Virginia: Confederate Flag to be flown by I-95
A Confederate heritage group has announced plans to fly a Confederate Flag on I-95, the main highway running the length of the East Coast. The group Virginia Flaggers said that the Confederate Flag would be flown just south of Richmond, Virginia. Group founder Susan Hathaway explained their interpretation of the Confederate Flag:
“Basically, the flag is being erected as a memorial to the memory and the honor of the Confederate soldiers who sacrificed, bled and died to defend Virginia from invasion,” she said.
The Confederate Flag is a symbol of Civil War-era Southern pride. PHOTO: Thomas R. Machnitzki, CC License
If you were hoping that she means invasion from the British, prepare to be disappointed: the Confederate Flag made its first appearance in the 1860s, right around the time of the American Civil War and almost a century after the War of Independence. The “invasion” of Virginia that Hathaway refers to was from soldiers of the North in a war largely over whether America should continue to keep Africans as slaves. That’s what the Confederate soldiers were fighting for.
The Virginia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) opposes the planned flying of the Confederate Flag:
“It would be an embarrassment,” said Virginia NAACP Executive Director King Salim Khalfani.
“It’s going to continue to make Richmond look like a backwater, trailer park, hick town,” he said, adding “if [the Confederate soldiers] had been successful, I’d still be in chains.”
Virginia Flaggers is saying that they are simply being proud of their heritage, but are they really proud of what the South stood for during the Civil War? Apparently they are. We can only conclude that they are willfully deluding themselves. One can’t really make a case that the Confederate Flag doesn’t represent being okay with slavery. Everyone has some ugliness in their past, but the Confederate South carries the most shameful in American history. That doesn’t mean that current Southerners carry that burden, but it does mean that there are parts of their history that they should not be proud of or seek to honor.
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South Carolina: Exploring Camp Asylum
Chester DePratter is committed to uncovering personal items that Union soldiers may have discarded or dropped on the ground as prisoners of war, held captive inside the walls of Columbia’s state mental hospital.
The 1,200 men weren’t held there long, just two months. But period drawings from what was called Camp Asylum show where they were corralled as the calendar turned from the Christmas season of 1864 to the New Year of 1865.
Portions of towering brick walls are the only structures left on the State Hospital grounds that remain from the days of Camp Asylum.
DAWN HINSHAW
Many wrote of their experiences in letters home. Dozens either kept diaries or wrote memoirs. Some lectured on their experiences after the war, their accounts captured by newspaper reporters and magazine writers, said DePratter, head of the research division at the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology.
So while many Columbians don’t know about Camp Asylum — DePratter only heard about it for the first time four years ago — it’s well-documented: The archaeologist has filled 31 2-inch notebooks with firsthand accounts and stories about people who lived in the makeshift camp on the grounds of the mental hospital on today’s Bull Street.
The prisoners lived in barracks or tents, if they were lucky, many bedding down in shallow holes they dug for themselves on the 3.5-acre field.
Now, as Greenville developer Bob Hughes contemplates building a minor-league baseball park, shops and houses on the property he’s set to buy, DePratter is scrambling to raise money for an archaeological dig at Camp Asylum.
He says it will cost $300,000 to $400,000 to excavate the site and process the collections – money he doesn’t have time to raise through the traditional avenue of grants.
He’s been guaranteed four months to do field work, and hopes to start by the end of the year.
‘I had no idea’
For the past decade, there’s been serious talk about developing the State Hospital property on Bull Street.
But with Hughes’ plans now on a fast track, and a realization that buildings will be demolished, curiosity and interest are high.
Amateur photographers are flocking to the property, eager to memorialize structures that may not survive the project. Sixty-five people signed up to walk the property Saturday, more than security officers at the S.C. Department of Mental Health preferred, spokeswoman Tracy LaPointe said.
One of the visitors, Elza Hayen, 36, remembers riding down Bull Street, looking out the car window as a child and seeing the big building with ASYLUM carved on top. She always wondered what was happening behind those windows.
