Stolen bust of Civil War general found under I-95 in Philadelphia

General James Beaver

Stolen bust of Civil War general found under I-95
Updated: AUGUST 25, 2017 — 7:13 PM EDT
by Martha Woodall, Staff Writer  @marwooda |  martha.woodall@phillynews.com
Link to article in Philly.com

Philadelphia police on Friday were investigating the theft of a bust of a Civil War general that was later found under an I-95 bridge in South Philadelphia near FDR Park.

Fairmount Park officials said they believe the bust of Gen. James A. Beaver was stolen from the Smith Memorial Arch in West Fairmount Park late Thursday night.

The bronze bust was found by a police officer early Friday, said Alain Joinville,  a spokesman for Parks and Recreation.

“Vandalism and theft are illegal, and people who commit these crimes will be treated accordingly,” Joinville said, adding that the staff has “retrieved the statue, and we’ll assess whether any conservation is needed.”

Beaver was a general in the Union Army. Officials do not know whether the removal of his bust was connected to the current controversy over whether the statues of Confederate officers and depictions of others with racist views should be removed.

A native of  Perry County, Beaver commanded the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers and later became the state’s 20th governor.

During his term from 1887-91, Beaver was credited with obtaining state funds to improve Penn State’s football field. Beaver Stadium is named in his honor, and a tablet bearing his likeness is in the southeast corner of the stadium.

The Smith Memorial Arch was created to honor Pennsylvania’s Civil War heroes. Located near the near the Please Touch Museum, the memorial has two tall columns supported by curving arches, and adorned with portrait sculptures  including two equestrians statues, three figures and 8 busts. Beaver’s bus was installed in 1912.

Joinville said the memorial  is owned by the Smith Memorial Trust. The estate of Richard and Sarah Smith established the creation of Smith Memorial Playground & Playhouse, in East Fairmount Park.

Civil War Naval Symposium - Save the Date - Oct 18, 2018

The Old Baldy Civil War Round Table announces its plan for an all Navy Symposium on October 20, 2018. (click here for their website)

The morning sessions will be allocated to the “Blue Navy” and the afternoon to the “Brown Navy”.

The Battleship New Jersey is the very special venue planned for this event.

See the attached flyer for more info

Gettysburg National Military Park Announces its Licensed Battlefield Guide Examination Process and Written Exam Date

Gettysburg National Military Park Announces its Licensed Battlefield Guide Examination Process and Written Exam Date

Gettysburg National Military Park is opening its Licensed Battlefield Examination process, park officials have announced. The written exam, the first part of an intensive, multi-tiered process, will be given on Saturday, December 2, 2017, at the Harrisburg Area Community College/Gettysburg Campus from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.

Based upon park needs and visitor demand, the park will only be licensing individuals for the full-time license category. The licensing process consists of five tiers: the written exam, the panel interview, the field practicum, the oral exam, and the post-licensing orientation. Candidates must pass each tier in succession to become a Licensed Battlefield Guide.

“This multi-tiered process continues a tradition of rigorous Licensed Battlefield Guide examinations and upholds the continued excellence of guiding on the Gettysburg battlefield,” said Bill Justice, acting superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park. 

Information about the licensing process and a letter detailing the written exam application are available on the park’s website at www.nps.gov/gett and on the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides’ website at www.gettysburgtourguides.org A limited number of hard copies of the examination process will be available at the National Park Service information desk located in the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center.

Gettysburg National Military Park preserves, protects and interprets for this and future generations the resources associated with the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, during the American Civil War, the Soldiers' National Cemetery, and their commemorations. Learn more at www.nps.gov/gett

Work Begins On Restoring Pemberton’s Headquarters At Vicksburg

One of the most important historical houses in downtown Vicksburg, Mississippi, is getting some much-needed repairs. Historic preservation efforts are underway at Pemberton’s Headquarters to prevent further deterioration of the historic building.

The front porch will receive structural shoring to support the existing structure and prevent the collapse of the second-story porch. The slate roof will be removed and stored while temporary waterproofing material is applied. The park will, at a later date, restore the porch and slate roof along with other exterior and interior preservation treatments. 

This stabilization project is planned to last over 10 years and until additional planning and funding can result in the full restoration of the historic structure. Once the house is stabilized, the National Park Service hopes to reopen the building to the public on a limited basis.

