beat-up U.S. belt buckle.

“See that humpy area.” Warner gestures toward the middle of a field. “A Confederate cavalry guy got killed out there. Found a whole bunch of Richmond Lab carbine bullets in the same spot. Someone lost an ammo pouch.” 

Warner bags most artifacts he finds for storage in bins in his house. He displays dozens of the relics in his home office. Only one other person may relic hunt on his battlefield—a friend who scours the fields with Warner and shares his passion for the battlefield.

“Everything he finds here, stays here,” Warner says.

Warner points out the “S” curve of an ancient stretch of the Old Jamestown Road that snakes through his battlefield. To our right, stood a thick growth of pines in 1865. Shortly before advancing, officers in the 2nd New York Heavy Artillery peeked from the edge of those woods.

“Boys,” a New York captain said, “there’s another wagon train for us over behind the rebel lines.”

The Federals advanced over an open, rolling field on Warner’s farm—“no man’s land,” he says. The soldiers halted briefly in a dip and charged as they closed to within 250 yards of their well-entrenched enemy.

Confederates answered Yankee cheers with the Rebel yell and sheets of lead and iron. Some Union soldiers reached the entrenchments and “fought to the death.” The entire 5th New Hampshire color guard fell. The Yankees fell back. 

Sergeant John C. Moorehead of the 148th Pennsylvania and his friend, 24-year-old bugler Joseph Harrison Law, surveyed the battle next to each other from astride their horses—probably on the very ground where Warner and I stand near the Old Jamestown Road. 

Law, a blue-eyed, light-haired farmer, had enlisted in the 148th Pennsylvania in Punxsutawney, Pa. He served in Company E with his younger brothers, Charles and Daniel. He also went by “Harrison” or “Harry.” Jovial and organized, Law seemed a natural for the army.

Shortly before he rode into battle at Cumberland Church, Harrison Law said he was eager to return to his 22-year-old wife, Mary, and four-year-old son, Carl. He had not seen them since his enlistment in August 1862. “Lee is on his last legs,” he told the regimental chaplain. “He will surrender in a day or two and then we shall soon get home.”

Shortly after Law finished his bugle call to rally the 4th Brigade, a Confederate artillery shell or solid shot carried away the top of his head. Moorehead leaped from his horse, plunged the brigade flag into the ground, and pulled his friend from his saddle. The bugler became the 210th—and last—soldier to die in the hard-fighting 148th Pennsylvania during the war.

Moorehead buried Law on the battlefield. Later, he presented Harry’s blood-spattered bugle to his brothers, who gave it to his widow. Law’s remains, however, never made it back to Pennsylvania. Moorehead died shortly after the war, leaving the location of Law’s grave a mystery.

“We know where he’s not buried,” Warner says. He stands in a shallow area in a thin patch of woods, yards off the Old Jamestown Road. In 2021, Warner had deployed ground-penetrating radar to try to locate Law’s remains. Nothing turned up, but he suspects the bugler rests near the “S”-shaped road. 

Earlier that year, Warner had connected with Law’s great-great- grandson, who supplied him with copies of dozens of wartime family letters and other information. Weeks after my visit, he walked the ground with Warner—a surreal, emotional experience for both.

On the night of April 7, Ulysses Grant—commander of all U.S. Army forces—sent a messenger through the lines to Lee: It’s time to give up. Lee asked James Longstreet, his “Old War Horse,” what he thought. “Not yet,” the lieutenant general said.

“That messenger rode right out here along the Jamestown Road and delivered the message by torchlight,” Warner says. Later that night, Lee’s army withdrew by light of bonfires in the woods beyond Bad Luck Creek.

The Army of Northern Virginia could have surrendered right here. But no historical markers designate the battlefield. “This place is forgotten,” Warner says.

And so Dirk Warner dreams that someday, perhaps after both he and Jane rest in graves near the redbud trees, this unheralded battlefield becomes a national park, his house the visitor center and museum. Relics unearthed on the farm become its centerpiece. 

Meanwhile, he will admire the warm glow of battlefield sunsets and think of the stories that linger on his farm like wisps of musket smoke.

“This place,” he says, “is so humbling.”

John Banks, author of two Civil War books, has another one coming in 2023. Check out “A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime” (Gettysburg Publishing) for more on Cumberland Church and stories about Andersonville, Antietam, and more.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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On a baby-blue sky fall afternoon, Richard Clem and I stand among the remains of cornstalks in a field on the old Otho J. Smith Farm near the Antietam battleground. The South Mountain range stretches across the horizon to the east; roughly 350 yards away stand large, modern farm buildings. A hint of cow manure wafts through the air.

Clem, a wiry octogenarian with a soft, deep voice, quickly shifts into storytelling mode…and I love it.

“John, I remember coming out here relic hunting, and when the sunlight hit the field just right, you could see the glass glistening from the broken medicine bottles from that hospital.” 

“Mr. Smith’s barn stood in the hollow out there. This hospital site was a mystery for many years.” 

“Right over here on this hill I found that ID disc of that VER-mont soldier.” 

A decade ago, I connected with Clem—a retired wood worker and lifelong Washington County, Md., resident—for a story about a Connecticut soldier who was killed by friendly fire at William Roulette’s farm at Antietam on September 17, 1862. We became fast friends, and no visit to Sharpsburg, Md., is complete for me now without exploring area historic sites with him or listening to Clem’s battlefield stories on his back porch.

I won’t forget the afternoon we examined the ruins of prewar kilns along the bank of the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, W.Va. (formerly Virginia), where friendly artillery fire killed 118th Pennsylvania soldiers on September 20, 1862. 

“You’re an old man,” his delightful wife Gloria kidded him before our trek that day. “Watch yourself out there.” But Clem navigated the hills with the enthusiasm of a 22-year-old history geek.

I also won’t forget the day we visited the grave of Nancy Campbell, once enslaved by Roulette—the man who farmed one of Antietam’s most infamous killing fields. Or the day we spent in the “Corner of Death” on David R. Miller’s farm, when five battlefield trampers marveled as Clem told them stories.

Or after a lunch at Captain Bender’s Tavern in Sharpsburg, when the ever-generous Clem handed me a gift of four bullets and a Union coat button that he had eyeballed on the surface of the ground in the Bloody Cornfield in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Shortly after my return home from that visit, an all-caps e-mail from Clem arrived in my in-box. Our visit, he wrote, was “A TIME I’LL LONG REMEMBER.”

In the late 1940s, Richard Clem’s grandmother Betty—then in her 60s—fueled his interest in the Civil War. On Sunday afternoons, his father pumped 50 cents’ worth of gas into an ancient Ford for excursions with the family from Hagerstown to the Antietam battlefield. Grandma packed a container with sardines, crackers, cheese, and water for the trips. Mom sat up front while Grandma sat in the back with Richard, whom she fondly called “Dickie.” 

While Dad drove over gravel battlefield roads and across Burnside Bridge, then open to vehicles, Grandma fed Clem a steady diet of local history—the lifelong western Maryland resident knew people who had lived through the battle. She even recalled Civil War veterans visiting Sharpsburg.

“Dickie,” Grandma said during a battlefield trip, “that’s the old Iney Swain home there, and she told me back when she was still alive that there were wounded soldiers in her barn from the state of Massachusetts.”

At Bloody Lane, where the family ate lunch, Grandma recounted what locals had told her about the battle. “Even months after the battle, people would slip here on pools of dried blood,” she’d tell Dickie. Sometimes the truth may have been stretched a bit.

On the return trip to Hagerstown on the Sharpsburg Pike, the Clems passed the site of Dunker Church, the iconic battlefield landmark that had collapsed in a windstorm in April 1921. Only a pile of bricks from the original church remained. Clem remembers when it was the site of a gas station and a convenience store that sold ice cream, beer, and sandwiches. In the early 1960s, the church was rebuilt on the site with many of the original bricks.

“Grandmother didn’t understand exactly what happened during the Civil War,” Clem says, “but she knew and spoke almost like it was reverent to her. Sometimes she’d even tear up.” 

Years later, Clem and his brother Don discovered the joys of hunting for battlefield relics. Most of the battlefield was in private hands then. So, on afternoons after work, Clem rode in his brother’s four-wheel drive jeep to Antietam, where they would eyeball relics in the fields—with a farmer’s permission, of course. 

On the surface, just south of Bloody Lane, Clem found his first bullet—a fired, Union three-ringer. He still has it. “If you found four or five bullets, that was a good afternoon,” Clem recalls about those early hunts. After a hard rain in the 1960s, he eyeballed 18 bullets behind Dunker Church.

Later, the Clem brothers discovered the joys of hunting for artifacts with metal detectors. Their hobby turned into an obsession. On leisurely walks with Gloria, Clem often stared at the ground, fixated on what Civil War-era metal might lie beneath the surface.

Over the years, the brothers unearthed roughly 30,000 bullets and other artifacts in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Years later, they sold more than 12,000 of those bullets to artifact dealers for a buck apiece. Clem gave many away.

But these hunts were never business for Clem, who hung up his metal detector for good several years ago. In a notebook, he documented many of the artifacts recovered, noting their location and other details. For Cracker Barrel and Gettysburg magazines and The Washington Times, Clem wrote deeply researched stories about his most remarkable finds. And he continues to share his vast local historical knowledge with others.

Most of Clem’s relic hunts were a short distance from his Hagerstown home in Washington County, where brigades of soldiers in both armies fought and camped from 1861-65. Thousands of bullets and other artifacts turned up in U.S. Army 6th Corps camp sites in a farm field across the road from his house. In his backyard, Clem unearthed his first U.S. box plate and 50-60 bullets.

At the Otho Smith Farm, Clem and I walk steps from where Alexander Gardner set up his camera in September 1862 for a series of remarkable photographs. Here, at the division hospital for U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William French, doctors, volunteers, and others cared for hundreds of Antietam wounded from both sides.

Two images Gardner shot on the farm intrigue me most. In a cropped enlargement of one, an unidentified man—undoubtedly a wounded soldier—rests in a makeshift, hay-covered tent. Another shows 14th Indiana regimental surgeon Anson Hurd standing among wounded.

Clem and I often wonder about the heart-rending scenes that played out here.

“Almost every hour I witnessed the going out of some young life,” recalled nurse Elizabeth Harris about her service on the farm. 

On the brink of death, a blue-eyed soldier—a “mere youth” with a “full, round face”—captured Harris’ heart. “Hold my hand till I die,” he told her. “I am trying to think of my Saviour; but think of my mother and father; their hearts will break.”

On a beautiful, fall day on the Smith Farm in 1991, Clem unearthed a brass identification disc—roughly the size of a quarter—under five inches of earth on a cedar-covered ridge. The rare find turned into an obsession for Clem, who has recovered three other soldier ID discs while relic hunting—a feat equivalent to Babe Ruth hitting four grand slams in a game.

Dog tags weren’t issued to Civil War soldiers; instead, they purchased their own “tags” in which they had their names and units stamped. No soldier wanted to be forgotten if he fell in battle or from disease. Letters, diaries, photographs, and ID discs often aided burial crews in the identification of soldier remains.

Clem’s dogged research brought the owner of the Smith Farm disc back to life. It belonged to 2nd Vermont color-bearer William Secor, a corporal, and the only soldier in his regiment to die at Antietam. Perhaps he was one of Harris’ patients.

Using a small hammer and lettered dies, a sutler probably hammered Secor’s name and regiment into the gold-plated disc. It may have cost the soldier 25 cents for a pair—one for him, another to send home.

Secor stood 5-foot-6¼, with blue eyes and brown hair. From Halfmoon, N.Y., he enlisted in neighboring Vermont. He was 21 and unmarried. On September 17, 1862, Secor was mortally wounded at Bloody Lane—an old sunken, country road during the battle and where the Clems picnicked decades later.

A condolence letter Clem discovered from Secor’s commanding officer to his stepfather shed further light on his last day on Earth.

“I saw the Chaplain that was with him in his last hours, and he said that it might be of consolation to his friends to know that he lived with a hope in Christ and was resigned to his fate,” Lieutenant Eugene O. Cole wrote. “As a soldier, there was none better.”

Clem believes U.S. Army comrades transported Secor to the Smith Farm along with countless other casualties. He likely was buried on the ridge with others. Perhaps their remains still rest there. Secor’s ID disc may have fallen out when his remains were disinterred for reburial in New York.

Before our visit to the farm ends, Clem pulls from his pocket the small disc. And so an Antietam story comes full circle. I am half-tempted to send Clem my own all-caps e-mail:

WE’RE GRATEFUL, RICHARD, THAT YOU KEEP HISTORY ALIVE. Ο

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Days before my visit to Davis Ford, a remote Duck River location near Columbia, Tenn., where 22,000 Confederates crossed in the late fall of 1864, guide Neal Pulley shoots me an eye-opening text: “Bring some orange. Don’t want to get shot! ”

No fan of becoming an inadvertent target of a deer hunter, I scour a big-box chain store for an orange vest. No luck in sporting goods. But in the men’s clothing section, another quarry is cornered: a gawd-awful, orange sweatshirt.

Poorer by $7.87, I toss my purchase into my duct-taped car and almost immediately suffer from buyer’s remorse. In a plastic box in the trunk rests a fluorescent, yellow cycling jacket—the perfect hiking attire.

This trip feels jinxed before it starts.

Still ornery, I drive the next morning to Columbia, Civil War country about 50 miles south of downtown Nashville, for a rendezvous with Pulley, an expert on obscure Davis Ford and the Battle of Columbia. Fabulous stories linger in the beautiful, rolling countryside a Confederate soldier called “God’s country.”

A couple miles from where Pulley and I meet south of town, Union officer-turned-Confederate cavalry commander Frank Armstrong married President James Polk’s great-niece on April 27, 1863. Confederate Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, a notorious womanizer and married father of five, attended the nuptials at Rally Hill, a circa-1830s mansion that still stands. So did Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the cavalry genius and infamous slave trader. Roughly a Napoleon cannon shot away stands the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs, where the remains of the former Klansman were recently transferred from Memphis for reburial.

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Months ago at the museum, I examined the bed Army of Tennessee commander John Bell Hood slept in while Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio marched past his soldiers in the dead of night in late November 1864—one of the war’s gutsiest moves. I’m no expert, but the one-legged, one-armed Hood probably didn’t curl up with the Confederate battle flag bedspread on that heirloom.

In the 1920s and ’30s, war relics were plentiful here in Maury County, where ground was trampled, camped on, and fought over by both armies. An acquaintance—a longtime relic hunter—enjoys telling stories of unearthing dozens of rare Whitworth bullets, Confederate belt plates, and thousands of other artifacts from area fields, woods, and construction sites. In the 1930s and ’40s, Pulley’s dad played with Civil War-era Enfield rifles in nearby Giles County, where he grew up. “They used to beat ’em on rocks,” Pulley says. Hunted squirrels with them, too.