“It’s a mystery wrapped up in a lot of history,” said Hayen, who’s been photographing the site from her car almost daily for the past two weeks.
“I had no idea,” she said. “Prisoners of war.”
David Bush, director of the Center for Historic and Military Archaeology at Heidelberg University, said few Civil War POW camps are “memorialized,” so people living nearby often are unaware of them.
“These things are known historically as existing, but a lot of time they drop out of what we call the public memory,” Bush said.
Of 65 “official” POW camps that existed during the Civil War, Bush knew of significant digs at just three. That includes one where he’s been working at Johnson’s Island, a 17-acre camp on Lake Erie in northwest Ohio, for the past 25 years.
What Bush called “minimal work” has been done to document perhaps a half-dozen more of the camps, he said.
“Prisoner of war facilities are not typically the kinds of resources associated with war that people like to maintain in memory,” he said. “There are usually atrocities associated with them.”
Artifacts to discover
For most of his career, DePratter didn’t know there was once a prisoner of war camp in Columbia, either.
He only learned about it in 2009 after he and his teenage son Russell began studying Civil War history as a shared hobby.
“I am an archaeologist of Spanish exploration in South Carolina,” the bearded DePratter, 65, said last week. “The Civil War was not what I did. But what I found through reading about South Carolina history was there were Civil War prisons here.”
Now he’s considered an expert on Camp Asylum.
“Dr. DePratter has done some of the most in-depth research on a S.C. Civil War site that I have seen in quite a while,” Allen Roberson, director of the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, said by email. “He has identified most of the Union soldiers held captive there, documented how they lived and even what they ate.”
A prisoner of war camp called Camp Sorghum was first established in West Columbia. But with so many of the Union officers able to escape, the governor arranged for them to be transferred to the State Hospital grounds, DePratter said.
Turns out the West Columbia camp, where prisoners also were held for about two months, is now the site of a subdivision.
Two other POW camps were being built outside Columbia, but construction was abandoned at the threat of Gen. W.T. Sherman’s March to the Sea.
The threat of Sherman’s sweep through Columbia was behind the decision to close Camp Asylum, too, DePratter said. The only thing that remains on the Department of Mental Health campus from the days of Camp Asylum is the towering brick wall along what’s now Calhoun Street, plus two segments of walls inside the property.
Despite prisoners’ short stay there, DePratter is convinced there will be plenty of artifacts.
“There’s going to be personal items that were owned by the officers and lost: Buttons, pocket knives, identification badges, uniform insignia,” he said. “There’ll also be things like craft items,” perhaps handmade dice or chess pieces.
The dig could uncover items the prisoners received from traders. Though the prisoners mostly bought food from traveling salesmen, they also purchased personal items such as pens, sewing needles, ink and cooking implements, DePratter said.
One thing that distinguishes Camp Asylum from all others is only one man died there. DePratter said the camp was supplied with fresh water, and prisoners had medical care.
“We have a camp that’s different from all the others,” he said. “People weren’t dying like flies.”
The story under the ground
Hughes has committed $25,000 toward DePratter’s exploration of the site, and Mayor Steve Benjamin said he’ll ask City Council this week to match that with an unspecified amount in tourist-tax revenues.
That would get DePratter’s dig started with borings that would “determine what kind of information might be there and where it might be,” Benjamin said.
DePratter — who also wants to write a book, mount an exhibition of artifacts and produce two films about the site — said he hopes private donors will come forward.
“I’m pretty much dropping everything else that I’ve been working on, and thinking about doing, to make sure this happens,” he said. “It’s a matter of finding the money and finding a crew and then getting out there and doing the field work.
“We will do it. There’s no question. … It’s just not something you can walk away from.”
Benjamin said he’s excited by the prospect of the excavation at yet another urban site that could help tell the story of daily life through artifacts buried in the ground. “It has a great deal of promise by helping tell the story of what was one of the most challenging and painful times in American history as it relates to Columbia,” he said.
