Former POWs To Speak At Andersonville National Historic Site

National POW Museum at Andersonville

By NPT Staff on February 5th, 2018
        On Sunday, April 8, former POWs, veterans, and others will gather at Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the National Prisoner of War Museum. Featured speakers will include Seymour Lichtenfeld, held prisoner by Germany during World War II, and David Eberly, a former POW during Desert Storm. 
     Mr. Lichtenfeld served his country as a U.S. Army rifleman in both airborne and combat infantry units during World War II. During the Battle of the Bulge, his unit was surrounded. After three days, with no food or ammunition left, he was captured on December 19, 1944. He spent more than five months as a prisoner of war in Germany. He has been awarded the Combat Infantryman’s badge, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Prisoner of War Medal, World War II Battle of the Bulge Medal, European Theater of Operations Medal with three battle clusters, and many others. 
      Colonel (ret) Eberly was the senior-ranking Allied Prisoner of War in Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991. He served as a U.S. Air Force airman and participated in the initial air strike into Iraq. On January 19, 1991, his Strike Eagle was shot down. After evading the enemy for three nights, he was captured and held prisoner for 43 days. He has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and many others. 
     On Sunday, April 8, the park will honor the sacrifices and service of Mr. Lichtenfeld, Colonel (ret) Eberly, and other former POWs and veterans. Activities begin at 1:30 p.m., when the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence Ceremonial Band will perform. At 2 p.m., Mr. Lichtenfeld and Colonel (ret) Eberly will share their stories during a commemorative ceremony.
     Other planned activities include a performance by the Lee County High School Military Drill Team; a Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program; a military flyover; and display of a UH-1 Huey helicopter. All activities are free and open to the public. 
     Andersonville National Historic Site is located 10 miles south of Oglethorpe, Georgia, and 10 miles northeast of Americus, Georgia, on Georgia Highway 49. The national park features the National Prisoner of War Museum, Andersonville National Cemetery and the site of the  historic Civil War prison, Camp Sumter. Andersonville National Historic Site is the only national park within the National Park System to serve as a memorial to all American prisoners of war. Park grounds are open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The National Prisoner of War Museum is open 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., daily. Admission is free.

Black Civil War Soldiers of Chester County - a Presentation

     The Citizens for the Restoration of Historical LaMott (Cheltenham Twp outside Philadelphia) invite you to attend a presentation by Dr Cheryl Gooch on "Black Civil War Soldiers of Chester County." See photo below or click here for a pdf copy. 
     To be held Sunday February 25th at 3pm at 7420 Sycamore Ave in LaMott PA

Has the Cloatilda - the Last Known Slave Ship - been found??

A wreck found in Alabama may be the last American slave ship
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
Updated 7:08 AM ET, Thu January 25, 2018

Click here for original story
Click on this link for another version of the same story from Smithsonian.com

The aerial photo (above right) shows the remains of what may be the Clotilda, the last slave ship documented to have delivered captive Africans to the United States. The long spine is the ship's starboard side.

If experts' suspicions are correct, it's the long-lost wreck of the Clotilda -- the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans into the United States.
Its precise location has eluded archaeologists and historians since the vessel was burned in 1860 by slavers seeking to hide evidence of their illegal trafficking. But after the wreck was recently exposed by unusually low tides, AL.com reporter Ben Raines discovered its remains near Mobile and has taken the first step towards verifying its authenticity.
"We did not see anything on the site that would say it's not the Clotilda," said Gregory D. Cook, assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of West Florida. Raines brought Cook and several other experts to examine the wreck and all agreed that its remains match historical records of the ship.
"We think it's a very compelling possibility that the wreck could be the Clotilda, but we cannot positively identify it at this point," Cook told CNN.

Still, historians are excited at the prospect.
"It's frankly of world historical importance," said John Sledge, an architectural historian with the city of Mobile. "It's something that's been of great interest, both locally and nationally ... going back more than a century."

A dark journey
The Clotilda had a brief and wretched history.
By the mid-1800s importing slaves into the US had long been illegal, although some smugglers defied the law, especially in the South.
According to historical accounts, the Clotilda made its illicit journey after Timothy Meaher, a local plantation owner, made a bet that he could sneak slaves past federal officials and into the country.
He bought the two-masted schooner and paid a captain, William Foster, to sail it to West Africa and collect 110 slaves from what is now Benin. Foster ferried them back across the Atlantic to Mobile, where he smuggled the ship past authorities in 1860 under cover of darkness.
The captain then navigated the Clotilda up the Spanish River, transferred the slaves to a riverboat and burned the ship, sinking it.
Many of the ship's slaves, freed five years later at the end of the Civil War, settled a community north of downtown Mobile that became known as Africatown. Some descendants of the original slaves still live in the area.
"Any tangible evidence related to the period of slavery in the United States carries a powerful meaning for many people, so if this was the last ship to transport enslaved Africans to this country, that would be a pretty huge discovery symbolically," said Cook, the archaeology professor.
Cook said that if the wreck is proven to be the Clotilda, the descendants of its slaves would be consulted on decisions about its future.
"This would have obvious impacts on them, and we would work with them to get a sense of their feelings, what they would like to see occur with the site, and have them involved in the research as much as they would like to be," he said.