Before we depart for the ford, Pulley explains “The Burn Line,” homes torched by Yankees in 1864 to clear a field of fire. Then we ride down the highway in his pickup, turn off on a rutted route with bomb-like craters caused by storm washout, and park near an old road.

Nervous and achy (curses to you, arthritis!), I put on the fluorescent jacket while Pulley dons a vest of orange and yellow. Then he hands me a bottle of bug spray.

“What animals are out here?” I ask.

“Well, skunks. Bobcats, too.”

Damn, I hate cats.

And so we trudge up the road, about a mile from our destination.

A longtime student of the Civil War, Pulley spends spare time researching the Battle of Columbia—a series of skirmishes and sharp fights fought November 24-29, 1864—for a book he plans to write. The Columbia native has multiple connections to the war: One ancestor served under Hood in the 53rd Tennessee while another rode with Forrest. One fought in the U.S. Army, too—“a red leg, a traitor on my mother’s side,” he says, half-kidding. According to family lore, Pulley’s great-great-grandmother was inadvertently struck in the calf by a U.S. Army bullet while kneading dough in Giles County.

On farmland, in woodlots, and near fords of the Duck River at Columbia, the armies fought in a prelude to the brutal Battle of Franklin on November 30. Casualties were light—about 10 for the U.S. Army, roughly 25 for the Confederates. But no matter the size of the battle, some family member or sweetheart somewhere mourned when they received news of a loved one’s death.

Eliza Donley, whose son James was a 65th Illinois corporal, was one of them.

At Columbia on November 26, 1864, Donley’s leg was shattered between the foot and knee by an artillery shell. “He bore it bravely like a good soldier as he is,” 65th Illinois 1st Sgt. George Heywood wrote days later to Eliza. “We were driven from the field and out of 19 men in the company 7 were wounded & one killed. It left us so small that we could not bring them off.”

Shortly after his wounding, James died, probably in enemy hands as Schofield soldiers headed toward Nashville, their ultimate destination. “I asked them about your son & they told me that he was no more,” wrote Heywood in another letter to Eliza, nearly a month after her son’s death. “I was surprised and sorry to hear it.” 

After Columbia, Hood aimed to flank Schofield’s army before it made it to Spring Hill. With a good chance to wreak havoc, he couldn’t dawdle. So, in late November 1864, he ordered a pontoon bridge built across the Duck River at Davis Ford.

To get to there, we navigate through a cornfield, deftly avoiding groundhog holes. “Careful,” Pulley says, “you can snap an ankle in those.” No worries. I’m expert at groundhog hole avoidance, having traipsed numerous times through David R. Miller’s Cornfield at Antietam.

We make our way to a rutted, military road on a bluff along the Duck River. The distant sounds of a plane overhead and a hunter’s gunshot do not ruin the greatness of the experience. Long before Hood’s soldiers, the ancient transportation route was used by 18th- and 19th-century pioneers as well as Creek Indians.

Then we take a circuitous route to the ford, trudging through briars and bushes, over fallen limbs and poison oak, and through muck and who-knows-what-else. “Any rattlesnakes here?” I ask. “Could be.” Pulley says. Wearing shorts and running shoes, hardly the best hiking attire, I soldier on. “Stupidity,” it’s commonly called.

If it weren’t for the three-inch snail darter, an endangered, freshwater ray-finned fish, Davis Ford may not even exist. In the early 1980s, the feds stopped construction of a $100 million, half-built dam in Tennessee when the endangered fish was discovered in the Duck River. “All this would have been underwater otherwise,” Pulley says after we finally arrive at the ford.

Through a maze of trees to our left, about 50 yards across the Duck River, rises the steep north bank. The water may be three or four feet deep. To the right stand huge mounds of deep-brown earth and remains of a cut in the south bank made by Hood’s engineers—unsung heroes of the war. Not another soul is in sight.

Imagine this scene the night of November 28, 1864, and the following morning:

One hundred sappers, miners, and diggers pitch in. Torches flicker as massive, wooden beams are pounded into the gravelly riverbed. By 1 a.m., trusses arrive to lay across the stringers—work that continues into the wee hours. Fifty soldiers dig a cut on the north bank, backbreaking labor done “all night without flinching,” the lieutenant in charge of the operation later recalls.

Near dawn, the trudging of thousands of feet rumble and rustle in the distance as the ragged, smelly Army of Tennessee marches on the narrow military road to the ford. Patrick Cleburne, Hood’s fiery, Irish-born division commander, chews out the officer in charge of the pontoon operation, peeved the south bank cut is incomplete. “He…abused me shamefully, and threatened to have me arrested and court-martialed for my failure,” remembers the lieutenant, “but I was never arrested.”

I wonder about the thousands of Confederates who crossed here shortly after dawn that frigid day long ago. Among them was Private Sam Watkins, a Columbia native who was pleased to be on home turf. “We have never forsaken our colors,” he wrote in his classic war memoir, Co. Aytch, about his return home. “Are we worthy to be called the sons of old Maury County?”

By nightfall on November 30 in Franklin, 30 miles north, hundreds of Watkins’ comrades who crossed Davis Ford would be dead. Mathew Andrew Dunn, a 30-year-old sergeant in the 33rd Mississippi, was one of them.

Four months before he was riddled with bullets at Franklin, Dunn prepared his wife, Virginia—he affectionately called her “Stumpy”—for awful possibilities. “Oh my love,” the father of two young children wrote, “if I could only See you and our dear little ones again what a pleasure it would be. But God only knows whether I will have that privilege or not. I want you to try and raise them up right. Train them while they are young.”

“And if I am not Spared to See you I hope we will meet in a happier world. . .
if I am killed I hope that I am prepared to go.”

Months later, a condolence letter arrived for “Stumpy” in Liberty, Miss.—population a few hundred.

“Dear Friend, though I join you in shedding a tear of grief, let us not mourn as those who are without hope,” wrote 33rd Mississippi Private John Wilkinson, “for we feel assured that our loss is his Eternal gain, that his freed spirit is now singing praises to our Blessed Savior in the Paradise above where all is joy and peace.”

Dunn’s remains probably rest in McGavock Confederate Cemetery in Franklin.

Perhaps his spirit, though, still hovers somewhere here near the banks of remote Davis Ford.

In 2015, John Banks waded the Potomac River from Maryland to West Virginia at Boteler’s Ford, an epic experience. You can read about it on his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com).

At about 8:45 a.m. on March 29, 1862, neighbors of Professor Samuel Jackson’s fireworks-turned-munitions factory heard a low rumble like the sound of distant thunder. Then came the roar of an explosion, followed by an even louder blast, as gunpowder and cartridges ignited in the south Philadelphia factory across the street from a prison.

Many of the 78 factory workers, mostly women and girls, never had a chance to escape the conflagration. Jackson’s 23-year-old son, Edwin, was among the 18 employees who died. Dozens of survivors suffered from burns or other injuries in the catastrophe—the war’s first munitions factory accident involving a major loss of life.

Other more deadly—and more well-known—munitions industry explosions rocked the home fronts during the Civil War.

On September 17, 1862—the same day as the Battle of Antietam—78 workers, mostly women, died in an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal near Pittsburgh. And, on June 17, 1864—a sweltering day in the U.S. capital—21 women and girls died in an explosion at the Washington Arsenal. Most victims were young Irish immigrants. President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton attended their huge, public funeral.

The Confederacy wasn’t immune to these disasters. On March 13, 1863, a massive blast at a Richmond munitions factory on Brown’s Island, in the James River, resulted in 64 deaths. The factory employed about 600 workers, roughly half women or girls.

But bigger stories pushed the tragedy at Jackson’s factory in Philadelphia—as well as deadly munitions industry explosions in Hazardville, Conn.; Springfield, Mass.; and Jackson, Miss.—to the margins of history. Each calamity underscored dangers faced by civilians supplying their military forces during an era of few safety regulations and standards.

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“It is a solemn and terrible warning to those working in similar establishments,” a New York newspaper wrote after the Philadelphia disaster, “and we trust that its effect will be to make [munitions workers] more careful of their own safety by the strict observance of those cautions, the neglect of which may consign hundreds to untimely graves and carry suffering and desolations into many homes.”

Like a scene from an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, dazed, burned, and blackened survivors stumbled from the flaming and smoking ruins of Samuel Jackson’s factory on Tenth Street. Others writhed in agony. Several female victims, “their clothes all aflame,” ran about “shrieking most pitifully.”

Heard a great distance away, the explosions shattered windows, damaged shutters and sashes, blew doors off hinges, wrecked plaster, and toppled furniture in nearby homes. A blast tossed a man cleaning a lamp in front of a tavern headfirst through a doorway. He survived, but the lamp was “broken to atoms.” The explosions even rattled inmates in gloomy Moyamensing Prison—the castle-like structure nearby where Poe supposedly slept off a drinking spree years earlier.

After the war broke out, the U.S. government had contracted Jackson to make “Dr. Bartholow’s solid water-proof patent cartridges,” a “peculiarly made” ammunition for cavalry pistols. In the three weeks prior to the accident, Jackson—a 45-year-old pyrotechnics wizard—was under intense pressure to produce cartridges for the Army of the Potomac.

The factory, which produced thousands of cartridges a day, consisted of frame structures and a one-story, brick building about 10 x 12 feet. Boards covered a powder magazine, “merely a large hole dug in the ground.” In moulding and finishing rooms, Jackson stored thousands of completed cartridges. Elsewhere in the tight quarters, workers stashed thousands of pounds of black powder loosely and in kegs.

After the explosions, hundreds of curiosity-seekers rushed to the site, followed by firefighters, who extinguished the blaze. Alerted by telegraph, the mayor soon arrived with the police chief. The city had not seen such an “intense state of excitement,” the Philadelphia Press reported, since a huge fire at the Race Street wharf in 1850.

Frantic parents and friends of factory workers searched for loved ones among the crowd or in the ruins—“looking shudderingly,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “among the fragments of clothing which still clung to the almost quivering remains of the mutilated dead.” Responders commandeered milk and farm wagons for use as ambulances. To keep gawkers at bay, police roped off the scene.

Some injured received care in nearby tenements, but most were sent to the city’s Pennsylvania Hospital. Several suffered from bullet wounds from exploding cartridges. A young white worker, severely burned and covered with soot, was taken to the segregated hospital’s area for Black patients. “… it was some time,” the Inquirer reported, “before the mistake was discovered and rectified.” He died the next day.

At least five of the victims were teenagers; one was 12. When the blast rocked the building, 14-year-old John Yeager was carrying a box of bullet cartridges that also exploded, knocking out his eyes. His sister, Sarah, also was hurt. Both had helped to support a widowed mother.

Twenty-two-year-old Richard Hutson spent the last hours of his life at the house of Margaret Smith, who lived on Wharton Street, near the factory. His face was as “black as a man’s hat” because of severe burns. “He seemed to be troubled with the idea that he had caused the mischief,” recalled Smith, “but we tried to comfort him.”

The tragedy rocked widows Margaret Brown and her sister, Mary Jane Curtin. Five of Brown’s children who worked in the factory were badly injured. Blown across the street into a wall of Moyamensing Prison by the blast, Curtin—the superintendent of children at the factory—somehow escaped physical injury. But three of her children, also munitions workers, suffered severe burns. Curtin also lost the $60 in gold she carried.

Rescuers discovered Edwin Jackson’s body, “shockingly burned and mutilated,” among charred ruins. The previous evening, he had said he was unafraid of any explosion there. Samuel Jackson’s daughters, 20-year-old Josephine and 18-year-old Selina, also suffered terrible burns.

Heroes emerged to aid the sufferers: A woman cut her shawl in two, wrapping the pieces around two “half-naked” victims. A court officer put his coat around a burning girl, putting out the flames; and a U.S. Army cavalry officer, who happened to be riding past the factory, picked up a horribly burned victim and dropped him off at a drug store for medical aid. When the soldier returned to his camp, he found a detached hand in his carriage.

The catastrophe brought out the worst in people, too. Scoundrels snatched clothes from a woman’s explosion-battered tenement on Austin Street, a block or so from the blast. A ragpicker offered fragments of clothes from the explosions for 25 cents.

When two victims sought aid at a residence in the neighborhood, the lady of the house indignantly slammed the door in the women’s faces, telling them she “did not keep a house for working girls to enter.” The local newspaper chastised the door-slammer: “Was the woman insane, or a fiend, or was it merely an instance of what utter vulgarity is capable of?”

Other grisly discoveries put an exclamation point on the horror show. Blood streaked the walls of houses in the vicinity. A cheek stuck to a building on Tenth Street. A portion of a thigh plopped in a yard, near where it left a bloody mark on the wall of a tavern. A severed arm hit a woman in the head, knocking her down, and a scorched and fractured skull with gray hair landed in the street.

“Heads, legs and arms were hurled through the air, and in some instances were picked up hundreds of feet from the scene,” the Inquirer reported. “Portions of flesh, brains, limbs, entrails, etc. were found in the yards of houses, on roofs and in the adjacent streets.” A policeman filled a barrel with human remains.

In the ghastliest news from this awful day, a man told a reporter that he saw a boy going home with a human head in his basket. The lad said it was his father’s.

Two days after the disaster, hundreds of people sought admission to Pennsylvania Hospital to check on the injured. “Such a rush to this institution,” the Press wrote, “was never before known.”

Authorities worked quickly to determine the cause of the explosions. The fire marshal convened a coroner’s jury, which examined mangled remains of victims at the First Ward police station, among other grim duties. 

The day after the disaster, the six-person jury also stopped at the home of Jackson, who wasn’t present at the disaster. Before Edwin’s burial in Odd Fellows Cemetery, the jury examined his battered body in Jackson’s Federal Street house.

The fire marshal concluded the first explosion occurred in the moulding room, where the strike of a mallet may have caused the spark that set off a 30-second chain reaction of death and destruction. But he couldn’t know for sure—all the witnesses in that area were dead or too badly injured to aid the investigation.

The jury determined the detonation of a scale of dry powder caused the catastrophe. “[M]any obviously essential precautions to prevent [the] accident,” it concluded, “seemed to have been entirely neglected.” But authorities never charged anyone with a crime. 

Weeks later, Jackson’s factory re-opened in nearby Chester, Pa., along the Delaware River. Black powder for the operation was stored on a boat offshore, a safe distance from the factory. Despite the deadly south Philadelphia accident, Samuel Jackson had no trouble employing female workers, who made only 40 cents per thousand cartridges made.

“[T]hey would rather earn a living salary, at risk of their lives,” the Inquirer wrote in a sad commentary of the era, “than endure the indignities and hardships to many forms of female occupation.”

At about 3 p.m. on July 23, 1862, five massive blasts rocked the Hazard Powder Co. mills in Hazardville, Conn., killing 10 people, nine of them employees. Among the dead was a man taking a bath and another walking his mule. “Blown out of existence,” the Hartford Daily Courant described victims of the disaster.

