WEST VIRGINIA: Antietam and West Virginia
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. – It’s called the single bloodiest day in American history — the battle of Antietam. It took place September 17, 1862 and was the first battle fought on Union soil during the Civil War. It’s always been considered part of Maryland history. However, some of that fighting took place in West Virginia.
The National Park Service is looking at expanding Antietam to include the Core Battlefield in Shepherdstown.
The Battle of Antietam, by Kurz & Allison, depicting the scene of action at Burnside’s Bridge
“That battle was fought on September 19, two-days after the battle here at Antietam and really represents a continuation of the engagements here and represents really the final battle of the 1862 Maryland campaign,” explained Antietam Park Superintendent Susan Trail.
The park system has already conducted a boundary study and identified 500 acres that qualify for battlefield status. Next comes a public comment period. Once that’s complete, the proposal goes to the Secretary of the Interior, then to Congress. As for a time frame, Trail said that is hard to predict.
“Antietam Battlefield is a very well established park. We’ve been around since 1890. With Shepherdstown, that’s a very different story,” explained Trial. “So we would be working from scratch.”
The Core Battlefield has been largely untouched in the past 150 years. There’s now a movement in the Shepherdstown area to protect that West Virginia battlesite.
“The property in the Core Battlefield area is rural and wooded. Some organizations and non-profits have initiated purchasing some of the properties within the battlefield or requiring scenic easements to start the protection process for it,” said Trail.
It’s a good start according to the superintendent. However, it could take years to make the project a reality and then create a living park history to go along with the programs at Antietam.
-wvmetronews.com
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SOUTH CAROLINA: Clearing trees may affect Civil War site
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. — Beaufort County needs to remove or trim several hundred more trees around the Hilton Head Island Airport, and caretakers of a Civil War fort’s remains are concerned the work will harm the historic site.
The county is using eminent domain to condemn some of the airspace above properties neighboring the north end of the runway, along Beach City and Dillon roads.
Ownership of the airspace will allow the airport to clear the tops of trees that interfere with the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules for clear flight paths, according to airports director Jon Rembold.
Trees rise over a path that runs atop the rampart of Fort Howell on Sunday. A coming runway expansion at nearby Hilton Head Airport may cause some of the trees at the earthen fort to be trimmed or cut down. The Civil War fort’s caretakers are concerned the work may harm the historic site.
JAY KARR — Jay Karr
The county sent condemnation letters to nine property owners last week, including the Hilton Head Island Land Trust, which oversees historic Fort Howell’s remains off Beach City Road.
The earthwork fort was built by the 32nd U.S. Colored Infantry to protect Union forces and nearby Mitchelville, widely considered the country’s first freed-slaves village.
The group received a condemnation letter Tuesday, but its president, Linda Hyslop, said the county did not provide details on how many or which trees it might trim or remove.
About eight years ago, the land trust agreed to airspace easements for the county to remove and trim trees near its parking lot and paths. However, previous surveys did not show trees on the Civil War fort site as being affected, as the county now suggests, Hyslop said.
“I think that perhaps the county does not understand that when you open up the tree canopy on a piece of property like this, the fort can actually wash away in our torrential rains,” she said.
Any trimming on the site also must meet certain rules set out by the fort’s designation on the National Register of Historic Places, Hyslop added.
The county and land trust have not yet addressed the details of how the site’s historic and National Park Service designations will affect the work, but they will in the coming months before any trimming begins, county attorney Josh Gruber said Friday.
The county already has more than half of the airspace easements it needs, and the condemnations issued last week will secure the remaining areas, Gruber said.
The county also has acquired all the airspace it needs to address trees in the flight path at the runway’s south end, near William Hilton Parkway, Rembold said.
On Monday, County Council’s Finance Committee is expected to authorize a $178,000 work order for the airport to conduct a required environmental assessment on tree trimming in that area, he said.
Tree trimming and removal is to begin at both ends of the runway early next year.
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NORTH CAROLINA: N.C.’s Critical Role in the Civil War
In “Cold Mountain” (1997), North Carolina author Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel about the Civil War, there’s an account of a woman named Owens who is tortured by soldiers of the Confederate Home Guard in an effort to uncover the whereabouts of her deserter husband.