“This is one of the most important sites in the Vicksburg Campaign,” said Scott Babinowich, chief of interpretation at Vicksburg National Military Park. “These repairs are not permanent fixes, but they will give us the opportunity to open the building again to visitors.” 

Vicksburg National Military Park and the National Park Service Southeast Regional Office Facility Support Division are overseeing the restoration and ensuring the work follows the guidelines of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties. 

The house was built by William Bobb in 1835-36 and was originally known as “Mrs. Willis’ House.” Confederate Gen. John Pemberton used the house as his headquarters during the 47-day siege of Vicksburg. It is in this house that Gen. Pemberton and his staff decided to surrender to the Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army on July 4, 1863. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977 and was deeded to the National Park Service in 2003.

News Release

Vicksburg National Military Park

The Great Lengths Taken to Make Abraham Lincoln Look Good in Photos

The Great Lengths Taken to Make Abraham Lincoln Look Good in Photos
One famous image of the president features a body that isn’t his.

BY MICHAEL WATERS JULY 12, 2017
Article from Altas Obscura
 

Print of Lincoln vs. print of Calhoun PHOTOS: LEFT, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LC-DIG-PGA-02353; RIGHT, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LC-DIG-PGA-02499

ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD A PROBLEM. During his 1860 campaign as a Republican candidate for the American presidency, in an era after the birth of the photograph but before its widespread dissemination in the media, many of the country’s citizens could only guess at what he looked like.

Rumors of his ugliness proliferated. The North Carolina newspaper The Newbern Weekly Progress wrote that Lincoln was “coarse, vulgar and uneducated,” while the Houston Telegraph opined that he was “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”

One woman, Mary Boykin, claimed Lincoln was “grotesque in appearance, the kind who are always at the corner stores, sitting on boxes, whittling sticks, and telling stories as funny as they are vulgar.” In fact, many Democrats sang an anti-Lincoln rallying cry that concluded with: “We beg and pray you— Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture.”

Though the rumors of Lincoln’s ugliness stayed mostly within Democratic circles, Lincoln was not anxious to let the idea spread. So he turned to Mathew Brady, a well-known photographer with a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. In many ways, Brady was perfect: though Brady himself had bad vision and did not take many of his own photos, he “conceptualized images, arranged the sitters, and oversaw the production of pictures.” Plus, according to the New York Times, Brady was “not averse to certain forms of retouching.”

In February 1860, just before Lincoln gave the Cooper Union Address that would help secure him the Republican presidential nomination, Brady had Lincoln pose for what would soon become one of the first widely disseminated photographs of the future president.

BELOW: Lincoln Cooper Union photo, 1860
Lincoln Cooper Union photo, 1860 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LC-DIG-NPCC-28318

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Missing Civil War Sword Found

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Missing Civil War Sword Found
By Louisa Moller, WBZ-TV
July 12, 2017 11:55 PM

Click here for original story

Click here for more on Shaw and the 54th Massuchusetts

BOSTON (CBS) – The long lost sword of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commanding officer of the North’s first all-black regiment during the Civil War, has been acquired by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Shaw led the 54th Massachusetts Infantry into battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. He was killed on the battlefield and his body was robbed of the sword.

The sword was recovered in 1865 and returned to Shaw’s parents. But it disappeared again until it was recently discovered in a North Shore family attic by Mary Minturn Wood and her brother, descendants of Shaw’s sister, Susanna.

“I said, uh oh. There are three initials on it: RGS. And he went, oh, this is the sword,” Wood said.

The family decided to gift the sword to the Massachusetts Historical Society where it is now in the hands of curator, Anne Bentley.

“It’s just a magnificent specimen of a sword and it’s exactly what a colonel would carry in a war,” Bentley said.

For Bentley, the sword represents more than a weapon of war. It signifies the bravery of an African American regiment.

“What they did is they proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were as courageous and honorable and steadfast as any white regiment,” Bentley said.

The sword will be on display to the public at the Massachusetts Historical Society on July 18th.

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2017/07/12/robert-gould-shaw-civil-war-sword-found/

Paoli Battlefield Advocates Seek National Landmark Status

{While not Civil War, this nearby Revolutionary War Battlefield is of local significance.}

The following appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 10:

Advocates shoot for moon in fight to make Paoli Battlefield national landmark
 

JULY 10, 2017
by Michaelle Bond, Staff Writer   mbond@phillynews.com

Supporters have uncovered fresh evidence to buttress their case for making the Main Line site of a Revolutionary War battle a national landmark, but ironically, a major victory they won two decades ago might have slowed progress.