In the immediate vicinity of the mills, the explosions of tons of gunpowder produced an otherworldly landscape of dead cows and horses, uprooted trees, toppled fences, and acres of grass that looked “as if heavy rollers had passed over it.”

The blasts shattered windows and damaged roofs on houses at least two miles away. In Springfield, Mass., 10 miles away, “houses were jarred as if by an earthquake.” The rumble was “distinctly heard” as far as Northhampton and West Brookfield, Mass., roughly 50 miles distant.

Thousands came to view the horrific scene. “One of the most appalling calamities that has occurred in this vicinity for many years,” the Boston Journal reported. The cause of the blasts was a “mystery,” newspapers said.

The company was owned by 60-year-old Augustus George Hazard, a politically well-connected businessman whose friendship with Confederate president Jefferson Davis raised eyebrows in the North. Colonel Hazard’s mills produced thousands of tons of gunpowder for the U.S. war effort—more than any other northern company except the duPont factories in Delaware. Confederate artillerists used Hazard’s gunpowder in the pummeling of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861—the opening salvos of the war.

Born in Rhode Island in 1802, Hazard was the son of a sea captain. After his family moved to Connecticut, he worked on a farm in Columbia there until he was 15, learned the trade of house painting, and eventually settled in Savannah, Ga., where he became a dealer in paints and oils. 

While in his adopted state, Hazard may have even joined the Georgia militia, earning the rank of colonel—a title that stuck with him the rest of his life. Extraordinarily successful, he became part-owner of a coastal shipping company that did a brisk business between New York and Savannah. The colonel was especially interested in one product: gunpowder.

By 1843, Hazard had assumed full ownership of a gunpowder company in Enfield, Conn., naming himself president and general manager. “Shrewd, energetic” and with deep interest in politics, the ardent Democrat became one of the state’s wealthiest men. Hazard and his wife, Salome, settled in Enfield, where he raised a family and built a mansion on Enfield Street, a few miles from his rapidly growing company. 

By the outbreak of the war, the sprawling Hazard Powder Co. in Enfield covered over 400 acres and included massive infrastructure: rolling and granulating mills, woodworking, ironworking, and machine shops, packing houses, magazines, hydraulic presses, and more. In all, there were nearly 125 buildings—an operation that dwarfed Jackson’s in Philadelphia.

Power to operate the mills’ 25 water wheels and three stream engines came from the nearby Scantic River. Canals carried water to the complex, where Hazard also made gun cartridges and fireworks. Hazard’s employees voted to change the name of the industrial village to “Hazardville” in the colonel’s honor.

Work at Hazard’s company was difficult and often dangerous. In April 1855, Hazard’s eldest son, 23-year-old Horace, was mortally wounded by a gunpowder explosion at his father’s mill. Later that year, a wagonload of powder exploded, killing a teamster and his two horses, injuring a young girl, and damaging the roof of a powder mill. The next year, three horribly burned workers died following an explosion. In a blast in September 1858, the superintendent and three workmen were instantly killed.

The company mandated some safety rules. Fearful of sparks setting off gunpowder, Hazard banned iron and steel tools as well as pipes and matches for obvious reasons. Workers wore shoes made with wooden pegs instead of iron nails. Large, stone blast walls separated buildings.

Even Hazard, though, couldn’t plan for unexpected mischief by Mother Nature: In late April 1861, a lightning strike on kegs of powder produced an explosion heard as far away as Hartford. Remarkably, no one was injured.

Fifteen months later, however, the human toll of the accidental explosions was heart-rending. James Beach, who worked in the fireworks building, was washing in a brook after his shift when blasts rocked the grounds. Responders found the 28-year-old’s body in the water, partially covered by a large rock. Beach had started work at the company only days earlier.

The only remains found of the six men who worked in the 20- by 30-foot press room, where the disaster probably originated, was a detached foot discovered about a quarter-mile from the blast zone. Arthur Beach, James’ 40-year-old brother and the married father of seven children, worked there. So did luckless Patrick Fallon, who was on his first day on the job, and Henry Clark, a married father of five. Leno Monsean, another press room victim, had only recently been married.

The initial explosion triggered four more at surrounding buildings. To escape injury, panic-stricken workers in the cartridge-making building burst through doors and leaped through windows.

In 1864 the Washington Arsenal was the largest federal arsenal creating and storing ammunition for the Union Army. Because women often had slenderer fingers, they were better able to roll, fill with gunpowder, and pack cartridges into crates. Seated at their long benches, the women were not allowed to talk while at their tasks and their full, flowing dresses were made of flammable material. Hundreds of young women and girls were employed by the arsenal to create ammunition for the war effort. On June 17, 1864, fireworks left in the sun outside a cartridge room ignited, and a resulting spark caused thousands of cartridges to flare in a massive explosion. When the room at the Washington Arsenal set ablaze after the explosion, the women were mostly trapped. Twenty-one women and girls were killed. “One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his hands and arms badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill and the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen nearby, who thus, probably saved the girls from a horrid death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured,” The Washington Evening Star reported a day later. “The scene was horrible beyond description. Under the metal roof of the building were seething bodies and limbs, mangled scorched and charred beyond the possibility of identification,” another local newspaper reported. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton attended funeral services three days later, and Stanton told army authorities, “You will not spare any means or expense to express the respect and sympathy of the government for the deceased and their surviving friends.” A tall marble monument in honor of the girls was carved by Irish American sculptor Lot Flannery and stands today in the Congressional Cemetery near Capitol Hill. It is simply titled “Grief.” The names of all 21 of the victims are inscribed on the base. —Melissa A. Winn 

The catastrophe could have been worse. A building packed with coarse, unground gunpowder was damaged, but it didn’t explode. Enough gunpowder was in another building “to have destroyed the whole village” if it had exploded, the Courant reported.

“One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his hands and arms badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill and the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen nearby, who thus, probably saved the girls from a horrid death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured,” The Washington Evening Star reported a day later.

“The scene was horrible beyond description. Under the metal roof of the building were seething bodies and limbs, mangled scorched and charred beyond the possibility of identification,” another local newspaper reported.

En route home via train from New York, Hazard received word of the disaster at a stop in Berlin, Conn. His financial losses were estimated at $15,000—$12,000 for the roughly 10 tons of gunpowder that exploded, $3,000 for five wooden buildings destroyed. But that was merely a dent in Hazard’s booming business.

“The loss will not interfere with the operations of the company,” the Courant reported, “as there are 75 mills left.” Hazard, who began re-building almost immediately, continued to fill U.S. Army orders. By January 1864, his company was producing 12,500 pounds of gunpowder daily.

At 3:30 p.m. on November 5, 1862, sisters Lucy and Nancy Gray were toiling in the small munitions factory on College Green, on the northern outskirts of Jackson, Miss. Roughly 40 people, mostly women and girls, worked in the two-story brick building that formerly housed a school for boys. Workers made artillery shells on the first floor, cartridges for small arms on the second.

Kaboom!

A blast of unknown origin at the arsenal rocked the buildings of Jackson—the state capital and a center for manufacturing, munitions production, and military hospitals.

Hundreds ran to the blast site. Firefighters quickly arrived, but they didn’t have access to water. They discovered a gruesome tableau of mangled bodies and charred flesh. Dangling from a tree was the body of a girl, her clothes still aflame. The explosion tossed workers like rag dolls, 50 to 150 yards from the factory. 

“The sight was horrible,” reported the Memphis Commercial. “But there was another scene still more horrible, if that was possible, than the work of death—it was the sight of screaming women and maddened men calling aloud for their children! The loved one that had left them at the noon meal, rejoicing in their youth and in the attractions of beauty, like a holocaust of maidens, offered in impious sacrifice to the Moloch of war.”

None of the four Confederate officers in charge of the operation were in the building when the explosion occurred. One was “providentially absent,” sick in his room.

No employee survived the disaster—the Confederacy’s second-worst munitions factory catastrophe. For the Grays’ widowed mother, the tragedy was searing. Less than three months later, her son would die in a gruesome train accident.

“The unparalleled fact of the greater portion of the victims being helpless women is dreadful indeed,” a Mississippi newspaper wrote.

Perhaps a higher power spared a young man who made cartridges. He repeatedly complained about safety procedures but was ignored by a foreman. The morning of the disaster, he noticed gunpowder scattered about—a dangerous sign. Powder grains would stick to a pan and “flash”—suddenly burst into flame—when placed over a wick to melt wax to seal cartridges.

Less than five hours before the catastrophe, he nearly leaped through a window after a flash. But his supervisor again ignored his complaints. Incensed, the young man quit on the spot—and thus became the last employee to leave the building uninjured.

As soon as he heard the blast, Charles M. Atwood knew—oh, my, he knew. “There goes Leet’s cartridge factory,” the young man said to himself. Then he sprinted from his boarding house toward his former place of employment blocks away, in the heart of Springfield.

At 2:30 p.m. on March 16, 1864, a series of explosions at the C.D. Leet & Co. cartridge factory on Market Street reverberated in town. Leet’s employed 24 women and girls and 24 men at the factory, which made metallic cartridges for Joslyn and Spencer carbines and other weapons.

Small explosions and accidents were common at the three-story factory leased by 40-year-old Charles Dwight Leet. A week or two earlier, Atwood—as others also had recently—quit his job there because he dreaded the potential for something much worse. Perhaps he was pushed over the edge by an accident at Leet’s factory the previous month, when roughly a half-pound of gunpowder blew up—frightening more than a dozen female employees, burning five of them, and filling a room with smoke.

But that accident paled when compared with this disaster. The final death toll was nine—four in the explosions and subsequent fire, five afterward. About a dozen suffered injuries.

Atwood and 10th Massachusetts Lieutenant Lemuel Oscar Eaton and Private John Nye—who just happened to be in the neighborhood—dashed into the burning factory to aid victims. To avoid an even greater disaster, Atwood helped remove kegs of gunpowder. As Eaton tossed cases out of harm’s way, another explosion rocked the building, briefly knocking the officer senseless. He was due to return to his regiment the next day.

After removing four cases, Atwood and Eaton were moving another when it exploded. Somehow both escaped without serious injuries. (Two months later, Eaton was badly wounded in the leg at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.) Nye recovered from burns to return to his regiment.

Upon their arrival shortly after the first blast, Springfield firemen discovered a grim scene: flames leaping from shattered windows, huge columns of smoke, wailing victims, scores of gawkers, and friends and family searching for loved ones employed at the factory.

Fourteen screaming girls leaped from the third floor onto the roof of the shop next to the factory. They “were removed by ladders,” the Springfield Republican reported, “after the most frantic threats” to keep them from jumping to the ground.

“The appearance of those who were worst injured was shocking beyond description,” the Republican reported. “Every garment of their clothing was blown or burnt off, and some of them were literally a blistered and blackened mass from head to foot. So badly were they burnt that it is surprising that they were not instantly killed.”

Calista Evans, a widow from New York, was burned over her entire body and died the next day at her sister’s house in Springfield. She was on her second day on the job. Laura Bishop, who only recently had returned to work after an accident at the factory, also died. 

John Herbert Simpson, a 27th Massachusetts veteran, was standing near the loading room when the first explosion rocked the building. “Shockingly burnt,” the 19-year-old died the next morning. His 15-year-old sister, Anna, also suffered injuries.

Willard Hall and Horace Richardson, Leet’s business partners, also died the day after the explosions. Hall, who supervised 20 men and women, suffered severe burns on his head and chest; Richardson fell through a set of stairs and into the cellar after the final explosion. He was attempting to save girls on the second floor.

Intense heat and fire caused the discharge of bullets from completed cartridges. Two put holes in the hat of contractor Jesse Button, who aided victims inside the factory and escaped with minor injuries. Another narrowly missed the head of a woman at her workplace on Main Street. Yet another zipped into a nearby dental office but caused no injuries.

Underscoring the horror, depraved onlookers picked up ghastly souvenirs: pieces of burnt flesh and fingers of victims. The following day, a crowd gathered to examine the disaster area. Some of the ghouls among them snatched “any piece of a partially burned dress, or other scrap the Republican reported, “as a memento of the terrible scene.”

A coroner’s jury of inquest determined the chain-reaction catastrophe began in the second-floor loading room. A flame from an exploding cartridge apparently caused another blast fueled by fulminate and gunpowder. A massive explosion momentarily lifted the third floor. In the chaos, panic-stricken employees descended the stairs, their burning clothes igniting cases of gunpowder.

Authorities reprimanded Leet, who was not in the factory when disaster struck, for woeful safety procedures. “Hazardous,” “highly censurable,” “highly reprehensible,” the coroner’s investigation called his operation.

In a subsequent U.S. government investigation, an inspector called Leet’s copper cartridges, and the compounds used inside them, “exceedingly dangerous for magazines and transportation.” But Leet, who wasn’t charged with a crime, re-opened his factory weeks later.

And so the war—and cartridge-making—dragged on.

On a misty Kentucky morning, Confederate Brig. Gen. Felix Kirk Zollicoffer’s body lay on the muddy ground surrounded by gawking Union Army soldiers. “What in hell are you doing here?” a Federal officer shouted at the men as the Battle of Mill Springs swirled on January 19, 1862. “Why are you not at the stretchers bringing in the wounded?”

“This is Zollicoffer,” one of them replied, gesturing toward the corpse.

“I know that,” the officer said. “He is dead and could not be sent to hell by a better man, for Col. [Speed] Fry shot him; leave him and go to your work!”

Earlier that wintry day, Zollicoffer—a former Tennessee congressman and newspaper editor from Nashville—had accidentally ridden his horse into Union lines. After a volley or two, he fell from his mount, fatally shot in the chest. Fry may have fired the bullet that killed the 49-year-old commander, derisively called “Snollegoster” and an “old he-devil” by the Yankees, but no one really knows for sure.

Even after his death, Union soldiers and others targeted Zollicoffer, whose body was looted of outer wear, buttons, hair and even (gasp!) pieces of his underwear. “Old Zolly,” though, was not the only fallen commander treated disrespectfully during the Civil War.

Fiends, ghouls, and souvenir hunters have looted fallen soldiers since the dawn of warfare thousands of years ago. Following the famed final showdown between Napoleon and Wellington at the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo, locals and soldiers reportedly yanked teeth with pliers from the fallen. But the gruesome act was not some weird form of vengeance. Early dental technicians boiled the teeth, chopped off the ends, and placed them onto ivory dentures. According to the British Dental Association, “Waterloo Teeth” appeared in dental supply catalogs well into the 1860s.