Digging for proof
The wreck is partially buried and not much to look at -- a long wooden spine with some planks and iron spikes lying nearby. It's accessible only by boat and lies alongside a marshy island in the lower Mobile-Tensaw Delta, some 12 miles north of Mobile.
It sat underwater before being exposed by extreme low tides caused by the wintry "bomb cyclone" storm system that hammered the Eastern US this winter.
Preliminary evidence suggests it could be the Clotilda. Cook said its type of hull construction matches ships built in the mid-19th century, and the remains of the hull show signs of being burned. And according to Raines its location in the delta is consistent with the one described in Foster's journals. (He's not revealing the wreck's precise location to preserve its integrity and discourage looters.)
For proof, however, archaeologists would likely need to excavate the wreck and examine the contents of its hold for such items as ceramics, which could help pinpoint the time period, or shackles, which could help confirm its use as a slave ship.
Any digging would require state and possibly federal permits.
"We just won't know until we investigate," Cook said.
Sledge, the Mobile historian, hopes confirming the ship's identity will help bring some closure to descendants of its Africatown neighborhood.
"The Clotilda has been the missing piece of that story," he said.

"Abraham Lincoln: Philosopher Statesman” with Dr. Joseph Fornieri

Saturday, February 10, 1:00 p.m.: 
Abraham Lincoln Birthday Celebration
featuring “Abraham Lincoln: Philosopher Statesman” 
Lecture/Book Signing with Dr. Joseph Fornieri
at the Lehigh County Historical Society
432 W Walnut Street
Allentown, PA  18102
Come celebrate Lincoln’s birthday with a taste of his favorite cake, and learn more about his life and political greatness.  Leading Lincoln scholar Dr. Joseph Fornieri will explore how Lincoln's greatness of thought, speech, and deed made him a true Philosopher Statesman. FREE to members; non-members $8 adults, $3 children.

CLICK HERE FOR A PDF POSTER OF THE EVENT

Clara Barton (as suggested by a student)

The following post was suggested by a school student who found the research page of our website to be helpful for a school project. We hope she (and others) continue to learn from history: past, present and future! Keep on learning, Rebecca!
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All About Clara Barton
Clara Barton is a famous teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. She is considered to be one of the most famous nurses of the Civil War but is most recognized for establishing the American Red Cross. Because she was able to do more than many women were allowed to do at the time, Barton is also a role model for many girls and women.

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born in Massachusetts on Christmas in 1921. She was the youngest of five children, and she was a very shy girl, but she had a very close relationship with her four older siblings. During her childhood, her father often told her war stories, which gave her a sense of pride in her country and helped teach her the importance of being prepared. She also developed an interest in caring for others, which began when she had to take care of one of her brothers after he fell off of a roof and severely injured himself. She was not accused of abuse at a nursing home.

Barton's Role as an Educator

Barton's shyness was a big problem when she was young. Her parents believed that teaching would help her get over her shyness. Because she liked helping people, they also thought that she would make a very good teacher. She began teaching in Massachusetts when she was nearly 17 years old, and she was very good at it. During her time as a teacher, she became more confident, and she did very well with students. Her teaching style made even the most difficult children enjoy learning.

In 1850, she moved to New York to further her education, and after, she went to teach in New Jersey. Because there were no free public schools in New Jersey, Barton opened her own small school in Bordentown. As her school became more popular, Bordentown decided that it should be made larger. When the new school opened, officials decided that Barton should no longer be in charge because she was a woman. They hired a man to replace her, and they paid him more for the job. This angered Barton, who later resigned from the school entirely.

Barton's Role During the Civil War

When the Civil War started, Barton lived in Washington, D.C., where she worked at the U.S. Patent Office. After the Baltimore riot of 1861, she assisted injured soldiers, and she recognized some of the men as former students and other people that she knew. She also saw that there were not enough supplies to care for the injured soldiers. To help fix this problem, she encouraged friends in every place where she had lived to gather supplies such as medicine, food, blankets, and clothing for the soldiers. This support network became very important for Union soldiers and played a huge role in getting them aid when their supplies ran out or were low. She would travel by carriage and deliver supplies to field hospitals herself and was even given approval to travel to some battlefields. This was surprising to many people, as women did not normally travel to battlefields or field hospitals alone. Even though she mainly delivered supplies, she would also act as a nurse at times. When she could, she and other nurses would assist with medical care and provide comfort and food to the injured. Her actions earned her the nickname "Angel of the Battlefield."