In recent years, the Historic Columbia Foundation has conducted archaeological digs at five of its six house museums, most recently at the Modjeska Simkins House. Director Robin Waites said the organization may be willing to provide staff to help with DePratter’s work.
“Honestly, once they start a project and you see what they find, it’s like a treasure hunt,” Waites said. “It’s really fun to see the process but also to understand then what they as archaeologists can glean from all those little broken pieces of glass or ceramic or bones.
“They can build an entire story from what they find under the ground.”
–Dawn Hinshaw, The (Columbia, S.C.) State
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Arkansas: Civil War Flags Return
The third Iowa Calvary Civil War flag, seen Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013, will be on display at the MacArhur Museum of Arkansas Military History beginning Sept. 11 to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1863 Battle of Little Rock.
Two Civil War flags in September will make their first appearance in Arkansas since the 1861-1865 war ended.
MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History will exhibit the flags starting Sept. 11 to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1863 Battle of Little Rock.
The flags will be on a 30-day loan from the State Historical Society of Iowa, museum’s Executive Director Stephan McAteer said.
The flags represent the Third Iowa Cavalry and the 37th Arkansas Infantry. Chip Culpepper of the MacArthur Museum board said the 33rd Iowa Regiment captured the 37th Arkansas Infantry flag on July 4, 1863, in the Battle of Helena.
The exhibit at the MacArthur Museum, at 503 E. Ninth St. in Little Rock, is free. Museum hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1-4 p.m. Sundays.
The Engagement at of Bayou Fourche, also known as the Battle of Little Rock, was a Civil War battle fought on Sept. 10, 1863, as Confederate troops sought to stop Major General Frederick Steele’s Union army from capturing Little Rock (Pulaski County).
Steele had advanced steadily across eastern Arkansas during August with a combined force of infantry from Helena (Phillips County) and cavalry that had come down Crowley’s Ridge from Missouri. With the exception of the short Action at Bayou Meto (or Reed’s Bridge) on August 27, the Union approach to Little Rock had seen relatively light resistance. As the Union army prepared for its final assault on the Arkansas capital, Steele had some 10,477 men present for duty and fifty-seven cannon. Confederate commander Major General Sterling Price commanded 7,749 men, most holding the fortifications at present-day North Little Rock (Pulaski County) while a thin screen of Confederate horsemen sought to defend a dozen fordable sites along the Arkansas River.
On the evening of September 9, Union engineers began building a pontoon bridge across the Arkansas River at Terry’s Ferry, located at a horseshoe bend downriver from Little Rock. This position enabled Union troops to place converging artillery fire on Confederate defenders of the southern bank. Steele also sent a diversionary force east to threaten Buck’s Ford on the Arkansas River.
Around daylight on September 10, Confederate artillery fired on the bridge but was quickly silenced by Union cannon fire. At about 10:00 a.m., two regiments of Union infantry rushed across the bridge and established a beachhead. Two brigades of Union cavalry followed, while the Union infantry headed west along the north bank of the Arkansas River to face the strong Confederate fortifications on high ground at present-day North Little Rock.
Confederate colonel Archibald Dobbins and his men fell back steadily under pressure from the Union First Brigade under Colonel Lewis Merrill and the Second Brigade under Colonel J. M. Glover. Dobbins ordered about 500 troops to form along Bayou Fourche, also calling in the men facing the Union feint at Buck’s Ford. Dobbins’s troops consisted of Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas cavalry and two artillery batteries, later bolstered by Confederate infantry. Brigadier General John S. Marmaduke replaced Dobbins as the Confederate commander during the battle.
The Engagement at of Bayou Fourche, which took place near the present-day Little Rock National Airport, was essentially two fights, with Glover’s First Brigade moving through a heavily wooded area between the bayou and the Arkansas River, while Merrill’s troops advanced through a large cornfield south of the bayou. Marmaduke formed his lines behind a levee on the west side of the bayou.
