Not Even the Regular Army Was Regular

Jennifer at Rainy Day Genealogy Readings asks How Did That Civil War Soldier Really Die? The most likely answer will not be found carved on his gravestone.

So That's What Rebels Smelled Like

The Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Virginia, was occupied by both Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War. They left behind names, dates and drawings scribbled on the walls, discovered during a renovation in 1992. New graffiti came to light just last summer.

[Paint-removal specialist Kirsten] Travers ... uncovered a large piece of graffiti in the JEB Stuart room - where the Confederate Army General signed his name. The new image is a full-size figure of a man with a head resembling a pumpkin. On his torso is the phrase: “President J. Davis. Good on the boots.”

Neither Travers nor Edrington know what the phrase means but they suspect it is a sarcastic comment, perhaps about Davis’ efforts in providing adequate footwear to soldiers.

Besides the date and the pumpkin head, Travers found another image of a horse standing in front of a man who had been revealed previously.

Edrington said the volunteers thought the man was a standalone image but now he is seen behind the horse and above him are the words, “He smells a rebel.” [Link]

145-Year-Old Book Finally Released

Joyce Yarde bought a copy of The Siege of Kenilworth that once belonged to Union soldier J.C. Sample.

When curiosity about the book’s plot led Yarde to turn a few pages into it, she found an inscription penned by Sample in 1863.

“Captured from the Blount House Little Washington North Carolina in June 1863,” the inscription reads. It is signed “J.C. Sample Corps G 168 P.V.I.”

That sent Yarde, a self-professed history buff, on a quest to return the “captured” property in her possession to its rightful owner, if one were living and if she could find him or her. She Googled “Little Washington, North Carolina” and came up with Blount Rumley, director of the N.C. Estuarium. A few weeks of e-mail correspondence ensued and, confident that she had at least found someone who could point her and the book in the right direction, she mailed the book to Rumley. [Link]

There Still Be Blood

Paul Dye is confident that the Civil War battle flag in his family's possession is stained with the blood of his ancestor, William D. Whitehead. Others aren't so sure.

"It's a great artifact, but there's no way it could have gone into all the battles they claim it went into," says Greg Biggs, a military historian in Tennessee who has researched Confederate flags for 18 years.

Another historian, Keith Bohannon of West Georgia University, told the auction house that he suspected the regiment had replaced the flag months before Whitehead fell at the Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862.

Word of the scholarly skepticism riles Dye. "If anyone has questions, I'll do a DNA test," he vows. "But I know that's my family's blood on that flag." [Link]

Thar's Gold in Them Thar Hills

An Arkansas man is searching for Confederate gold buried to finance a second Civil War that never happened. The Freemasons, John Wilkes Booth, and Jesse James were all involved.

Bob Brewer was 10 when his great-uncle, W.D. "Grandpa" Ashcraft, pointed it out on a logging trip 57 years ago.

"He said, 'Boy, you see that tree? That's a treasure tree,'" Brewer recalled on a recent visit to the site. "'You see that writing? If you can figure out what that is, you'll find some gold.'"

The old man didn't elaborate, but his words stuck with Brewer through childhood and two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Navy helicopter crewman. So did memories of Grandpa's frequent, unexplained horseback rides into the nearby Ouachita Mountains. [Link]

Man Finds Spoon, Loses Arm

Descendants of John W. Matheny donated some of his belongings to the Botetourt County (Va.) Historical Society, including a very special eating utensil.

According to family lore, said Jim Keyser, Matheny had found the spoon on the battlefield earlier and stuck it in his left breast pocket. While the battle raged around him a Yankee pumpkin ball hit him in the chest bending the lip of the spoon and sending the musket ball into his arm. He lost the arm from the resulting wound.

“All of our lives that spoon hung attached to the frame that held our great-grandfather’s discharge papers from the Confederacy,” said Keyser. [Link]

Pensions Get Attention

Diane Haddad reports that all of those Civil War pension applications squirreled away at the National Archives finally are coming to the Web.

The agreement will kick off with a pilot project to digitize, index and provide access to 3,150 pension files. When that’s done, FamilySearch, along with records site Footnote.com, plans to digitize and index all 1,280,000 pensions in the series.