To spare the land from bulldozers, in 1999 the Paoli Battlefield Preservation Fund purchased the 40-acre tract, where British forces killed at least 53 Americans and wounded more than 150 in 1777, and secured a place on the National Register of Historic Places as a site of “local” significance.

With development pressures building, pursuing that designation saved valuable time as opposed to the more-prolonged process of proving “national” significance. “We were up against the gun,” Bruce Knapp, the fund’s president, said.

But after advocates applied two years ago to make the battlefield a National Historic Landmark, they found they had to overcome the federal government’s skepticism about so knighting Paoli when two decades before supporters had argued for its “local” importance. To make the elite list of the nation’s roughly 2,500 landmark sites, the government has to deem a property significant to all Americans, such as Washington’s Headquarters in Valley Forge National Historical Park.

Making the battlefield a landmark would be significant for raising grant money and local tourism.

Knapp compared his group’s efforts to jump from the register’s local designation to landmark status as akin to launching a space mission to Mars without first trying to land on the moon.

So his group has decided to shoot for the moon. It now is seeking a spot on the register’s list of nationally significant places, using some of a nearly $60,000 grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program. Earning a place on the register’s “national” list of more than 8,000 sites likely would make designation as a national landmark an easier sell. Knapp’s group already would have completed most of the necessary work.

Because of the additional research his group has commissioned, historians have found hundreds of references in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s to the Paoli Massacre and the battle cry that followed: “Remember Paoli!”

“The United States has a unique tradition of following this template of ‘Remember Paoli,’ ” Knapp said, mentioning similarly formatted battle cries in the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and the world wars.

When the fund members submitted their application to a landmark committee in March 2015, they had dreamed that the U.S. Department of the Interior would name Paoli Battlefield a landmark before the April opening of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, thus luring history buffs visiting the area.

But Knapp and his associates are a patient bunch. He said they are “amazed and pleased” with the amount of new information they have uncovered in the last several years. He said his group won’t stop until Paoli Battlefield achieves national historic landmark status.

“It’s part of what this site deserves,” he said. “We’ll keep digging up stuff.”

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/paoli-battlefield-national-landmark-revolutionary-war-20170710.html?mobi=true

H.L.Hunley: More Clues Found

More human remains, clues found in Civil War submarine's conservation
Andreas Preuss and Phil Gast, CNN • Updated 9th June 2017
     Click here for link to CNN News story

https://hunley.org/

     (CNN) — More clues of the H.L. Hunley mystery are being revealed during conservation of the American Civil War submarine.
     On Wednesday, researchers in a North Charleston, South Carolina, laboratory unveiled the crew compartment -- which had been sealed by more than a century of ocean exposure and encrusted sediment.
     "It's that 'wow' moment when you step back and realize what you're doing," Johanna Rivera, one of the conservators, told CNN affiliate WCIV-TV in Charleston.
     The Confederate Navy's Hunley was the first submarine to sink a ship in battle, sending the USS Housatonic to the ocean floor in February 1864. Five members of the Union vessel died; 150 others were rescued. But the Hunley also went down, with all eight crew members perishing.
     Conservation work is being done on the H.L. Hunley in a North Charleston, South Carolina, lab.
     The conservation work, which started after the Hunley was raised in 2000, has finally exposed the sub's entire crankshaft -- used to propel the vessel by hand.
     A tooth was found embedded in sediment on one of the crank handles. Officials said it wound up there "postmortem" after decomposition of one of the crew members.
     Inside, they also found remnants of textiles and a thin metal wrap around the hand crank -- showing how the crew operated the sub.
     "When you're turning an iron bar in front of you, or below you, you're going to need something to keep your hands from chafing or rubbing them raw," archaeologist Michael Scafuri told WCIV.
     The new findings give insight into how the submarine was operated, but the biggest mystery is still unsolved -- why did it sink after its successful, bold attack? An archaeological report issued earlier this year laid out six possible scenarios; a combination of factors may have doomed the innovative submarine.
     Since 2000, scientists, historians and a genealogist have studied the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. The H.L. Hunley did just that more than 150 years ago, on February 17, 1864, during the American Civil War.
     One scenario holds that the Hunley was swamped by or struck by a Union vessel. Or that it plunged to the seafloor to avoid detection and never made it back up. A latch on the forward conning tower was found to be ajar.
     The Hunley's "torpedo" was attached to a spar. The crew embedded it in the Housatonic's hull, and the charge was detonated. It's possible the sub's hull was breached by the explosion or the men were rendered unconscious at some point.
     Nearly all of the human remains were found where the men were at their stations, rather than jammed together at an escape hatch. The remains were buried in 2004.
     Work on the Hunley will continue for at least another five to seven years.
     Conservators have concentrated on painstakingly removing the sediment -- or concretion -- that was firmly attached to the Hunley's exterior and cramped interior.
     After the process is finished, the submarine will be moved to a museum for display, though details have not been worked out.