Glover’s command—consisting of the First Iowa Cavalry, the Tenth Illinois Cavalry, the Third Missouri Cavalry (US), and elements of the Second Missouri Light Artillery—faced part of Marmaduke’s division led by Colonel William L. Jeffers, which was composed of the Eighth Missouri Cavalry (CS), Greene’s Regiment, Burbridge’s Regiment, and Young’s Battalion. The Union cavalry began a mounted advance, but after losing an artillery battery to Confederate cavalry, Glover commanded his troops to dismount and move forward on foot. The dismounted men steadily drove back Jeffers’s troops.
Merrill, meanwhile, led the Eighth Missouri Cavalry (US) and the Second Missouri Cavalry (US), supported by the Twenty-fifth Ohio Battery, through the cornfield under artillery fire from Marmaduke’s men. As Confederate infantry arrived on the field to support the harried cavalry, Union artillery from the north bank of the river began firing on the Confederate troops’ flanks, preventing them from making an effective counterattack. Glover’s troops broke out of the timber on the north side of the battlefield, leading the Confederate forces to fall back toward Little Rock with Union cavalry following close behind.
When Price realized the Union cavalry was flanking his main defensive line north of the river, he ordered his infantry south, across the Arkansas River, burned his pontoon bridge, and began evacuating Little Rock and retreating toward southwest Arkansas. A final Rebel defensive line was set up on the fairgrounds on Little Rock’s southern boundary, but the Union forces did not challenge them, contenting themselves to accept the surrender of Arkansas’s capital city from Little Rock’s civil authorities.
The Engagement at Fourche Bayou resulted in seventy-two Union casualties; Confederate losses were not reported.
—Christina Huynh, Arkansas Online/Encyclopedia of Arkansas
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Tennessee: Volunteers Sought for Battle of Chickamauga Events
The Fort Oglethorpe Tourism Association (FOTA) will lend support to the National Park Service’s 150th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga events, Sept. 14–15 and seeks vendors and volunteers for this once-in-a-lifetime event.
FOTA is the volunteer group that promotes heritage tourism and markets and organizes community events on behalf of Fort Oglethorpe. The group has spent the past three years planning for the 150th anniversary and the special events that will be offered.
Helping a wounded soldier from the battlefield at the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga, produced by the Blue Gray Alliance held in Walker County in 2008. (Photo/Kymberly Thomas)
Read more: CatWalkChatt – Tourism association seeks help for 150th commemoration events
A Civil War timeline featuring living historians, guided by park employees, will propel visitors through North Georgia between 1861 and 1864. Living historians and park staff will also present programs at places like Horseshoe Ridge, the Wilder Brigade Monument and the park visitor center.
Throughout the two days, Union soldiers will provide artillery demonstrations near the visitor center building. The Georgia 8th Regiment Band will perform Sat. and Sun. morning, while bands from Heritage High School and Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School will perform Sun. afternoon. A family education tent will also be near the visitor center providing different hands-on activities for kids. All events are at the Chickamauga Battlefield.
Upon the request of park superintendent, Cathy Cook, FOTA will provide concessions, children’s activities and an assortment of vendors on the polo field on Barnhardt Circle.
“We were told we could have as many as 20,000 visitors that weekend.,” Cook said. “People will be hungry and thirsty and want a place to relax and we couldn’t provide those services. The tourism association does a great job with events on the polo field and we are happy to be working with them.”
The 6th Cavalry Museum will be open to the public and “Lives and Lands of the Civil War” art show will depict artists’ images of the people, architecture and landscapes of the American Civil War. All types of art are accepted (2-D, 3-D, photography, fiber arts, sculpture, etc.).
