Gettysburg monument repairs complete
Seven years after vandals damaged three monuments in Gettysburg National Military Park, the last monument to be repaired has been fixed. The 11th Massachusetts Infantry monument, which was conceived as a pedestal topped by an arm wielding a sword, got its severed arm back. Final repairs were made in April.
Park preservation worker Brian Griffin used photographs to remake the arm out of clay, then made a mold of it for creating a plaster model. Granite Industries of Vermont replicated the plaster model in stone.
Other monuments damaged in the February 2006 incident were the 4th New York Artillery (Smith’s Battery) and the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry. To date, no arrests for the vandalism have been made, despite a $30,000 reward for information.
In early May, staff reset the life-size bronze infantry figure from the 121st New York Volunteer Infantry monument onto its pedestal. A tree fell on the monument and damaged it during the Halloween snowstorm of 2011. The sculpture’s base was bent, and park staff pressed it back into shape.
Rail museum gets a boost
The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, Ga., plans to break ground on a $1 million research center this year, allowing for expanded access to documents and photographs in the location that won fame for the Great Locomotive Chase in April 1862.
During the Civil War, Union raiders swiped the locomotive “General” near Kennesaw, but were eventually chased down by Confederates on foot and by rail.
“Most museums or research facilities like this are closing down; we’re going in the other direction,” Executive Director Richard Banz told the Marietta Daily Journal.
With the expansion, the Smithsonian-affiliated museum will be able to take artifacts currently in a warehouse and either place them on display or make them easily accessible using a search aid similar to a card catalog.
“There are papers from all the past presidents of the Southern Railroad, nearly a million photos of old railroads, blueprints of cars, information about the role railroads played in civil rights and news articles about Jim Crow laws,” Banz said.
Record price for soldier’s letter
A letter written by an African-American Civil War soldier of the 28th U.S. Colored Troops sold for $38,000—more than four times the pre-auction estimate of $6,000 to $8,000—at the Printed and Manuscript African Americana sale in March at New York’s Swann Galleries.
Written by Morgan W. Carter on December 3, 1864, the letter is in fine shape and is remarkable for its content, auction chief Wyatt Houston Day told IndyStar.com. Writing to a friend in his hometown of Madison, Ind., Carter told of the fighting he’d witnessed, describing “the long to be remembered field of bloodshed and slaughter….There many a poor fell[ow] lost thear life for thear country and thear people.”
Carter, a free black and son of an African-American shopkeeper active in the local Underground Railroad, returned to Madison after the war and worked for his father. What happened to him after those years is unknown.
The letter had been in private hands for many years. A spokeswoman for Swann Galleries indicated no information would be released about the buyer.
ID tag wins relic prize
Ready, set, hunt. A nonconventional competition perhaps, but when the dirt had settled (literally), Jeffrey Rees of Bath, Ohio, had won the coveted Best Overall Find prize at the Grand National Relic Shootout held this spring near Richmond, Va.
Rees’ metal detector homed in on a sterling silver ID tag that once belonged to Pvt. John Bradt, a Union soldier from upstate New York.
Bradt’s unit had camped on the grounds as the Union Army was closing in on Richmond in 1864. According to the Albany Times Union, the soldier survived the war and lived until 1901. About 200 relic hunters participated in the competition.
Soldier’s ring returned to family
One hundred forty-eight years after the war ended, and 81 years after he died at the age of 91, Private Levi Schlegel’s identity ring was returned to his descendants in a modest graveside ceremony this past April in Reading, Pa., where he had lived.
The ring, similar to a soldier’s dog tag, was found by veteran relic-hunter John Blue, 40, a heavy equipment operator from Manassas, Va., at a construction site in Fredericksburg, Va.
Schlegel was a member of the 198th Pennsylvania, Company G, from Berks County, where Reading is located. A carpenter by training, he married after the war and had 11 children.
Blue found the ring in 2005, but it was only recently that he tried to locate Schlegel’s family, enlisting the aid of his friend Margaret Binning, a genealogist and volunteer at the Manassas Museum. Binning tracked Schlegel to the Reading Public Library, where descendant Ernest Schlegel is a board member.
It’s unknown how the ring came to be in Fredericksburg since Schlegel only passed through the city as he returned home after Appomattox in May 1865. However, as he had seen some of the most horrific fighting at the end of the war in Virginia, it might have been deliberately left behind.
As Ernest Schlegel told The Washington Post, “I just can’t help but wonder if he didn’t actually throw the ring on the ground in disgust.”
Cannons returned to Doubleday Hill
Three refurbished Civil War cannons were returned to Doubleday Hill in Williamsport, Md., this past May. They were removed in 2000 so they could be protected from further environmental damage.
The cannon tubes, part of a government stockpile after the Civil War ended, were placed by the town in 1897 to commemorate local men who served in the Civil War.
Williamsport Councilman Scott Bragunier, who coordinated the project and ceremony, said a grant from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority partially paid for the restoration, done by Steen Cannons in Kentucky, with the town providing additional funding.
Draft horses pulled carriages loaded with the cannons up the steep incline while re-enactment groups participated in the ceremonies and camped at the foot of the hill.
The Doubleday Hill monument overlooks the Potomac River south toward West Virginia and commemorates Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday’s occupation of the area in 1861.
Originally published in the September 2013 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.