At Gettysburg in July 1863, soldiers from both sides grabbed trophies from the dead. When a 14th Connecticut soldier stooped to examine a fallen Confederate, a Pickett’s Charge victim, he noticed the curly-haired, young man held something in his hand, near his left breast. The soldier broke the Rebel’s death grip and examined the object, a daguerreotype of a young woman in her late teens or early 20s. “I prize it as the most valuable relic of my war experience,” he recalled years later.

Civilians recovered souvenirs from Gettysburg’s fallen, too. Abby Howland Woolsey wrote of her mother, who collected battle mementos from Confederates while she served as a nurse: “One, of a rebel lieutenant who died in her care; and a score of palmetto buttons from [South Carolina] rebel coats—dirty but grateful, poor wretches; etc.”

In his classic Civil War memoir, Co. Aytch, Confederate soldier Sam Watkins—who seemed to be everywhere in the Western Theater—wrote of his attempt to snatch boots from a fallen Federal colonel:

“He had on the finest clothes I ever saw, a red sash [cloth belt] and fine sword. I particularly noticed his boots. I needed them, and had made up my mind to wear them out for him. But I could not bear the thought of wearing dead men’s shoes. I took hold of the foot and raised it up and made one trial at the boot to get it off. I happened to look up, and the colonel had his eyes wide open and seemed to be staring at me. He was stone dead, but I dropped that foot quick. It was my first and last attempt to rob a dead Yankee.”

Perhaps Watkins would have tried harder if the man were a general.

In a driving rainstorm at the Battle of Chantilly (Ox Hill) late in the afternoon of September 1, 1862, Union Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny, who lost his left arm during the Mexican War, reconnoitered ground before his division. “The General rode up to a whole company of the enemy, paid no attention to their demand that he surrender, wheeled his horse and started back,” an aide recalled.

A Confederate company fired a volley, and a bullet pierced the 47-year-old general’s back, near the spine, killing him instantly. Confederates took Kearny’s body to a field hospital. The next day, the general’s remains were returned to the Union Army—minus his “sword, pistol, watch, diamond brooch, finger rings, and the pocket book, in which the millionaire general always kept a large amount of money.” Confederates snatched souvenirs from the man they called “The One-Armed Devil.” The Rebels had Bayard, Kearny’s prized horse, too. Meanwhile, Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee burned the papers found with the general, assuming they were of a “private nature.”

Four days after his death, Agnes Kearny wrote a letter to Lee seeking the return of her husband’s mount and sword. “Feeling great sympathy” for the widow, Lee—who admired Kearny—replied on September 28, 1862: “I inquired particularly if his person had been disturbed and was informed that his uniform did not appear to have been disturbed; but that he was lying under care of a guard in the condition in which he was brought from the field without his side arms and hat.”

After Lee consulted with his government, Confederates returned Kearny’s sword—“a light one with a leather scabbard suitable for a disabled person.” It was private property of a former fellow officer, Lee decided. Rebels sent Bayard and Kearny’s saddle through the lines for Army of the Potomac commander George B. McClellan to forward to Agnes. “I beg you to accept my thanks for your courteous and humane attention to the request of the widow of this lamented officer,” McClellan wrote Lee. But the rest of the booty snatched from Kearny remained with the Army of Northern Virginia.

On July 3, 1863, Confederate Brig. Gen. Richard B. Garnett was killed during Pickett’s Charge. Although he wore a nearly new uniform coat with a general’s star and wreath on the collar, high-top boots, and spurs, the remains were never publicly identified, and his final resting place remains unknown. “Inexplicable,” Confederate veteran James Clay, Garnett’s orderly, said decades later.

“General Garnett was gallantly waving his hat and cheering the men on to renewed efforts against the enemy,” recalled Clay, an 18th Virginia private. “I remember that he wore a black felt hat with a silver cord. His sword hung at his side.”

After Clay fell among rocks, he lost sight of the 45-year-old commander during the “life and death struggle” with Union soldiers. Then Garnett’s wounded black charger, its right shoulder apparently shot off by Union artillery, galloped out of the battle smoke.

“At this time a number of the Federals threw down their arms and started across the field to our rear,” Clay recalled. “Two of these deserters came to the clump of rocks where [a Confederate captain] and I were and asked to be allowed to assist us to our rear, obviously for mutual safety, and the kind proffer was accepted. These men told us that our brigade general had been killed, having been shot through the body at the waist by a grape shot.”

Rather than attempting to recover Garnett’s body and accoutrements in the extreme chaos, Clay sought medical attention at a field hospital for his shot-off right index finger and head wound. “The place was like a slaughter pen—legs, arms, hands, etc., all piled up,” he recalled.

A Confederate staff officer reportedly recovered Garnett’s watch, but the ornately inscribed saber remained with the general’s body. Years afterward, George H. Steuart, who commanded a Confederate brigade at Gettysburg, purchased the then-rusty relic in a Baltimore junk shop. After Steuart’s death, the general’s nephew acquired the saber. He eventually gave the “precious heirloom” to Garnett’s niece.

Whether a Johnny Reb or Billy Yank picked up the relic from Garnett is unknown. How it ended up in a Maryland junk shop remains a further mystery. What’s indisputable is the location of the relic today: The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va.

At the Wilderness on May 6, 1864, Union Brig. Gen. James Wadsworth suffered a similar fate as Kearny. As Confederates pressed an attack near the Plank Road, a bullet crashed into the back of the silver-haired millionaire’s head, splashing brains upon an aide’s coat. The aide frantically tried to remove a gold watch from the 56-year-old officer’s outside coat pocket. But as Confederates swarmed the area, he did not have time. So, he scrambled upon the general’s horse and rode like hell back to Union lines.

Like frenzied locusts ravaging a cornfield, Confederates looted the helpless Wadsworth, who died two days later in enemy hands. His sword, boots, buttons from his coat, the gold watch, a Virginia map, silver spurs, a billfold containing $90, and elaborately engraved field glasses all disappeared during the maelstrom. Confederates left the white cotton stockings with Wadsworth’s initials stitched in red thread on the general’s feet.

Shortly after the war, a Confederate veteran returned the watch to the Wadsworth family and was rewarded handsomely. Veterans later returned other items pilfered from the general at the Wilderness. But the engraved field glasses—perhaps the most prized Wadsworth booty of all—remained MIA after the war. In 1921, Confederate Veteran magazine ran an obituary of William T. Lowry, an 8th South Carolina private, who claimed to have shot Wadsworth. Lowry reportedly once had the field glasses in his possession, but the elaborate artifact supposedly had been destroyed in a fire at his house several years earlier.

In the 1970s, however, the field glasses resurfaced when a descendant of a South Carolina soldier showed the relic to a National Park Service historian during a visit to the Fredericksburg (Va.) area battlefields. He claimed his grandfather had shot Wadsworth, but the man was uninterested in donating the field glasses or leaving his name.

In 1985, James Wadsworth Symington—the general’s great-great-grandson and a former Missouri congressman—placed ads in South Carolina newspapers seeking the gloves the general wore and field glasses he carried at the Wilderness. But the long-shot effort turned up nothing, and the whereabouts of the relics remain a mystery.

After a sharpshooter’s bullet struck 6th Corps commander Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick in the cheek, killing him instantly, blood spewed “like a fountain” and saturated bushes in the undergrowth. Word of the 50-year-old general’s death spread “like an electric shock” throughout the Union Army. Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade and other officers wept over the death of a general soldiers fondly called “Uncle John.” Sedgwick’s shooting rocked overall Union commander Ulysses S. Grant as much as news of President Lincoln’s assassination the following year.

Lieutenant John G. Fisher of the 14th New Jersey saved a souvenir of the killing, cutting down a bush upon which Sedgwick bled, letting it dry in the sun, slicing off a five-inch section that formed a “Y,” and carving into it the date “May 9.” After the war, he kept it on his mantle, “a reminder of the cold-blooded manner in which our gallant commander was killed.” Four hours after Sedgwick’s death, Frederick T. Dent, Grant’s brother-in-law and military aide, plucked a violet from the general’s death site and saved it in a book.

At Meade’s headquarters, Sedgwick’s remains lay on a bier below a bower of evergreens. Before the transportation of the corpse to Washington for embalming, soldiers paid their respects. (There were no reports of a private surreptitiously snipping hairs from Sedgwick’s beard.)

Then, as now, crassness plagued the nation’s capital.

After the embalming at Thomas Holmes’ establishment on Pennsylvania Avenue, the general’s body was visited by a “large number of persons,” the Washington Evening Star reported. At least one of them was a souvenir hunter. Apparently ignoring a guard of four soldiers near the corpse, a woman “exhibited a singular pertinacity to procure a memento of the fallen hero by clipping two buttons from his coat.”

Thieves looted the body of one of the Confederacy’s most beloved generals, too. At about dawn on December 1, 1864, the day after the Battle of Franklin, a search party discovered Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s body near Fountain Carter’s cotton gin, vortex of the bloody fight in which five other Confederate generals fell. The Irish-born Cleburne lay on his back “as if asleep,” his kepi partially covering his eyes. The 36-year-old division commander wore a new, gray uniform and a white, linen shirt stained with blood.

“He was in his sock feet, his boots having been stolen,” recalled a witness years later. “His watch, sword belt and other valuables were all gone, his body having been robbed during the night.” Cleburne had fallen within Confederate lines.

Early in the 20th century, the .36-caliber Colt revolver Cleburne carried at Franklin turned up with a man in Cleburne, Texas. Then it went missing for years. In 1944, it was found by two boys on the banks of the Nolan River in Texas. Today the weapon is in the collection of the Layland Museum in Cleburne.

Perhaps no fallen Civil War general suffered as ignominious a fate as “Old Zolly,” however. Days after the Battle of Mill Springs, a newspaper correspondent spotted Zollicoffer’s body in front of the tent of a sutler, wrapped in a blanket. His skin was “beautifully white and clear,” the reporter noted, and his face had a “pleasant expression,” which “grim in death was not altogether destroyed.” Zollicoffer had shaved off his beard, “probably in order to be less easily recognized,” the correspondent speculated.

But Federals had stripped “Old Zolly” of his clothes, from the white, rubber coat over his uniform to his shirt, undershirt, and socks. An Ohio private snipped three buttons from his coat. Colonel Speed Fry claimed to have Zollicoffer’s spyglass and elaborately engraved sword, apparently bent when the fatally wounded general fell from his horse. (The sword was returned to the Zollicoffer family, according to an 1893 account in The National Tribune, a veterans’ newspaper. In 2020, the weapon and general’s sash from the battle sold at auction for $31,980.)

Another soldier sent a piece of the general’s bloody undershirt to a friend in Alexandria, Va. “The possession of it made me nervous for awhile,” abolitionist Julia Wilbur wrote in her diary. “It is a singular & interesting memento of the Rebellion.” Even Zollicoffer’s hair was cut off close to the skull, apparently by fiendish souvenirs hunters.

“I am sorry to say that his remains were outrageously treated by the thousands of soldiers and citizens that flocked to see them,” wrote the newspaper correspondent, probably exaggerating the number of ghouls.

“On Tuesday evening the body was almost naked,” he added. “This kind of curiosity-hunting borders on vandalism.”

Some vehemently denied the ill-treatment of Zollicoffer’s remains, but the evidence is irrefutable. “I have a small piece of Zollicoffer’s undershirt,” a Federal soldier bragged, “and a daguerreotype of a secession lady, taken with a lot of other plunder.” An Ohio newspaper reported a Union officer showing off a piece of the general’s buckskin shirt: “It was very soft, and must have been exceedingly comfortable if kept dry.”

A week after the battle, 31st Ohio Captain John W. Free wrote of the division of Zollicoffer’s clothes as trophies—“until orders were imperatively given not to do so any more.”

“But his pants and the fine buckskin shirt is no doubt scatered [sic] all over the different States of the North,” the officer added, “as some 4 or 5 different states were here represented.”

Another Ohioan echoed Free’s account. “When the soldiers saw Zollicoffer’s corpse,” wrote Private John Boss of the 9th Ohio, “they tore his clothing from his body, and split up his shirt, in order to have a souvenir. A Tennessean wanted his whole scalp but was prevented from that because a guard was placed there.”

In a letter to a friend, 9th Ohio quartermaster sergeant Joseph Graeff wrote of Zollicoffer: “Inclosed you will find a lock of his hair and a piece cut from his pantaloons. Shortly after the battle I hunted for his corpse, and found it lying in the mud.”

Union Army authorities eventually stopped this macabre nonsense, washed Zollicoffer’s mud-spattered body, and placed it in a tent under guard. “Having no clothing suitable in which to dress him,” a witness recalled, “he was wrapped in a nice-new blanket until they could be procured, after which he was dressed and provided for in a handsome manner….Particular regard and unusual respect were shown his body by officers and men.”

Chaplain Lemuel F. Drake of the 31st Ohio viewed the general’s remains on a board in the tent. “I saw the place where he was shot, and laid my hand upon his broad forehead,” he wrote. “He was about six feet tall, and compactly and well built, one of the finest heads I ever saw.”

The Federals, who kept the body until January 31, considered the general a bizarre (and by then smelly) war trophy. At division headquarters in Louisville, Federal soldiers waited in line for an opportunity to view the remains of the general and his aide, also killed at Mills Springs.

The Union Army embalmed “Old Zolly.” Then “…the bodies of Zollicoffer and his aide were placed in elegant and expensive burial cases by the munificence of the government he had fallen trying to overthrow,” wrote one disgusted Federal soldier.

Under a flag of truce, the two Confederates’ remains were sent through the lines. “It was courteous, soldierly and christian to send to their friends these bodies of men prominent in the bad cause,” wrote the Federal soldier. “But neither courtesy, nor military etiquette, nor Christianity demanded anything more.”

Finally back in his native Tennessee, the remains of one of Nashville’s leading citizens were treated reverently. In early February, Zollicoffer’s body arrived in the state capital, where, despite rainy, “exceedingly disagreeable weather,” thousands filed past the remains at the State Capitol. The next day, the procession to Zollicoffer’s gravesite at Nashville City Cemetery, a little more than a mile away, was “one of the largest ever seen” in the city.

At last, “Old Zolly” could rest. 

John Banks, a frequent America’s Civil War contributor, writes from Nashville, Tenn.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Looking like 400 miles of bad road, I sit at a table outside the Sweet Shop Bakery in Shepherdstown, exhausted and achy but eager to walk the West Virginia town’s Civil War battlefield. On a Nashville-to-Philadelphia round trip, I have already visited a prison where Al Capone was incarcerated; a tavern on the site of a deadly Civil War munitions factory explosion; a rough neighborhood where the more adventuresome may examine the head of George Meade’s favorite horse; and world-famous Pat’s King of Steaks, where I ordered a sweet pepper-covered, heartburn-inducing steak sandwich.

Then a helmet-clad man on a whirring, humming Segway rolls up, looking like he means business.

“Are you John Banks?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, visions of Paul Blart in Mall Cop swirling in my head.

“I’m Steve Alemar.” 