If you’ve read the book — or chanced to see the 2003 movie — you may remember the graphic scene of a woman’s thumbs crushed between fence rails.But the really interesting thing about this is that Frazier didn’t make it up. The story of Ms. Owens is based upon a real event that occurred in Randolph or Moore County in 1864, and it illustrates the complex politics of the Piedmont region of North Carolina during the war: Southerners were hardly unified in their support for the conflict, and by the war’s third year, many counties in this section, such as Randolph, Moore, Montgomery and Chatham, were considered to be in a state of insurrection, in which deserters, outlaws and Unionist sympathies — or simply a desire for the war and its hardships to end — often outweighed Confederate patriotism.
This war-weariness framed crucial events that would take place later in 1864 and in the first months of 1865 in North Carolina: the first and second attacks upon Fort Fisher, which guarded the port of Wilmington, the last lifeline of the Confederacy; Sherman’s march into North Carolina in the spring of 1865; the Battle of Bentonville, the last major engagement of the Civil War; Stoneman’s Raid; the subsequent surrender of Gen. Joseph Johnston to Sherman at Bennett’s Farmhouse; the fleeing of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his entourage through North Carolina; and the final disintegration of the Confederacy.
And though, of course, North Carolina was a theater of war from 1861 until its end, our state’s role is magnified in these last months of the conflict, and Greensboro itself plays an especially significant part as the affair finally winds down.
We now find ourselves nearing the 150th anniversary of this critical stage, and if the sesquicentennial has wetted your appetite for more information about North Carolina’s role in the war (particularly Greensboro’s part in those last war-weary months), the Greensboro Public Library might have a book or two for you.
For example, John G. Barrett’s “The Civil War in North Carolina” (1963) remains probably the best concise survey of the war in North Carolina. More than half of his book is devoted to the post-Gettysburg period during which things were unraveling for the Confederacy.
Another excellent work on Civil War North Carolina is Greensboro writer William Trotter’s three-volume study, which like Barrett’s, is titled “The Civil War in North Carolina” (1988-89).
I especially have enjoyed Trotter’s account of the war’s end in Greensboro. As he wrote, “Now, in 1865, as March gave way to April, the once-placid little town was flooded with misery. … The city’s normal population of about 2,000 doubled, then tripled, then practically became lost among the successive waves of people who converged there. First came hundreds of refugees from the towns that lay in Sherman’s path. Then came the hundreds of wounded from Bentonville. Then came General Beauregard’s Confederate troops — and the first rumors of Stoneman’s Yankee cavalry incursion into North Carolina.”
Still another book on the war’s last days in Greensboro is Ethel Stephens Arnett’s aptly titled “Confederate Guns Were Stacked: Greensboro, North Carolina” (1965). Arnett was a history professor at UNCG and wrote a number of books about Greensboro and its past, including “Greensboro, North Carolina: The County Seat of Guilford” (1955), which is still a very useful resource for Gate City history. Though not as successful as Trotter in describing the spectacle of chaos in Greensboro, “Confederate Guns Were Stacked” is nonetheless a well-researched account.
More recently in 2008, Bradley R. Foley, editor of the Guilford Genealogist, produced “The Civil War Ends: Greensboro, April 1865: A Historical Study of the Civil War in Guilford County.” His research on Greensboro as the conflict ended includes a bounty of primary source material and is also quite well-illustrated.
But to return to Trotter, it is impossible for me to imagine a Greensboro bulging with refugees, tripled or better in population. It is an extraordinary story, and a tale which is really atypical for much of the literature on the Confederacy.
For writing on the Confederacy is often marred by a tendency to glorify and disjoin the Confederate soldier’s honor and bravery in battle from their broader context in the suffering and chaos the Civil War brought to the South and which would be its lasting legacy for decades thereafter: the economic despair of Reconstruction, the sight of veterans returned from war maimed and broken, a generation of women who would know only the empty chairs of menfolk never to return, and the cruel treatment of African Americans, which we have never completely reconciled.
This is equally true, for example, of one of the best recent works on the North Carolina soldier in the Civil War, Rod Gragg’s popular and well-received “Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg” (2000), as well as Archie Davis’ rather dull “Boy Colonel of the Confederacy: The Life and Times of Henry King Burgwyn, Jr.” (1985), which is also an account of the fated and fabled 26th North Carolina.
The simple fact is that the hundreds of young men of the 26th North Carolina slaughtered at Gettysburg were victims of poor generalship and their lives were wasted. But this is an argument (or battle) for another time.
Let it suffice to say here that the account of Ms. Owen’s torture at the hands of the Home Guard in Frazier’s popular novel, as well as other books which recount the tumult of the war’s end in our fine city, also can remind us that the tragedy and violence of the Civil War extended well beyond the field of battle.
Tim Cole is collections manager for the Greensboro Public Library. Decimal Points is a regular feature provided by the library.
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