According to the announcement, the digitized records will be free on FamilySearch and at Family History Centers, and possibly on a commercial third-party site.

As Diane says, "Oh, happy day!" I've been working on a large local history project that would have required a lengthy visit to Washington or a hefty payout to some researcher for copies of pension records. I'm doubly thrilled that these will be digitized from the original documents, and not from Eisenhower-era microfilm.

Graveyard Revisionism

Richard Hill has been arrested in North Carolina for desecrating the grave of his ancestor, who served on both sides of the Civil War War of Northern Aggression.

According to the warrant, Hill, apparently a sixth-generation descendant, "tore down and removed a tombstone on the grave" of Stephen S. Shook, who is buried in a family cemetery behind Upper Laurel Baptist Church near Mars Hill, "then replaced the stone with a Confederate stone."

According to the warrant, Shook was "a Union soldier who died on June 10, 1902."

But before that he was a Confederate, the family agrees. [Link]

Mom Finds Love in the Cemetery

For the past few years, Carolyn Fritz and her daughter Sandy have been visiting B.F. Gray and J.H. Love—two Confederate soldiers buried in Camp Butler National Cemetery.

"We didn't choose these two for any particular reason," Sandy says. "Mom just likes the name 'Love.' I made up a name for mine, B.F. Gray. I call him Beauregard FitzWilliam Gray because it just sounds very Southern. We were thinking about mom's J.H. Love. It could be John."

"John's a good name; nothing wrong with John." Carolyn says.

"But maybe we should call him Jackson for Stonewall Jackson or Jedediah to make it Southern," Sandy says. [Link]

I think "Benjamin Franklin Gray" would be more likely, but I could be wrong.

Unwitting Witness to History

Descendants of Wilmer McLean gathered on Monday for their first tour of his house in Appomattox, Virginia—the same house where Grant accepted Lee's surrender at the close of the Civil War.

The oft-repeated irony is that McLean, who lived in Manassas, had moved to Appomattox after the first Battle of Bull Run to escape the war.

“He used to say that the war started in his front yard and ended in his parlor,” said Patrick Schroeder, a historian with the Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park.

According to Charlotte Lageman, McLean’s great-granddaughter, “a family story is that a cannonball came through the chimney and fell into a pot of soup he was cooking in Manassas. That’s when he said, ‘This war is getting too close.’” [Link]

[Photo credit: McLean House by Mike McBride]

Every Bullet Hole Has a Story

David and Helen Sandfort of St. Charles, Missouri, have a bullet hole in the frame of their front door. They didn't know how it got there until David's brother did some digging at the Missouri State Archives.

On the night of June 10, 1862, two members of the State Militia Cavalry were returning home to St. Charles accompanied by four armed soldiers. After drinking at a tavern for a couple of hours, they passed by the house in question—then owned by Daniel Griffith.

As they approached the Griffith home, riding on the spot near where the north service road exists today, two of the Griffiths' dogs ran towards the soldiers, barking. Several shots rang out — it's still not certain who fired — but at least one bullet went through the right side of the front door frame, whizzed through the hallway, tore through the back door, hit a back porch post, glanced off a brick wall and fell to the ground.

The homeowner was not pleased, and—bullet in hand—filed a grievance with the battalion commander. The men were arrested and their statements taken.

The stories varied: Some denied firing their guns, one said he thought he heard two guns firing, another said he had fired his gun but so did the others.

"I was not drunk," Pvt. Hermann Koehne wrote. "I was drunk," Pvt. Franz Steinmann wrote. "I never was drunk when a soldier and this was the first time." [Link]

A Typical Case of Teenage Angst

An Alabama teenager spent four years after the Civil War searching for Jeff Darter—the man who shot his father.

[Geraldine Locke] said Joseph Moor heard Darter tell people he was going west to escape the Moor family and justice.

"Joseph spent years chasing Jeff Darter until they bedded down at the same campsite," Locke said.

In the middle of the night, Moor cut Darter's throat, got on his horse and rode back to Alabama.

Moor never told family members where he had been or about his actions until he was on his deathbed in January 1937. [Link]

There Was a Flaw in Her Plan

A Civil War letter valued at $1,000 was stolen from the car of Susan V. Hughes on Monday.