He’s just the man I want to see.

Alemar, the part-time parking enforcement officer in Shepherdstown (pop. about 1,800), is president of the Shepherdstown Battlefield Preservation Association. He has secured permission for me to visit privately owned battleground on the bluffs above the Potomac River. My aim: Walk in the footsteps of 118th Pennsylvania Lieutenant Lemuel Crocker, whose heroics on September 20, 1862, in the final Maryland Campaign battle should be legendary.

Alemar, a 67-year-old Vietnam veteran and former national park ranger, quickly earns a spot on my “Compelling/Interesting Characters From Civil War Trips” list—a lengthy roll call that also includes an ex-CIA station chief whose ancestor fought at Antietam; a former Marine/FBI agent who helped save a battlefield; a man who left a job in law enforcement to mow hallowed ground; a woman who has a framed Oreo cookie with frosting shaped like the profile of Abraham Lincoln hanging in her Civil War-era home; and a descendant of Confederate soldiers who seems obsessed with “snake-handling churches.”

In six years on his parking enforcement gig, Alemar has seen a little bit of everything in this quaint, college town along the Potomac River—flashers, drunks, bottle throwers, and other belligerents. A skin cancer survivor (“508 stitches in my face”), he uses the Segway on the job because he has a heart condition and a right knee replacement. I am tempted to ask for a spin on the thing, but there’s a battlefield to see. We agree to meet in 90 minutes on River Road, at battlefield markers near the ruins of a cement mill building that predates the war.

But first I order another cup of Joe in the Sweet Shop Bakery, asking the woman behind the counter if she’s creeped out because the building was used as a Confederate hospital in 1862 in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, the war’s bloodiest single day. “My own house is haunted,” she tells me, “so it doesn’t really bother me.” 

And then I am off…

I have advanced on Shepherdstown from all directions over the decades—by car from my one-time home in Martinsburg, W.Va., to cover football games at Shepherd University as a newspaperman long ago; by bike from the nearby Antietam battlefield in Maryland; and by wading the Potomac, an exhilarating experience if one knows how to swim and can keep an iPhone from plunging into the river. In the early 1980s, a newspaper pal and I used a cheap metal detector to scour a Shepherdstown hillside for battle relics. Our haul of pull tabs from beer cans was stellar. 

Like John Buford at Gettysburg, I scout the ground along River Road, roughly 15 yards from the Potomac. Oh my, what a treacherous place this was for the rookie 118th Pennsylvania, the “Corn Exchange” regiment from Philadelphia. Atop the bluffs, the Pennsylvanians fought with defective 1853 pattern Enfields, which proved useless. Then “beaten, dismayed, wild with fright,” Crocker and others hastily retreated under fire across a mill dam to the Maryland side of the Potomac.

In the distance behind me, barely in view between a stand of trees, are remains of that dam, stretching across the river; to my front are steep, craggy bluffs from which some 118th Pennsylvania soldiers plunged to their deaths as they hastily retreated. Others huddled along the river by Boteler’s Cement Mill kilns, where some were killed by friendly artillery fire from the Maryland side of the Potomac. You can see those ruins, too, if you’re mentally prepared for the copperheads.

Imagine the fright of those soldiers as they lay near the riverside, their own cannon booming in the distance and enemy troops nearby. “A cry of horror went up from our men, heard across the river,” 118th Pennsylvania Captain Frank Donaldson wrote about the awful effects of Union artillery fire on their own troops.

In one of the gutsiest moves of the war, Lemuel Crocker rescued wounded comrades and retrieved bodies of some of the unit’s dead, disobeying orders. In the army less than a month, the 118th Pennsylvania lieutenant, “absolutely covered with blood and dirt,” was carrying a soldier to the riverbank when he was approached by an aide for 5th Corps commander Fitz John Porter. Stop, he told Crocker, or a battery will open fire to persuade you. “Shell and be damned,” replied Crocker, who continued his noble work on the Virginia side of the river. (Remember: This didn’t become West Virginia until June 1863.)

When confronted by a Confederate general and his staff, Crocker—a large, muscular man with a thick beard—told them “humanity and decency demanded” that Union dead and wounded be cared for properly. And so this Civil War bad ass proceeded with his rescue and recovery mission.

Two days after the battle, Crocker—whose only punishment for disobeying orders was a reprimand—described his harrowing battle experience in a letter to his parents. “As we got to the river-​side we had to go near a half a mile to a dam over which our men were attempting to cross; and to make this dam many a man lost his life, as the rebels were stationed on the bluff taking deliberate aim during the whole fight,” the 33-year-old soldier wrote.

“I was cool and collected during my travel by the riverside,” he continued, “but when I reach this dam, I think my cheek blanched, for it seemed to me certain death to cross it, as the rebels had got into a large brick building below the dam, and the main body above on the bluff, picking off our poor fellows.” Ravaged by time, nature, and graffiti, that brick building used by Rebel soldiers still stands.

After Crocker’s death in Buffalo in 1885, apparently from a stroke, no mention appeared in local newspapers of his long-ago heroism. A respected businessman, “he was noted for his liberality, public spirit and kindheartedness,” an obituary noted. “He had many warm friends by whom his sudden taking off will be greatly deplored.” Crocker, buried in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, did not receive a Medal of Honor for his Shepherdstown valor—an egregious oversight someone must rectify.

“The daring of this man,” Donaldson wrote about Crocker’s Shepherdstown heroism, “is without precedent.”

On this muggy afternoon, I’m eager to commune with the spirit of the man, to touch his soul, to conjure visions of this brave soldier. I’m also eager to avoid the bears, coyotes, and snakes that are said to lurk in the woods on my route to the top of the bluff. “Just use your common sense,” Alemar told me in a pre-visit phone call, clearly not knowing whom he was speaking with.

Minutes after examining a sliver of ground along the river saved by the Shepherdstown Battlefield Preservation Association, Alemar arrives on River Road in his black truck. Only a few cars pass by us on this relatively remote stretch of road. In the distance, a deer bounds through the woods. “I used to love to come here,” he says. “It’s so peaceful.”

Alemar tells me about remains of Confederate artillery emplacements in the woods. We discuss non-Civil War topics, too—his mom was a secretary for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; his dad was employed by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Alemar, a former U.S. Postal Service employee, also served as a ranger for two years in the 1980s at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, an especially moving experience for a veteran.

Alemar also recounts his own life-altering war experience.

On October 1, 1972, he was an 18-year-old sailor aboard the USS Newport News off the coast of South Vietnam. About 1 a.m., the 21,000-ton heavy cruiser was firing on enemy targets when an eight-inch shell in the center gun of Turret 2 prematurely exploded, killing 20 and injuring 36 aboard. The battleship became a horror show of fire, thick, green smoke, and burning flesh. “I don’t remember how long I was in there,” a sailor recalled decades later about the scene at Turret 2, “but I’m guessing 15–20 minutes and then I was relieved. I [spent] 34 years in the fire department, and I don’t recall ever being as scared.”

“We were young that night,” another remembered years later, “but we aged fast.”

Alemar, who was above Turret 2 when the disaster occurred, suffered a crushed ankle and from smoke inhalation. The battered Newport News—“The Gray Ghost of the East Coast”​—finally made it back to its Norfolk, Va., base on Christmas Eve. The memory of that awful day still day cuts deeply for Alemar: “Those things never go away,” he says.

Armed with a Tennessee walking stick, a new iPhone, and curiosity, I eye my route through the woods to the bluffs above the Potomac. Alemar, who stays behind, offers instructions and insect repellent. There are ticks up there, too.

And so I begin my climb in search of a hero… while leaving another one behind. ✯

For the record, John Banks has never ridden a Segway. Shortly after writing this column, Alemar crashed while aboard his, suffering several injuries and ending his short law enforcement career. He is still recovering. 

As I race down Rohrersville Road near Boonsboro, Md., the magnificent South Mountain range to the left and a sign advertising a local moonshine tasting to the right, three thoughts linger:

Will that duct tape hold up on the crumpled left, rear panel of my car? (Curses to you, Cross Keys battlefield cows and bull that made me back into a fence post!)

Can I make that tasting before lunch? (Sadly, no.)

What would Mrs. Banks say if I suggest a move from our home in Nashville to this gorgeous area? (You don’t want to know.)

“There are few places that I have visited or of which I have ever dreamed that have such a hold upon my heart as the picturesque hills and broad valleys of Western Maryland,” battlefield tramper and historian Fred Cross wrote about this area in 1926. This land entrances me, too.

My destination is the east side of South Mountain and the “It’s-OK-to-leave-your-car-and-house unlocked” village of Burkittsville, population roughly 200 if you count the dogs and cats. You may remember it as the setting for that weird 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project.

At the Battle of South Mountain on September 14, 1862, three days before the much-bloodier Battle of Antietam nearby, cannon boomed and gunfire crackled from Crampton’s Gap as desperate Army of Northern Virginia soldiers were routed by Maj. Gen. William Franklin’s 6th Corps. Afterward, Burkittsville was overwhelmed with wounded and dead.

With heroes, too.

Seventy-five-year-old Paul Gilligan hustles to tidy up a circa-1850 house he owns before visitors check in to the Airbnb on Burkittsville’s main drag. (The wartime owner was a physician who cared for soldiers after the battle.) But the no-B.S. Irishman, president of the Burkittsville Preservation Association, takes time out to discuss with me a preservation effort he champions in this Civil War time capsule 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. 

A retired public health service officer, Gilligan lives in a late–18th century stone farmhouse in Burkittsville astride Gapland Road. On the afternoon of the battle, Federal soldiers, their hearts racing, advanced over Gilligan’s property on the way up the steep slopes toward Crampton’s Gap. In 2019, state archaeologists unearthed 600 battle artifacts on his farm. A year earlier, a relic hunter uncovered a sabot from a Blakely shell fired from the gap by a Confederate battery.

At the corner of West Main and Burkittsville Road, Gilligan runs PJ Gilligan Dry Goods & Mercantile Co., a general store, from an early–19th century building with a faded yellow façade. Across the road stands the gleaming-white, Greek Revival-style German Reformed Church, U.S. Army Hospital D following the battle. Blood of soldiers once spattered its walls, gruesome evidence of dozens of amputations. Next door stands the red-brick St. Paul’s Lutheran, also a wartime hospital. In all, roughly 60 of the town’s 70 houses date to at least the 19th century.

“A freaking museum,” Gilligan calls Burkittsville, where he and his wife, Laurel, settled in 1985.

One of the places he and the Burkittsville Preservation Association aim to save is the Martin Shafer farmhouse and outbuildings, Franklin’s Crampton’s Gap headquarters a mile from Gilligan’s store. Gilligan has a serendipitous connection to the five-acre farmstead, transferred to the association in 2016 (for a tax write-off) by the nephew of its last owner, Mary Shafer Motherway. Decades ago, Gilligan and his father drove past the farmhouse. “I know him,” said Dad, pointing to the mailbox outside. Mary’s husband, Tom, lived in the same duplex where the elder Gilligan grew up in Somerville, Mass.

Deftly maneuvering through bureaucratic channels, Gilligan secured a state grant to help preserve the farmhouse. His dream is to house a museum and visitors’ center in the circa-1820 dwelling—a place to interpret the Battle of South Mountain and for the hundreds of relics from his farm to be displayed. But money from the state won’t nearly cover the preservation work required.

Eager to visit the Shafer place, I excuse myself. Gilligan doesn’t mind: “I gotta clean the jawnzzz,” says the Massachusetts native.

One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, 39-year-old William Franklin, a career soldier and expert engineer, enjoyed a meal and smoked cigars in Martin Shafer’s yard with fellow generals Baldy Smith, Winfield Scott Hancock, and Henry Slocum, among other 6th Corps brass. Encamped near Shafer’s house were thousands of U.S. Army soldiers—including 3rd New Jersey Private Charles Hamilton Bacon, a 32-year-old father of five, and 32nd New York Colonel Roderick Matheson, a 38-year-old Scotsman who got gold fever in 1849 and sailed around Cape Horn for California. A teacher as a civilian, Matheson volunteered soon after the war began.

“Netty, my love, what would I do or give if you were by my side, that I could look into your face and get your approving smile for trying to fight and sustain YOUR country and now mine,” Matheson wrote to his wife in the summer of 1861. “Do you not think I may, by and by, rank as an American?”

This afternoon, the only human I spot near the corner of Gapland and Catholic Church roads is a man hunting for war relics in the field across the way. So, I deploy a one-man skirmish line and surprise Ron Brown, who slightly darkens this sun-splashed day when I discover he’s a New England Patriots fan. The 47-year-old physical security supervisor from nearby Jefferson, Md., has hunted the area for Civil War artifacts since COVID struck. The day before, as a volunteer at the Shafer farmhouse, Brown used his Garrett Ace 400 metal detector inside the home’s billiards room, a postwar addition. “Found a bunch of nails, a padlock, and some hand tools,” he says.

In his nearly 2½-hour relic hunt this day, Brown has unearthed one bullet, near Crampton’s Gap, and a chunk of postwar iron. But in other area hunts, he has recovered “Georgia rounds,” pieces of a Federal spur, and Union breast plates. The finds are meaningful for Brown, who has an ancestor who served with the 14th New Hampshire in the Army of the Potomac (Ezekiel Hadley) and another with the 31st Illinois (Thomas Jolly). Confederates inspired Jolly, a merchant as a civilian, to enlist when they confiscated his goods in the South—“it pissed him off,” Brown says. Though shot in the head during the Battle of Atlanta, he survived the war.

At the Shafer House, the entire west-facing wall has been carefully removed, exposing a hanging chandelier and a bleak interior. Workers eventually will cover beams and joists with cement cinder blocks as well as bricks salvaged from the house.

During a 2017 visit inside, I examined damage done by vandals, time, and nature. Perhaps a target of thieves, an old fireplace mantle was loosened from its moorings. Cracks snaked through interior walls. Covered with dust, a brown bottle of DDT, the long-banned insecticide, stood on a shelf. In the attic, Roman numerals were etched into wooden beams, a common construction practice long ago. In a downstairs room, perhaps the very one where Franklin met with Union commanders in 1862, four old ironing boards rested against a wall.

Outside, I examine the rickety, Pennsylvania-style bank barn, recently a victim of a windstorm. That structure, as well as the ancient, stone meat house and well house/machine shop, needs significant repairs. In the front yard, across from the field where 6th Corps soldiers camped, a homemade sign pleads for volunteers on workdays to help save the property:

“Your 2+ Hours.” it reads. “Big Help.”

So, why is Gilligan so eager to preserve this special town? “History,” he tells me, “sells.” The stories that still linger here under the preservation bubble, like puffs of smoke from a musket barrel, captivate him, too. More than 100 U.S. Army soldiers sacrificed it all at Crampton’s Gap to save the Union. 