Artists from Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama will have their work on display and for sale, along with Civil War prints. Deadline to enter is Aug.16. An artists’ reception will be held Sept. 6 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
In 2011, FOTA unveiled “The Blood Ran Blue and Gray,” a traveling exhibit of four interpretive panels about the hospitals, medicine and personal stories of the caregivers at the Battle of Chickamauga. Also included were the fifth and eighth grade school trunks with replica artifacts, classroom displays and lesson plans for area schools to borrow. The school trunks adhere to Georgia curriculum standards and give teachers all the tools needed to bring the Civil War to life for their students.
Interested vendors can download the vendor application at fortotourism.org. To download the art show brochure go to 6thcavalrymuseum.org. To learn more about the National Park Service’s commemorative events visit nps.gov/chch/planyourvisit/150th-anniversary-of-the-campaign-for-chattanooga. Volunteers to work the event can call Chris McKeever at 706–861–2860 or e-mail chris@6thcavalrymuseum.com.
–CatWalkChatt.com
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Missouri: Exhibit Focuses on “A State Divided”
Captain David Thompson of Caldwell Minute Men (later Caldwell LIght Infantry); Company D, 1st Infantry Regiment 4th Division Missouri State Guard; and Company H, 2nd Missouri Infantry Regiment; holding sword.
The Civil War was a uniquely terrifying experience for most Missourians. Because of its “border state” status, the state experienced more than its share of civilian bloodshed caused by marauding Confederate guerrillas, continuously shifting local allegiances and nebulous battle lines. The war often split families apart and caused terrible physical damage to many regions of the state.
Between August 10 and October 6, the Columbia Public Library will host an innovative and detailed exhibit called “A State Divided: The Civil War in Missouri.” This exhibit was created by the Missouri Humanities Council and the Missouri History Museum and will be showcased in the Columbia Public Library’s third floor reading room.
The library’s local partner is the Boone County Historical Museum, which will also be contributing items for the exhibit. The display has already traveled through a number of locations in Missouri, last exhibiting at the Bushwhacker Museum in Vernon County, and features four large informational panel displays and several interactive units.
In addition to this display, the library has a number of related programs in the late summer and early autumn. Several locally prominent amateur and professional historians will be discussing the role of citizens and soldiers in Boone County and the Mid-Missouri region during the Civil War. Civil War-themed musical events are also included in the programming. Please check theDBRL program guide for the exact dates and times for these events.
For some quick and easy access to information about the Civil War in Missouri, please check out our Civil War subject guide.
With annotated book lists and additional information related to historic preservation agencies in Missouri and their websites, the subject guide is a comprehensive resource for information related to the Civil War.
You can find more information about the exhibit on the Missouri Humanities Council website.
–Daniel Boone Regional Library
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North Carolina: Civil War Materials Going on Display
RALEIGH – How do historians learn about the past? One of the best ways is by examining old documents, or primary sources, often found in libraries and archives.
On Aug. 10, staff from the Capitol and State Library will display authentic Civil War era materials from the library’s collection and offer tours of the recreated library on the Capitol’s third floor, where the state stored many of these important documents throughout the war.
This event is a great way to learn about the variety of research materials available in your State Library and see how North Carolina’s governor and other elected officials led the state from their offices at the Capitol throughout the Civil War. The free event which is part of the statewide second Saturdays series will take place at the State Capitol from 1 to 4 p.m., with tours at 1 p.m., 1:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The Department of Cultural Resources’ 2nd Saturdays summer programming showcases North Carolina’s culture, heritage and arts. For a complete schedule of more than 100 second Saturdays across North Carolina, go to www.2ndSaturdaysnc.com or call 919-807-7385.
The State Capitol’s mission is to preserve and interpret the history, architecture and functions of the 1840 building and Union Square. It is within the Division of State Historic Sites in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. The State Capitol is at One Edenton Street, Raleigh, NC, 27601. Visit www.nchistoricsites.org/capitol/default.htm or call 919-733-4994 for more information.
–Fuquay-Varina Independent
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