As the Civil War came to an end, Barton's desire to help continued. Families who were missing sons, husbands, and fathers needed help finding out what happened to them. With the support of President Abraham Lincoln, she started the Missing Soldiers Office. This new organization was able to get information about more than 20,000 missing men.

Barton and the Red Cross

The Civil War and her search for missing soldiers had a negative effect on Barton's health, and her doctors advised her to travel and relax. In 1869, she traveled to Europe, and while in Switzerland, she learned about the International Red Cross. Impressed, Barton began working with the International Red Cross to deliver supplies during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1873, she returned to the U.S., where she worked to establish a Red Cross in the United States. After a lengthy fight, she succeeded in 1881. At the age of 60, she became the first president of the American Red Cross, a position she held for 23 years.
Source

Why Doesn’t Garfield Assassination Site on the National Mall Have a Marker?

Why Doesn’t Garfield Assassination Site on the National Mall Have a Marker?

A new campaign by historians seeks to bring recognition to the site where the 20th president was shot

By Jason Daley
January 25, 2018
Published in the Smithsonian.com

Yesterday, a tiny ripple made its way through the feeds of history geeks on Twitter. The James Garfield National Historic Site announced that it was working with historians, filmmakers, authors and other interested parties in placing a marker at the site where President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881. He is the only assassinated U.S. president without a marker at the site he was shot.

So why is there no marker for Garfield, 137 years after his murder? One reason might be his short term in office. Evan Andrews at History.com reports that after he was sworn in, Garfield clashed with fellow Republicans in Congress and cared for his wife, Lucretia, who was fighting a life-threatening bout of malaria. But the 20th president only served four months in the White House before he was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac rail station on July 2, 1881.

The other barrier to placing a marker at the site is the fact that the Baltimore and Potomac rail station, where the assassination took place, was torn down in 1908. According to Richard Brownell at WETA’s Boundary Stones, the rail station was built on Constitution Avenue, then B street, and 6th Street NW in 1873. While the station itself was rather beautiful, Washingtonians always hated the train shed that extended out from the station. Garfield’s murder at the site, of course, cast its own pall over the station. By 1901, plans were afoot to tear down the station during a large-scale renovation of the National Mall. In 1908, it finally came down and the tracks were dug up. The National Gallery of Art was opened on the site in 1941, covering the spot where a marker of the assassination might be placed.

The J.A. Garfield National Historic Site, which operates Garfield’s home and farm in Mentor, Ohio, is now looking at sites around the National Gallery of Art to place the marker.

The story of Garfield’s death is something of a potboiler. Garfield, a former Union General and Congressman from Ohio, was hoping to take a break from the D.C. heat with a visit to New England in July of 1881. As his carriage pulled up to the train station, a 39-year-old man by the name of Charles Guiteau was lying in wait, armed with an ivory handled pistol he thought would look nice in a museum one day and a note addressed to the White House. Upon seeing the president, Guiteau opened fire, shooting two point blank shots at the president, one which grazed his elbow and the other, which lodged itself in his lower back.

What was Guiteau’s motivation? Gilbert King at Smithsonian.com reports that Guiteau was a “mentally unstable 41-year-old lawyer [who] had stalked Garfield for months before shooting him.” After giving a few small local speeches supporting Garfield during the election, Guiteau became convinced that he was responsible for the president’s victory. He began writing to Garfield and moved from Chicago to Washington. He even received a meeting with the president where he asked for a post in Paris. His request was rebuffed. Later, he said he was lying in bed one night when God told him to kill the president so that Vice President Chester A. Arthur could return the country to Republican principals and save America. He considered killing the president using dynamite or a stiletto before settling on a revolver. Several times, he had opportunity to take Garfield’s life but held off, fearing he might hit his children or the first lady. One time, he followed the president to the secretary of state’s home, but lost his nerve when he had a clear shot. Finally, that morning at the train station he felt emboldened and brandished his weapon.

Garfield did not die immediately after being shot. In fact, he lingered, in agony, for 80 days. Researchers believe that today Garfield would have survived the assassination attempt, but because doctors of the day were unaware of sterilization practices, they likely created a deadly infection by poking and prodding the wound. By September, the president had a major infection and abscesses all over his body. A special railroad spur line was built directly to the White House, so that Garfield could be transferred by rail car to Long Branch, New Jersey, to take in the sea air. It did not help his condition. He died on September 19, 1881.

Guiteau was convicted and hanged in 1882. Portions of his brain are held in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. And what became of the Guiteau’s museum-quality revolver? A black-and-white Smithsonian file photo of it exists, but the weapon itself has been lost to history.