Charles Hamilton Bacon was one of them.

Late on the afternoon of September 14, as the 1st New Jersey Brigade swept across Mountain Church Road or fought at Crampton’s Gap, the private was fatally wounded. “He went into the fight with unusual vigor, his health having greatly improved recently, faltering not until a ball passing through his Testament, which he always carried with him, entered his abdomen and caused his immediate death,” regimental chaplain George Darrow wrote to Bacon’s wife, Ann.

A “consistent Christian,” Bacon was buried with eight of his comrades under an elm on Jacob Goodman’s farm, ground astride Mountain Church Road. Perhaps the burial was on the very land preserved by the American Battlefield Trust. Bacon’s final resting place is unknown.

After suffering a bullet wound in the right thigh in the same attack, Matheson was evacuated to a field hospital in Burkittsville. The injury was not deemed serious, but he died on October 2 after blood poured from the wound. The U.S. Army lamented the loss of a man Franklin called “one of its best colonels.” After his death, Matheson’s remains took a circuitous route home to California.

On October 9, his body lay in state at City Hall in New York. Then a military funeral was held at the Green Street Methodist Church, where he and Netty were married in 1848. Nearly a month later, Matheson’s remains arrived by steamer in San Francisco. On November 9, 1862, the Scotsman was buried at Oak Mound Cemetery in Healdsburg.

Days later, a California newspaper solicited contributions to pay the $5,000 mortgage on Matheson’s Sonoma County farm, which faced imminent foreclosure. Netty and the couple’s children—Roderick Jr., 13; Nina, 7; and a baby named George—lived there.

“[The donations] need not be large,” wrote The Sonoma County Journal, “but they ought to be universal, so that everyone who believes that Colonel Matheson has sacrificed his life in a holy cause may have the privilege of aiding to give independence and comfort to his family.”

A fitting tribute, indeed, to a hero of Burkittsville.

John Banks lives in Nashville, Tenn. He thanks the Healdsburg (Calif.) Museum for the use of the Matheson correspondence.

Steps from remains of Union earthworks and within sight of the “God Tree,” Gettysburg National Military Park archaeologist Erik Kreusch and two volunteers sweep metal detectors over deep-brown earth. “Beep, beep, beeepppp ….” A pricey machine squeals, announcing the presence of metal under hallowed ground, near the crest of Culp’s Hill. 

In three weeks, Kreusch and his team have uncovered hundreds of battle artifacts. That’s hardly a surprise, because on July 3, 1863 alone, more than 1.5 million bullets were fired on the hill ¾-mile from the town square, according to one expert. That’s probably more than 100,000 pounds of lead. 

To return Culp’s Hill to close to its 1863 appearance, trees and undergrowth were removed beginning in February, opening stunning viewsheds not seen for more than a century. The National Park Service-Gettysburg Foundation partnership was largely funded by California businessman Cliff Bream, a Gettysburg native with deep pockets and deep local roots—his ancestors owned the Black Horse Tavern, a Confederate hospital and staging area near the battlefield.

The NPS will add a trail for visitors to massive Forbes Rock, among the most famous boulders on a battlefield studded with them. To comply with Federal law, that project requires the clearance of archaeological materials and a report from Kreusch, a longtime NPS employee with an “I have a sweet gig” grin. 

While I visit with the archaeologist, yards away Civil War Times Editor Dana Shoaf and Director of Photography Melissa Winn hover over artifact holes like famished Billy Yanks eyeing a box filled with hardtack. Volunteer Joe Balicki, a retired archaeologist, registers another hit with his $1,200 Equinox 800. Shoaf plunges a shovel into the dirt, then uses a small, orange pinpointer to narrow the location of the find. Moments later, a mangled Confederate bullet reveals itself after nearly 158 years in seclusion.

For Shoaf, it’s ecstasy. For Kreusch, it’s a tiny piece of a giant mosaic…and so much more.

Before we dig deeper into this archaeology story, a brief history lesson: Culp’s Hill—the barbed portion of the “fishhook” of the U.S. Army line—was the only hill on the field that was attacked on all three days during the battle. Although it outnumbered the U.S. Army roughly 3½ to 1 at Culp’s Hill on July 2, the Army of Northern Virginia failed to dislodge the Federals, who fought furiously from behind breastworks. For Confederates, it was a missed opportunity to sever the Army of the Potomac’s vital Baltimore Pike supply line. 

Culp’s Hill was the scene of one of the more remarkable postwar events: On July 3, 1885, 22 years to the day after he lost his arms to friendly fire nearby, 20th Connecticut veteran George Warner unveiled the regiment’s monument. Using a pulley connected to a special device tied around his waist, the married father of five children stepped back several steps to remove a giant American flag from the white granite marker. “Holy and sacred ground,” one of Warner’s comrades called Culp’s Hill in his monument dedication speech that day. 

In the first decades after the war, Culp’s Hill was a destination point for visitors, who were drawn by its proximity to Baltimore Pike, bullet-riddled trees, remnants of Federal earthworks…and shade. The wooded hill, actually two rounded peaks separated by a narrow saddle, offered plenty of protection from the sun. In 1906, Culp’s Hill was still open enough for the Pennsylvania State Guards to hold a three-hour reenactment with thousands of soldiers. 

Eventually trees and other vegetation obscured the viewshed on Culp’s Hill; and for the past 100-plus years, many battlefield visitors skipped the former grazing ground for farm animals. That’s too bad, because on the crest they missed a monument to underappreciated Union Brigadier Gen. George Sears Greene—a brilliant engineer and one of my favorite Union officers. By ordering his soldiers to build breastworks at Culp’s Hill, 62-year-old “Pappy” Greene helped save the U.S. Army. 

A Navy jet mechanic a lifetime ago, Kreusch has worked as a professional archaeologist for 27 years. His resume includes assignments at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write The Star-Spangled Banner during the British bombardment in 1814, and the Chalmette battlefield near New Orleans, where Andrew Jackson’s hastily assembled army whipped the Brits the next year. He loves archaeology and says his Gettysburg job represents the pinnacle of his career—the battlefield he finds inspirational, “a touchstone for talking about our divisions.” 

The “holy grail” for Kreusch is tying an artifact directly to an event or person—a Rebel private to the lock plate on a Model 1861 Richmond rifled musket or a fallen Yankee lieutenant to the bullet that killed him. Linking a find to another living human exhilarates. 

He tells me the story of an assignment in the Great Smoky Mountains at a Cherokee Indian site that dated to 1350. One of his volunteers, a Cherokee high school student, discovered in a pit a small, green rock, about the thickness of five dimes. It was a fortune-telling stone, the Cherokee version of a Magic 8-Ball you may have played with as a kid. It was a thrilling find for the girl because her grandmother used similar stones. 

Few artifacts Kreusch uncovers elicit such a strong, emotional reaction. But every battlefield artifact he and his crew uncover at Gettysburg helps tell a story. Think of Culp’s Hill like a giant puzzle—the bullets, artillery fragments, buttons, and other recoveries are the pieces. Each “piece” enhances an archaeologist’s ability to tell a more complete story. That’s why professionals like Kreusch wince—or worse—when amateurs remove artifacts from Gettysburg or any other battlefield or historic site.

A longtime battlefield preservationist calls relic hunters “vermin.” Their angry reply might be: “What’s the big deal? We seek permission to hunt on private land, document our finds, and have a deep interest in history.” The NPS occasionally has even used amateur archaeologists to help recover artifacts from national parks. But some diggers are in the hobby for less than altruistic reasons—we sometimes read stories of the unscrupulous caught removing artifacts from national battlefields. “Vermin?” Yup. Theft from all of us? Yup. A Federal crime? You bet.

From Spangler’s Spring, Slocum Avenue cuts a serpentine path to the crest of Culp’s Hill. In a roughly 500-square foot area near Forbes Rock, a short distance from the park road, Kreusch’s crew works the ground; to our left, about 15 yards away, Mathew Brady shot an image in mid-July 1863 of his assistants gazing at the battle-scarred landscape. Dozens of white flags mark recent archaeological finds, each stashed in a small plastic bag. 

The work of Kreusch and his volunteers is—no pun intended—ground-­breaking. It’s the first systematic archaeological work at Culp’s Hill in the national military park’s 126-year existence. For now, their search is confined to ground the NPS plans for a pathway through the woods. Ongoing archaeological efforts on the rest of Culp’s Hill will take years to complete. 

Among finds by Kreusch’s crew are percussion caps, a button and small buckle from a forage cap, a Company I insignia, and a New York state button with a green patina. Behind Union earthworks, six Confederate Gardner bullets and a piece of leather revealed themselves. Kreusch speculates those rounds were in a pouch dropped by a prisoner as he was hauled over U.S. Army earthworks. Uncovered nearby were a cartridge box and more than a dozen unfired Miniés—the most impressive recovery thus far.

Oh, my, why did I choose journalism for a career?

The concentration of fired and unfired bullets on a battlefield can tell an archaeologist about the ferocity of fighting, troop strength, weapons used, and much more. A bullet’s orientation in the ground may denote its firing point. Were some of the Kreusch team’s recoveries discharged from nearby Forbes Rock, used by Confederates for cover on the night of July 2? A tree in Brady’s image of the massive boulder clearly shows evidence of Union return fire.

Two Culp’s Hill bullet finds—a Sharps fired into U.S. Army breastworks and a full Spencer cartridge—pique Kreusch’s interest. In 1863, Confederates were not generally known to have Sharps rifles. Was a Union cavalryman picketing on Culp’s Hill with a Spencer carbine? The weapon wasn’t demonstrated to President Lincoln on the lawn of the White House by its inventor until after Gettysburg. Hmmm.…

Perhaps bullets also remain in the now-decrepit “God Tree,” which in a misguided preservation effort more than 100 years ago was filled with concrete and rebar. (“Horrible,” Jason Martz of the NPS, our Culp’s Hill guide, tells me.) Areas near Union earthworks where relatively few battle artifacts are found also may tell a story. Were they safe havens in the storm of Confederate lead on the evening of July 2, 1863? 

At the national cemetery’s former caretaker’s lodge, nerve center of Kreusch’s operation, two large, plastic tubs hold hundreds of bags of Culp’s Hill artifacts. Each find will be cleaned and analyzed. Bullets may be subjected to ballistics tests. Using computer technology, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map of the finds will be created. Kreusch will write a report about his team’s discoveries. The entire process may take as long as six months. 

For Kreusch, new archaeological adventures at Gettysburg await—at Devil’s Kitchen on Big Round Top’s lower slope; at Devil’s Den and Spangler’s Spring; and at the Josiah Benner farm, a U.S. Army hospital site, and elsewhere. 

Oh man, I can dig it. ✯

John Banks, who lives in Nashville, is author of a popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com). On his only relic-hunting adventure, he found a fired bullet on private land at Antietam.

Memories, and two ancient trees, linger at Confederate General Leonidas Polk’s mansion, consumed in a postwar blaze

Frantically trying to determine the origin of a roaring sound, the caretaker grabbed an ax, climbed atop Ashwood Hall, and slashed through the tin, resin, and gravel roof of the mansion in rural Ashwood, Tenn. Then “a terrible flame leapt out like a wild beast released from prison.”

Whoosh!

Ashwood Hall—once one of the “handsomest country residences in Tennessee”—was ablaze on the fall day in 1874, and no one could save it. Fortunately, Rebecca Polk—owner of the estate and widow of a former Confederate officer—was in Europe with her daughters; and except for a young man’s “fine shotgun,” most valuables in the uninsured mansion somehow were rescued from the flames. The ruins reportedly smoldered for two weeks.

Ashwood Hall was never rebuilt, but stories linger there (and treasure remains), for this was where an Episcopal bishop who became a Confederate general laid the foundation for a great estate in 1834; where hundreds of slaves toiled and worshipped; and where a teen became a Confederate heroine “in one of the loveliest spots in America.”

“Bring your boots,” farmer Campbell Ridley encourages me the rainy night before our visit to the Ashwood Hall site. The 78-year-old widower knows the rural area 40 miles south of Nashville better than most—“about seven generations” of his family have lived on his farm; and for two decades, the quipster/storyteller/U.S. Army vet has farmed land where Ashwood Hall once stood. Ridley’s farm shop is a musket shot from the Clifton Place mansion of Confederate Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow, his ancestor. Campbell’s grandfather, who relished eating hog brains, once owned the Pillow place, too.

Joined by Maury County Archives Director Tom Price and my friend Jack Richards, we trudge through a field of corncobs and broken stalks to the Ashwood Hall site—about five miles from downtown Columbia, the county seat. Behind us, spring peepers make a god-awful racket in a marsh along Old Zion Road. From the rise about 200 yards from Mount Pleasant Pike—a wartime route used by both armies—we see in the distance the slave-constructed St. John’s Episcopal Church, the plantation chapel completed in 1842 under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his three brothers, George, Lucius, and Rufus. 

Leonidas, who commanded the First Corps of the Army of Tennessee, became famous as the “Fighting Bishop”—the North Carolina-born soldier held various roles in the Episcopal Church during his lifetime, including Bishop of Louisiana. On June 14, 1864, the general was nearly sliced in two by a well-aimed Federal artillery round at Pine Mountain, Ga.

(My favorite Polk anecdote is about when at a christening for a slave’s child in Ashwood, he asked the young mother: “Name this child.” “Lucy, sir,” she replied. “That’s no fit name for a child!” bellowed the bishop, who thought the slave said “Lucifer.” Polk baptized the girl “John.”)

In what before the Civil War was the wealthiest county in Tennessee, the Polk brothers owned enormous, adjacent plantations—George, Rattle and Snap; Lucius, Hamilton Place; Rufus, West Brook; and Leonidas, Ashwood Hall. (Only the Rattle and Snap and Hamilton Place mansions stand today.)

“God’s country,” Confederate soldiers called the beautiful area.

Of the four plantations, Ashwood Hall may have been the most impressive, “surrounded by one of the most fertile and magnificent farms of which the new world can boast,” a local newspaper wrote of it. Leonidas and his wife, Frances Ann, furnished the mansion with pricey pieces shipped from such far-flung places as Philadelphia and New York City.

After Leonidas sold Ashwood Hall to his younger brother, Andrew, in 1845, the two-story mansion was greatly expanded. It included one-story wings, full-length windows, Corinthian columns, iron railings, a picture gallery, library, and billiard room. Plop the place in Beverly Hills today and no one would blink.

Unfortunately, I did not bring boots for our muddy sojourn to the site of Polk’s palace. But I did bring my imagination. I can picture Ashwood Hall’s once-exquisite grounds—the well-manicured lawns, the greenhouses, the orchards filled with fruit trees, the iron gates swinging from massive stone pillars surmounted by inverted carved, stone acorns, the Polk family symbol. 