The letter was described as being written during the Battle of Bowling Green. Hughes, who declined comment to the Journal, told police the letter was a family heirloom, and she had been planning to take it to a safe-deposit box.

[Deputy Police Chief Mike] Marshall said the car was not locked. [Link]

The Civil War in Four Minutes

If you found the Ken Burns Civil War series too long to watch, you might like this exhibit from the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

"The Civil War in Four Minutes," also known as The Electronic Map, is a map of the war with battle lines that continuously move, showing the changing progress of the war. Here, each week of the war has been condensed to one second. In the corner of the map, a casualty counter tracks the mounting butcher's bill - an odometer of death. [Link]

[Hat tip: Neatorama]

Not the Scabs She Would Have Picked

Back in March 2003, a New Mexico librarian discovered something special between the pages of an old book.

Librarian Susanne Caro was leafing through an 1888 book on Civil War medicine when she spied a small, yellowed envelope tucked between the pages. Freeing it, she read the inscription "scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington's children" in the corner, with the signature "Dr. W.D. Kelly," the book's author.

After some research, the 23-year-old Santa Fe, N.M., woman decided not to open the envelope. "The only thing I could find connected with it," she said, "was smallpox." [Link]

[via Metafilter]

She'd Know That Skull Anywhere

Genealogist Joyce Saunders had the chance to meet her great-grandfather, Civil War soldier Roland Gillispie, when his remains were moved to make way for a highway in West Virginia.

She noticed Gillispie’s skull was relatively small compared to that of an average man. She knew it was his based on prior research into his medical record.

“He had the head of maybe a 12- or 14-year-old boy,” Saunders said. “He was only 5’5”, had a fair complexion, blue eyes and light hair.” [Link]

Did He Join the Wrong Army?

One of the contenders at this weekend's Kentucky Derby is a horse named for Charlie Curlin, a slave who fought with the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War.

But it was after his honorable discharge from the army that Curlin's story took its most intriguing turn. Charlie Curlin, Union Army veteran, came home from war thinking he was a Confederate, on the side of the people he had fought.

"Charlie Curlin was truly confused about who he was fighting for. That's very clear from stories he told when he got back home," said lawyer Shirley Cunningham Jr. of Georgetown, the man who named Curlin, the horse. [Link]

A Civil War Scion

It's not often that the son of a Union veteran becomes a member of the Sons of Union Veterans.

George Williams, 95, is the son of a Union soldier from Kentucky who ran away from home to fight on some of the bloodiest landscapes during the Civil War. He will be installed Monday night as a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

To many, the Civil War is just a historic event in the distant past. To Williams, it's an epic struggle washed in blood. His father, Henry, told him the stories of what it was like to hear the can[n]ons blast, to see the Southern hills littered with dead bodies, and to feel the emotion of neighbor fighting neighbor. [Link]

They Made a Big Production Out of It

ThinkFilm just picked up North American distribution rights to the 2005 indy feature The Last Confederate: The True Story of Robert Adams (formerly known as Strike the Tent). The Civil War-era film about a man from the South who falls for a gal from the North was written and produced by descendants of Robert and Eveline (McCord) Adams, and stars their great-great-grandson Julian Adams as Robert, and Julian's father Weston as "Grandfather Adams."

To ensure authenticity of their family’s story, Julian and Weston turned to the wealth of diaries, letters, and family documents surrounding Robert and Eveline. Records of Robert’s enlistment in the Confederate Army, his military service records, and his prison documents from Elmira, New York, also brought the elegant and horrible details of his story to light. [Link]

A Lot of People Have Ancestors

The Berkeley County Landmarks Commission in West Virginia searched for the grave of Civil War soldier Nimrod Wright for nearly a year, but now they're giving up. Descendant Dennis Wright had hoped to place Nimrod next to his widow, and is upset that the Commission gave up so quickly.

“There we are with Nimrod Evans Wright laying somewhere, rest his soul. His body probably never will be found,” Wright said.

[Chairman Don C.] Wood said the effort to exhume Nimrod was no longer the responsibility of the Landmarks Commission, adding Wright is free to continue the search for his relative on his own.

“A lot of people have ancestors,” Wood said. “He can go and get a permit.” [Link]