Read the entire article by clicking this link

Photos below: 
LEFT: Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Terminal, 6th Street & Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C. Opened in 1873, demolished in 1908.   RIGHT: View of the Constitution Avenue entrance, north side, of the National Gallery of Art. (Public Domain/Smithsonian Archives)

Project to Develop Data Base for “Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade”

Project to Develop Data Base for “Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade”

By Jason Daley, smithsonian.com, January 16, 2018

A new project called “Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade” will give scholars and the public a massive resource to help search for enslaved people and their descendants in one source. 

As Brian McVicar at MLive.com reports, Michigan State University received a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the online data hub linking together several important databases on enslaved people in the Americas. It will also allow users to analyze and create maps and charts of enslaved populations in the United States.

According to a press release, it will take 18 months to build a proof-of-concept version of the project, which will pull from eight major online databases. “By linking data compiled by some of the world’s foremost historians, it will allow scholars and the public to learn about individuals’ lives and to draw new, broad conclusions about processes that had an indelible impact on the world,” says project co-investigator Walter Hawthorne, professor and chair of MSU’s Department of History. 

In a video presentation, Hawthorne explains that much of what historians know about enslaved people come from things like baptismal records, plantation inventories and other scattered documents that include mostly fragmentary information about each person. The problem for those researching geneaology is that such handwritten paper documents are often damaged and very difficult to read, even when they’re made into high-resolution scans or photos. But by extracting the data from these documents and entering them in databases, online databases have made these primary documents more accessible to historians and genealogists. 

While there are dozens of digitization projects going on around the world doing this work, tracking the story of one individual or running analyses on one population can become difficult across so many databases. “Enslaved” will act as a hub, linking open data-sources together. “If I can do an analogy, it’s kind of like what you might do for an airline ticket or a hotel room when you go on Expedia,” says Hawthorne. “You’re searching across multiple databases.”

Though online databases and digitization of census records and other documents has led to a genealogy boom in the United States in recent years, for people with enslaved ancestors, tracing their roots remains a daunting task. Historian Rebecca Onion at Slate reports that freed slaves did not show up in the U.S. census by name until 1870. Tracking ancestors by last name is also difficult. Many people assume that many enslaved people took the last name of their owners, but Tony Burroughs, founder of the Center for Black Genealogy, tells Onion that’s not necessarily the case—last names come from many sources and don’t often link up with a slave owner. This difficulty of linking a free person with records from a plantation has thus been dubbed the “1870 Brick Wall.”

When “Enslaved” debuts, it hopes to join with other resources to help scale that barrier.

Read more at the Smithsonian Magazine

Emma Louise Nagle of Bethlehem - One of the Last Four Civil War Nurses

Emma Nagle of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is memorable for having lived to become of of the last four women known to have nursed in the Civil War. However she never actually enjoyed this distinction, for neither she not those about her, knew how many or how few such nurses remained. Emma, at ninety-seven, knew only that it had been years since she could recall seeing another who had nursed in the Civil War. In fact, she hadn't seen a Civil War soldier for several years either. Of publicity, she sought little and got little.

Born in Philadelphia to... (click here to read the rest of the story)

National Park Service Begins Roof Replacement, Masonry Repair At Lincoln Memorial

National Park Service Begins Roof Replacement, Masonry Repair At Lincoln Memorial
By NPT Staff on January 9th, 2018

An eight-month-long project is under way to make repairs to the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington/NPS

The National Park Service has begun an eight-month project to replace the roofs and repair cracked marble at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial will remain open for the duration of the project, though some areas will be inaccessible.

The flat upper and lower roofs of the memorial were last replaced 20 years ago and are starting to fail. Incoming water is staining the interior walls of the memorial, most noticeably on the southeast wall. A sound roof is one of the most important ways to protect and preserve a historic building, and the new roofs will be constructed with five layers to keep the interior dry and watertight. From interior to exterior, the roofs will be composed of: hollow clay terracotta tile, concrete decking, a hot rubberized asphalt membrane, rigid insulation and slate pavers.  

The project will also repair the white marble at the (click here to read the entire article)

Daughter of a USCT Civil War veteran has died

Daughter of a USCT Civil War veteran has passed on.
With sadness we report the passing of Maggie Devane, of St. Paul, Minnesota on
Friday, September 12, 2017 at the age of 111. She is survived by her son Gene Devane, three
grandsons, and a niece Doris Bonds. Her husband Junious Devane and a sister Inez Womack
having preceded her in death. Maggie was born on November 17, 1905 to Henry Johnson and
Nannie Bell Montgomery, his third wife. Her father was a former slave from Jackson
Mississippi who fought in the Civil War as a USCT and was discharged in 1865 near Louisville,
KY

Click here for an article about Maggie