Look over there: Is that the Polks’ English gardener? Are those the rare animals the family stocked on the grounds? Is that Andrew Polk, a captain in the First Tennessee Cavalry, instructing soldiers in his Maury County Braves on the plantation? Do you see Confederate cavalry commander Earl Van Dorn, that married rascal, hitting on another lady in Ashwood Hall’s entryway? 

Listen up: Can you hear Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Yankees blowing on the organ pipes they swiped from St. John’s Church as they march down Mount Pleasant Pike on the way to Shiloh? Or the chatter from a ball at the Hall with Confederate officers? Or John Bell Hood, “Old Wooden Head” himself, who briefly used Ashwood Hall as headquarters before the Confederates’ disaster at Franklin?  

The only tangible evidence we find of Ashwood Hall are scattered pieces of brick and stone, a decrepit building that may have been the mansion’s kitchen, a railroad spike-like rod perhaps used for construction, and two massive, Ginkgo trees imported eons ago by the Polks from Japan. Ridley chuckles when he sees me examine those gnarled monsters. These Ashwood Hall relics have survived for roughly 170 years, but the Gingkoes his wife Patty planted at their house were short-timers.

Although we find little, much remains from the plantation era. With Ridley’s permission to hunt the private property, local detectorists Terry Hann and Dan VunCannon have uncovered scores of artifacts—a water pump with an 1854 patent date, broken pieces of dishes, a bronze piano foot, a gorgeous, decorative female figurine, an ornate wind-up key for a clock, the top of a champagne or wine bottle inlaid with gold, and a metal tag inscribed with Andrew Polk’s name. They even have a bucket full of burnt relics.

My favorite find is VunCannon’s bronze tag with “Leonidas Polk” and “Raleigh, N.C.” inscribed on it in cursive writing. Hann speculates it was Polk’s property at West Point, where he roomed with fellow cadet Albert Sidney Johnston, who later became Army of Tennessee commander and was killed at Shiloh. Hann and VunCannon believe more treasure await discovery—perhaps even the communion set Leonidas used at St. John’s Church. Could it be deep underground, in what was once the mansion basement?

Of course, the Yankees figure prominently in Ashwood Hall’s story, too. Hann discovered a mangled Federal box plate on the grounds. But he hasn’t found Andrew Polk’s silver—if any of it is still out here.

Eager to keep the treasure out of Federal hands, Polk and a family slave hid the silver somewhere on the Ashwood Hall grounds. When marauding U.S. Army soldiers found out, they demanded the slave tell them where. When he refused, the child—“about four years old,” according to an account—was held over a well. The slave’s repeated refusal apparently almost led to tragedy.

“[H]orrible to relate,” according to a diary of one of Polk’s relations, “they dropped it & in the agony of the moment the unfortunate father gratified their cupidity! One of the number caught the child, it is true, after it had fallen out of the father’s sight in the well curb, but the effect on him was the same as tho they had killed it.”

During the war, Ashwood Hall was stripped of livestock, horses, fences, and crops. But Andrew Polk, who was seriously wounded early in the war, got a teeny measure of revenge against the Federals…thanks to his precocious daughter. 

My drive on Mount Pleasant Pike from Columbia to Ashwood Hall, past the convenience stores and other schlock, will never be the same after learning what happened on this stretch on July 13, 1863. Chased by three Yankees on horseback, 15-year-old Antoinette Polk—who had been visiting cousins in Columbia—dashed on the toll road astride her thoroughbred, Shiloh. (Apparently, she didn’t pay the fare.) The skilled rider’s aim: Race to Ashwood Hall, where Confederates were in danger of capture if she didn’t raise the alarm.

The Yankees were in Columbia!

The cavalrymen dug their spurs into their horses’ sides, straining to catch up with Antoinette. But she reached the mansion ahead of the Federals, roused the Confederates, and was taken almost fainting from Shiloh, whose mouth was covered with blood and foam from the bit.

The soldiers at Ashwood Hall avoided capture; Antoinette’s mission was accomplished. For her bravery, Nathan Bedford Forrest gave the teen a flag captured from Colonel Abel Streight’s brigade in 1863. You can see it today in the Maury County Archives in Columbia. 

After the war, Antoinette traveled to Europe, where the “beauty and belle” became a “great favorite of the Italians.” Her riding exploits remained renowned—“she is a beautiful rider, fearless,” according to an 1872 letter. In 1877, Antoinette married a French nobleman, becoming Baroness De Charette. When she met a group of soldiers from Tennessee on leave in France during World War I, the baroness said, “I am going to kiss every one of you.”

“She felt, no doubt,” a Columbia newspaper wrote after the baroness’ death in 1919, “that in ministering to these men she was but performing another chapter in that romantic career that began more than half a century ago when she outrode a squad of Federal troops from Columbia to Ashwood and prevented the capture of Confederate soldiers billeted in the palatial home of her father, Ashwood Hall…”

Ah, Ashwood Hall. What a sight. What stories.

Just imagine the rest. ✯

John Banks is the author of two Civil War books and his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com). He lives in Nashville, Tenn.

At about 2 on a foggy morning in 1862, a steamer transporting the 67th Ohio Infantry on the Chesapeake Bay struck another vessel, sending several soldiers, a horse named Big Frank, and two other mounts splashing into the inky-black water. The accident apparently wasn’t serious, and the men were rescued, but no one aboard the steamer noticed that the steeds were missing. Roughly six hours later, about 15 miles from where the collision occurred, a lookout spotted an animated form in the wake of the ship. It was Big Frank, paddling to catch the vessel with his master, 67th Ohio Lt. Col. Henry Commager, aboard.

Like Commager, “a man of immense stature,” Big Frank was large, with flanks as big as a plow horse’s, and had a fearsome personality. Months after his rescue in the bay, the gray charger dashed under fire into a sandy ditch near Fort Wagner (S.C.) during a night assault—the only horse to make it that far. “I do not know that he feared God,” recalled Commager’s son, also a Union officer, “but he was like his rider in one thing, he didn’t fear the devil nor gunpowder….”

No wonder Henry Commager wept when Big Frank, a veteran of several major battles, died from exhaustion in 1864.

Ah, but this was far from the only story of deep appreciation—dare we say love?—that a Civil War soldier had for a horse. At least one veteran gave his wartime mount a military funeral…in his backyard. Another old warhorse—named after the wife of a Confederate guerrilla—earned a national reputation and his master’s undying devotion. A famous general’s revered mount was a leading attraction in postwar parades, and later poisoned and buried, then exhumed and decapitated.

Sometimes love can be complicated. Weird, too.

By one estimation, 5.9 million horses—4.2 million for the U.S. and 1.7 million for the Confederacy—were used by the armies. They moved artillery and other equipment, carried soldiers into battle, and helped deliver messages, among many other duties. They suffered, too. Hundreds of thousands died. Horses of generals became famous, inspiring poetry and at least one novel in which the tale was told through the animal’s eyes.

At the Battle of Thompson’s Station (Tenn.) on March 5, 1863, Confederate Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s favorite horse, Roderick, was wounded three times before he was guided to safety by the general’s son. Apparently eager to return to the “Wizard of the Saddle,” however, Roderick leaped over several fences, suffering another wound in the process. As Roderick’s life ebbed away, bad-ass Forrest—who had many other mounts shot out from under him—supposedly wept beside the animal. Roderick was buried on the battlefield.

Roderick’s remains may rest somewhere in an upscale development named after the horse, which could lead to some weird conversations: “Honey, the workers were digging in our flower garden, and they found this huge skull.” A statue honors the chestnut gelding there, too.

In 1956, the Nashville Banner devoted an entire page to The General’s Mount, a poem that recounted Roderick’s demise. Many of the newspaper’s readers probably winced at stanzas such as this:

From mouths and nostrils
Sponged his wounds
Applied a stinging ointment
They washed his knees
And hocks
And pasterns
It’s Roderick! The General’s mount!
Bring the water bucket to him.

Robert E. Lee may not have shed a tear over Traveller, perhaps the most famous Civil War horse of all, but he was enamored with the gray American Saddlebred. In a postwar letter dictated to his daughter to an artist who wanted to depict the horse, he said:

“If I was an artist like you, I would draw a true picture of Traveller—representing his fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest, short back, strong haunches, flat legs, small head, broad forehead, delicate ears, quick eye, small feet, and black mane and tail. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth…”

In Traveller, Richard Adams’ 1988 novel, the horse is the lead character, telling stories of wartime exploits while he and Lee enjoyed retirement. The tale was not universally acclaimed. “If there was good information here,” a critic wrote on Amazon.com, “it was lost behind the concept of a horse talking and in dialect, too.”

Less famous than Traveller or Roderick was Almond Eye, the favorite horse of Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler. The colorful, often controversial commander was nicknamed “Beast” for his alleged harsh treatment of civilians as military governor of New Orleans during the Federals’ occupation of the city. Decades after the war, newspapers reported a story that, if true, may explain why Butler appeared so grumpy in Civil War-era images. (The “Beast” didn’t mention Almond Eye by name in his 1,000-plus page autobiography.)

While he commanded the Army of the James in front of Petersburg in 1864, Butler heard his prized mount had died from a fall into a ravine. Saddened, he decided to have Almond Eye stuffed. He ordered an Irishman to skin him. According to postwar accounts, the conversation went something like this:

“What! Is Almond Eye dead?” asked the Irishman.

“What is that to you? Do as I bid you and ask no questions.”

The man returned about an hour or two later.

“Well, Pat, where have you been all this time?”

“Skinning the horse, yer honor.”

“Does it take near two hours to perform such an operation?”

“No, yer honor; but thin ye see it took ‘bout half an hour to catch him.”

“Catch him! Fire and furies, was he alive?”

“Yes, yer honor; and ye know I couldn’t skin him alive.”

“Skin him alive! Did you kill him?”

“To be sure I did! You know I always must obey orders without asking any questions.”

Evidently, neither beast was pleased.

A year after his favorite horse was wounded at Gettysburg, Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George G. Meade was cheered by the mount’s recovery. “I am glad to hear the good news about Baldy,” the general wrote, “as I am very much attached to the old brute.” The animal took a beating during the war, perhaps suffering as many as a dozen wounds. In 1864, fearing the enfeebled, battle-scarred horse would be an “embarrassment” on future campaigns, Meade sent Old Baldy home to Pennsylvania.

After the war, the horse—beloved by veterans, too—marched in parades and in the November 1872 funeral procession for his owner through Philadelphia. Before his death, Meade gave the charger to a blacksmith named John Davis. The general’s conditions: Never sell Old Baldy into servitude, and when his quality of life deteriorated significantly, put him out of his misery humanely. Old Baldy, believed to be about 30, was dispatched on December 16, 1882, with two ounces of cyanide of potash and a pint of vinegar poured down his throat.

“Not a word was spoken,” wrote a local reporter who witnessed Old Baldy’s demise. “True, it was only a dumb animal that was about to stagger, fall and die beneath the deadly action of the potent drug. Yet the mind would conjure up a widely different scene in which Baldy, gay in the trappings of war, with proudly arched neck, heaving flanks and panting nostrils bore amid the clashing of sabers and the hot fire of musketry, the Hero of Gettysburg—Pennsylvania’s noblest son!”

Then things with this famed horse got, ah, a little squirrely.

With Davis’ blessing, two veterans in the Meade Grand Army of the Republic Post No. 1 exhumed the horse’s remains around Christmas Day 1882 on the blacksmith’s farm, cutting off his head. The nag’s noggin was “very tastefully” mounted on a large plaque, with each war wound site noted, and displayed at the post. Old Baldy’s front hooves were made into inkstands.

Perhaps the Pennsylvania owner of another Civil War horse took notes. After a battle against Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early in 1864, Benjamin Franklin Crawford of the 16th Pennsylvania Cavalry acquired a captured coal black charger. He named the horse Ned.

After the war, Crawford took the mount to his home near Erie, Pa., using him for farming. Old Ned, whose coat eventually turned a solid gray, became a fixture in parades and veterans’ events. The horse “pranced like a colt” when he heard martial music, “which had a wonderful rejuvenating effect on him.” On Decoration Days, children reportedly enjoyed putting flowers on Old Ned more than they did on soldiers’ graves.

In Old Ned’s old age, Crawford fed the horse—“always the boss in pasture,” according to his owner—a diet of bran and apples. “He was cared for as carefully as a child would be,” the veteran’s cousin recalled. After Old Ned died in 1898, at about age 43, his skeleton was donated to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. But Crawford kept the hide, which he planned to have tanned.

By late 1864, Dixie Bill was considered jinxed. The horse’s dark history in battle explains why.

At the Battle of Wilson’s Creek (Mo.) on August 10, 1861, the Confederate rider on the dark bay—whose Rebel name was unknown to Federals—was killed by an Iowa soldier. The horse was shot in the neck—the first of four battle wounds the hearty animal suffered during the war.

After Wilson’s Creek, the horse was sent with other captured Confederate mounts to Muscatine, Iowa, where Colonel Sylvester G. Hill led the recently formed 35th Iowa Infantry. Hill purchased the battle-scarred steed, dubbing him “Dixie Bill,” and the horse quickly became a favorite of his staff. Hill rode Dixie Bill throughout the Deep South—at the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg and during the 1864 Red River Campaign battles in Louisiana at Pleasant Hill and Yellow Bayou, where his 18-year-old son was killed. While the heartbroken father recovered from a bullet wound during a furlough in Iowa, Major Abraham John of the 35th Iowa was mortally wounded riding Dixie Bill in a skirmish at Old River Lake, Ark., on June 6, 1864.

Six months later, at the Battle of Nashville on December 15, 1864, Hill was killed astride Dixie Bill during an assault on Redoubt No. 3. Afterward, the bay was purchased by a 33rd Missouri Infantry (Union) adjutant, but when he learned of Dixie Bill’s bad battlefield karma, the horse was offered for sale. “With this record, three riders killed in action, he became hoodoo,” an Iowa newspaper reported years later, “and no staff officer could be found who would ride him.”

And so William Bagley, who rose from private to 35th Iowa chaplain, acquired the outcast. When he returned to Iowa near the end of the war, Bagley offered Dixie Bill to Hill’s widow. Thanks, but no thanks, she told him. Perhaps it was too painful to keep a reminder of a war that had cost her family so much.

The Rev. Bagley eagerly took in Dixie Bill at his farm in Tipton, Iowa—a decision he never regretted. In parades throughout the state, the horse often was a star attraction. At veterans’ events, Bagley enjoyed talking about Dixie Bill’s wartime exploits. The bay’s saddle—the one on which Colonel Hill sat during his final ride—became an attraction, too. It was donated by his widow to a local Grand Army of the Republic post.

Even as late as 1878, Dixie Bill—purportedly 29 years old at the time—remained feisty. Before a July 4 parade, “[t]he old horse broke away from Mr. Bagley while in [Wilton],” an Iowa newspaper reported, “and pranced through the streets like a colt, and to judge from his appearance would be good for another campaign.” 