Gettysburg Casino Proposal

NO CASINO  GETTYSBURG

June 14 was the last day for David LeVan to apply to the PA Horse Racing Commission, and that afternoon he announced: 
“I’ve decided against submitting an application. Unfortunately, the uncertainty surrounding the gaming expansion legislation in Harrisburg makes it impossible for me to commit to this project at this time.
… But I remain hopeful for our county's future.”

The Gaming legislation he cites is HB 271, passed by the House and in committee in the PA Senate now. LeVan says he is withdrawing because that law may change the current racino license to a stand-alone casino. If another license becomes available it is likely LeVan will apply for it.
We must remain vigilant!

At the Freedom Township Supervisors meeting last night the Supervisors approved the Referendum, and that will be on the November 7 Ballot.The Freedom residents decided they want to go ahead to forever prevent a racino, and demonstrate how strongly they disagree with any casino. 

The Referendum is allowed by the 2nd Class Township Code. The citizens who wanted it had to meet 2 criteria and they met both. The township No Casino residents are represented by attorney Susan Smith. Her legal opinion of the referendum question is at https://www.nocasinogettysburg.org/assets/Opinion_Letter_Racetrack_final.pdf  To meet the criteria for the referendum, the proposed racetrack needed to be within 50 AIR MILES of the center of Penn National Race Track in Grantville, PA. The surveyors found it is exactly 49.55 air miles! Here is the map done by surveyors. https://www.nocasinogettysburg.org/assets/Final_No_Casino_Gettysburg_Survey_Maps.pdf

The referendum question requires a YES answer.
It asks, in complex language,
Shall horse races run by corporations be prohibited in Freedom Township? The answer we want is YES!
The vote is Tuesday Nov. 7, 2017. 

No Casino Gettysburg and the residents of Freedom Township are glad that Mr. LeVan has realized that he would have lost the upcoming referendum. If he believes he can apply for another casino license in Freedom Township or anywhere within 10 miles of the Gettysburg National Military Park, he underestimates the local, state and national opposition.  Ouronline petition has reached 9,400 signatures, and will be used when or if LeVan submits another proposal.
He has never received a single vote from the Pa Gaming Control Board in 12 years of trying. Our hope is that he will give up completely on this bad idea.

Thank you for fighting for Freedom Township and for supporting No Casino Gettysburg!

No Casino Gettysburg
e-mail: ncgettysburg@centurylink.net

Preservation project at Gettysburg’s Eternal Light Peace Memorial

Preservation project at Gettysburg’s Eternal Light Peace Memorial begins today

 Gettysburg, Pa. (September 5, 2016) – Beginning today, September 6, the Eternal Light Peace Memorial at Gettysburg National Military Park will close for a months-long preservation project. National Park Service preservation experts from the Historic Preservation Training Center will dismantle and reset all plaza stones, granite capping stones, stairs, and flagstone walkways; selective repointing of the memorial shaft; and cleaning of all masonry on the monument and its bronze urn.

 During the majority of the work, the gas flame will continue to burn, with some planned outages.

 Park visitors may continue to park at the Peace Light but the area immediately surrounding the memorial will be closed through the rest of 2016.

 The memorial was dedicated in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 75th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.  For more information please contact 717/ 334-1124, or visit www.nps.gov/gett.  

 Gettysburg National Military Park is a unit of the National Park Service that preserves and protects the resources associated with the Battle of Gettysburg and the Soldiers' National Cemetery, and provides an understanding of the events that occurred there within the context of American history.