When Dixie Bill died on October 15, 1881, he received a grand military funeral. Covered with an American flag, the bullet-scarred charger was laid to rest by Bagley in the backyard of his house on 11th Street in Des Moines. A U.S. flag flew near Dixie Bill’s grave. Scores of veterans attended the service, and area residents talked about the funeral for years.

“[G]reater sorrow could not have been felt from a human being than was felt by a number of people over the death of the faithful old steed,” a Muscatine newspaper wrote.

Dixie Bill’s funeral story was picked up by newspapers throughout the country: “Venerable war-horses who did valuable service during the Rebellion are as plentiful as George Washington’s body servants,” read an account in the Oakland Tribune, “but there is no occasion for cavilling over the remains of ‘Dixie Bill,’ which were consigned to their final resting place in Des Moines with military honors in the presence of many mourners.” At an 1898 reunion of the 35th Iowa, Bagley said a larger crowd attended Dixie Bill’s graveside service than would attend the funeral of any veteran in the room.

Like his horse, the reverend remained vigorous in his old age. “He is still fighting Satan,” a Muscatine newspaper wrote in 1906 about the 86-year-old veteran, “as hard as he fought the rebels.” Bagley died nearly three years later after a brief illness. An obituary highlighted his Civil War service and listed survivors. Dixie Bill was mentioned prominently, too.

“One of [Bagley’s] dearest possessions,” the obituary noted, “was a horse.”

Dixie Bill wasn’t the only horse whose master mustered a military funeral for his beloved animal.

In 1886, 7th Minnesota Infantry veteran William R. Marshall, a former Minnesota governor, mourned the death of Don, his devoted companion of nearly a quarter-century. In Roseville (Minn.) Cemetery, you can see the 29-year-old horse’s gravestone: “Don, My Faithful War Horse,” reads the inscription on it. The horse was also buried cloaked in an American flag.

And, in 1895, Belle Mosby, among several nags billed as the last surviving Civil War horse, was laid to rest in Library, Pa., near Pittsburgh, also with military honors. What a life she led.

Shortly after going into camp in Virginia one evening, 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry soldiers were stirred by a commotion. On the other side of a creek, they spotted an escaped slave, “evidently frightened to death,” astride a beautiful black thoroughbred. Swiped from a Confederate camp by the man, as it turned out.

The banks of the creek were steep, so the soldiers debated how to get horse and rider across to their side. A plank was placed across abutments of a ruined bridge, allowing the “snorting and trembling” horse to walk to the other side. When the pair finally made it, soldiers cheered.

A Union cavalryman named the horse “Belle Mosby” because the “beautiful creature reminded him to some extent” of the “beautiful gypsylike wife of Guer[r]illa [John S.] Mosby…” There is no known record of what Pauline Mosby thought about the comparison.

In exchange for an overcoat, a lieutenant in the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry acquired the bullet-scarred horse from the escaped slave. In a fight against Rebels the next day, the officer rode the animal after two other mounts were shot out from under him.

“She seemed to bear a charmed life, darting and flashing around through the scrap like a charmed creature,” recalled Joseph R. Phillips, a farrier in the Pennsylvania regiment. The horse was hit several times by stray bullets—“only flesh wounds,” the farrier said. A day or two later, the lieutenant gave the “hard as nails” horse to Phillips, his friend. An examination of Belle Mosby’s teeth in 1865 determined she was five years old.

After the war, Phillips worked Belle Mosby regularly at his farm in western Pennsylvania until she was wracked with rheumatism in the early 1890s. By then, Belle Mosby had earned national fame—nearly every member of the Grand Army of the Republic had heard of her, according to a newspaper account. At the national G.A.R. encampment in Pittsburgh in 1894, thousands of pictures of Belle Mosby were sold. But the next year, a bitter cold snap evidently led to the horse’s demise. In an orchard at Phillips’ homestead, Belle Mosby—age about 35—was buried with military honors, wrapped in flags.

“Comrade Joe Phillips,” a Pittsburgh newspaper reported, “…wept like a child.” 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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A Missouri woman sacrificed much of her own life to help an aged Union veteran

Barely five feet tall and weighing no more than 100 pounds, Helen Viola Jackson sat on the edge of a bed in a private room of a nursing home, her tiny feet grazing the floor. Hanging on a wall, near a collection of birthday cards, was a photo of Jackson’s parents and one of her nine siblings—Helen, nearly 100, had outlived them all.

“My God, it’s hot as hell in here,” Pastor Nicholas Inman said as he entered the sparsely furnished room at Christmastime 2017. Jackson liked the heat on full blast and the curtains closed. The light hurt her eyes.

Still full of life despite physical challenges, the lifelong Missourian intended to plan her funeral with the pastor, whom she befriended after they first met in church three decades earlier in rural Marshfield. But on this afternoon, Jackson—almost a member of the Inman family now—also planned to reveal an 81-year-old secret.

“I was married,” she told the 35-year-old pastor. “What do you mean you were married?” replied the incredulous Inman, who thought Helen had been single her entire life. Jackson was no jokester, so this must be serious.

Jackson paused, then revealed even more stunning information. “Well, he was in the Union Army,” she said. The veteran was 93; she was 17.

Helen Jackson was “The Last Civil War Widow,” and, oh, what a story this old woman had to tell.

Born August 3, 1919, less than a year after the end of World War I, Helen Jackson grew up in Niangua (population about 275), a railroad and farming town about 25 miles northeast of Springfield. Hardworking and humble, she was the seventh of 10 children of Thursa and James Jackson, a farmer and longtime member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

In the late 1920s, Route 66—the legendary “Mother Road”—pumped a little energy into sleepy Niangua, known mainly for its dairy and cattle farms. And, in March 1936, a tornado ravaged the area, killing four. But the pace of life was typically slow in this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place.

Twice-married Civil War veteran James Bolin, a widower, also lived in Niangua, alone, in a small house near a lumber yard and train tracks. In a photo from the 1930s, a seated Bolin—wearing a bowler hat, suit jacket, and dark vest—sported a large, white mustache. It’s a pity the photo isn’t in color, because the veteran had vivid blue eyes.

When he enlisted in 1864, Bolin—a 21-year-old farmer from Webster County—had dark hair and a fair complexion. The 5-foot-8 private served honorably with the 46th Missouri Infantry from fall 1864 to March 1865 and, later, with the 14th Missouri Cavalry. Although they were busy, neither unit saw much serious fighting.

In the spring of 1865, the cavalrymen—including Bolin—guarded the Wire Road in Missouri, a frequent target of guerrillas because of the telegraph line along the vital route. In late May 1865, more than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, the unit was sent to confront unrepentant Confederates in the border state, which sent troops to both sides during the war.

“The band that crossed the railroad near Knobnoster on the 22d instant were all that I could obtain any reliable information of,” 14th Missouri Cavalry Lt. Col. Joseph Gravely wrote of the recalcitrant Rebels in an after-action report of those events. “At Warsaw and other points, I learned that the above-named band committed horrid outrages, murdering some ten or twelve discharged soldiers and citizens in Hickory and Benton Counties.”

Unable to find the guerrillas, the soldiers returned to camp—“men and horses in good condition,” according to Gravely.

Following a divorce from his first wife during the Civil War, Bolin married Elizabeth Ferrell in 1868, and the couple had seven children together. After Elizabeth’s death in 1922, James had no one to help with chores. So, in 1936, James Jackson recommended his daughter, Helen, then a 17-year-old high school student.

The kindly old man and the teen grew close—no, not in that way. Bolin enjoyed Helen’s company, and Jackson, an eager caregiver, became the veteran’s lifeline.

One day, Bolin made an unusual proposal to Jackson: I do not believe in accepting charity and don’t have money to pay you, so why don’t you marry me so I can give you my Civil War pension when I’m gone? For a girl of modest means, the veteran’s pension check—perhaps $30 a month or more in Depression-era America—was too enticing to decline.

Jackson accepted the old man’s offer, but with strict ground rules: She would keep her maiden name, go home to her family farm every day, and tell only a select few people. The couple’s 76-year-old age difference, after all, surely would have created a scandal.

Let’s do it, Bolin said.

On September 4, 1936, Jackson and Bolin were married in the living room of the veteran’s house. Shortly after the ceremony, Tommy Macdonnell, a teenager who was preparing for a squirrel hunt, and his father, Bolin’s physician, congratulated the couple. Keep this quiet, Dr. C.R. Macdonnell urged his son. To cement the union, Bolin gave his bride a pink topaz ring that belonged to his second wife, and the common-law marriage was recorded in his cherished personal Bible, given to him decades earlier by a traveling evangelist.

The union followed Jackson’s ground rules—cooking, housekeeping, chores, return to the farm. Although her husband talked about Civil War “blood and guts stuff” all the time, Jackson showed no interest.

Less than three years after the marriage, on June 18, 1939, Bolin died in the home of his daughter, Martha, after a lengthy illness. In the local newspaper, the 96-year-old veteran’s obituary listed next of kin: two other daughters besides Martha, two sons, 17 grandchildren, 36 great-grandchildren, and nine great-great-
grandchildren. There was no mention of his young widow.

At the funeral service at the Free Will Baptist Church in Niangua, a quartet sang “Will the Waters Be Chilly,” followed by a soloist’s version of “Good Morning Up There.” Jackson didn’t hear a single verse—fearful her secret would be revealed, she did not attend the church and graveside services.

In the spartan nursing home room, Nicholas Inman gently pressed the nervous, old woman for more details about her stunning news. Shifting uncomfortably on the small bed, Helen Jackson eyed her pastor while trying to gauge his reaction.

Nearly blind, hard of hearing, and wracked by arthritis in her legs, Jackson spent most of her days in bed, staring at the ceiling. Perhaps that’s when she planned this big revelation, Inman thought.

Like bubbles in a glass of soda, details of Jackson’s long-ago life broke through the surface—slowly at first, then in a rush. Soon after her husband’s death, one of Bolin’s daughters threatened to ruin Jackson if she filed for the veteran’s pension. Petrified of having her reputation destroyed, she never did.

Around World War II, Jackson moved to Marshfield, roughly seven miles from Niangua, to escape potential “wagging tongues.” Worried that if she got serious with a man he would discover her secret, Jackson never dated, or married, again. Meanwhile, her sisters and brothers married and raised families. Later, Jackson cared for her aging parents—her mom died in 1953; her dad in 1972. (Her last sibling died in 2019.)

Throughout her adult life, Jackson carried heavy emotional baggage from her short marriage to James Bolin: What would anyone think of me if they found out I married a 90-something-year-old man when I was a teen?

In Marshfield, where she worked in a wood-working factory and, later, as a substitute cook in local schools, Jackson lived alone in a farmhouse along Route 66. She became an active member of the Elkland (Mo.) Independent Methodist Church, where Inman became pastor in 2004, and volunteered for the local Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival. She may have even teased her Civil War connection with a friend or two, but she largely lived alone with her secret for 81 years.

The potential historical implications of Jackson’s revelation fascinated Inman, a Civil War buff. Could his friend—this sometimes gruff, 98-year-old woman with the beautiful white hair—really be the last living Civil War widow? He sought more information about Private Bolin from Wilson’s Creek (Mo.) National Battlefield, which confirmed the basics of the soldier’s service.

Stories of “last” Civil War widows percolate every so often in the news. The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War confirmed Jackson as the “last” publicly documented widow. But who knows if there are other Civil War widows out there harboring their own secrets?

In 2004, Alberta Martin, a sharecropper’s daughter who lived in poverty most of her life, died in Alabama at 97. Married to a Confederate veteran, William Jasper Martin, in the 1920s, “Miz Alberta” loved the attention she got from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who would take her to conventions and rallies.

In 2008, Maudie White Hopkins, who enjoyed making fried peach pies and applesauce cakes, died at 93. When she was 19 in 1934, she married Confederate veteran William Cantrell, who was 67 years her senior. Hopkins said Cantrell supported her with his Arkansas state pension of “$25 every two or three months” and left her his home when he died in 1937.

Helen Jackson’s husband left her his Bible and eyeglasses, a bullet he kept during the war…and memories.

Reluctantly the old woman who treated her pastor like a grandson agreed to go public with her story. Jackson came to embrace her celebrity—especially in Marshfield.

At the town’s annual Fourth of July parade in 2018, she was grand marshal. Inman drove the Chevrolet she rode in. “Slow down,” she told him, “these people want to see me.”

A stone slab with a star and her name inscribed was placed on the Missouri Walk of Fame, near Marshfield’s town square. The school superintendent in Niangua gave Jackson—who never completed her education—an honorary high school degree for the Class of 1937.

Through an address posted on a Facebook page that Inman set up (“Helen Jackson, Last Civil War Widow”), Jackson received fan mail from around the world. A member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War sent her a card each Christmas.

In 2019, Jackson sat down with a local historian for a lengthy oral history: “I didn’t want them all to think that I was a young woman who had married an old man to take advantage of him….Mr. Bolin really cared for me. He wanted me to have a future and he was so kind.”

And at the 2019 Cherry Blossom Festival, Inman’s play about Jackson’s life—“The Secret Veil”—was performed. Margaret Kerry, Disney’s model for Tinker Bell in 1953, played Jackson, who worried the portrayal would make her look like a “floozy.”

Jackson typically was blunt, like the president she adored, Missouri’s own Harry S. Truman. “She would not take guff off anyone,” said her friend, Ruthie Letterman.

“Not even words for the sass that woman had,” said Jill Phillips, the Cherry Blossom Festival’s official photographer. 

“Could have whooped a bear,” said Inman.

But one day, her crusty exterior was pierced by another woman’s kindness. Phillips, who made jewelry in her spare time, gave Jackson a necklace. Encased in resin in the pendant was a tiny picture of her husband. Nearly blind, Jackson gently rubbed the keepsake image of Bolin—the only man who ever loved her, she once said—and wept.

Shortly before Christmas, about 20 people gathered at Marshfield Cemetery for Helen Jackson’s graveside service. On December 16, 2020, the 101-year-old’s big heart finally gave out. Jackson’s life story made international news.

Perhaps Helen would have been pleased that Jimmy L. Bolin was there on that cold, blustery afternoon. At 6-foot-11 and 300 pounds, Civil War veteran James Bolin’s great-great-nephew looked nothing like his ancestor. The hulking man was honored to serve as a pallbearer for “The Last Civil War Widow,” who outlived a host of other potential pallbearers.

“At funerals, people don’t like to take pictures,” said Bolin, a lifelong Missourian. “How we wish we did at this one. This was part of history.…”

John Banks is the author of two Civil War books and his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com). He lives in Nashville, Tenn. Kristen Pawlak of the Missouri Civil War Museum in St. Louis and Penny Bolin of Springfield, Mo., aided with Banks’ research for this story.