For Release: October 30, 2007
Contact: Katie Lawhon
Phone: 717/ 334-1124 x452

Gettysburg’s 6th New York Cavalry Monument Damaged by Lightning

Officials at Gettysburg National Military Park are still assessing the damage done by a lightning strike on October 9 th that seriously damaged the monument to the 6th New York Cavalry.

The monument dates to 1889 and is composed of rough hewn and smooth granite, standing 26 feet high on a 14 x 10 foot base. It has a tower with turrets at each corner. Horse heads cap the pilasters. The monument features a bronze relief on the west face and an information tablet on the east side. It was designed by Frederick and Field and is located near the center of Buford Avenue, in the northwest part of the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Components of the stonework were blown free by the strike, and many of the stone components were displaced when mortar joints failed.

The park’s monument preservation experts have stored loose pieces of the monument and plan to stabilize it for the winter season using straps and possibly tarps.

According to Vic Gavin, the head of the park’s monument preservation branch, “The damage may be even worse inside the structure where lightning superheated the moisture that is naturally present in the stone and mortar.”

“We may have to totally disassemble it to repair the damage,” said Gavin. “Because of staff limitations, we will very likely need to use a private-sector restoration firm.”

National Park Service damage estimates are in the $100,000 range.

Reviewer: Chuck Romig
Chuck Romig graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in secondary education and teaches history at Penns Valley High School in Spring Mills, Pa. He continues to read and research Civil War history.

Review:
Eric J. Wittenberg has produced a gem of a regimental in Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War. Probably every Civil War buff can name one or two favorite John Wayne films and I’d be willing to bet that in at least one of those films the Duke was in the cavalry.

Wittenberg, in this work, expertly reveals not only untold morsels about one of the Civil War’s famed cavalry units, but also the experience of a horse soldier in the war.

He begins the story with the formation of the regiment in Philadelphia, Pa., spearheaded by one Richard H. Rush, a descendant of Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia renown. Rush was a member of the West Point class of 1846 but failed to live up to the reputation for which that class was known.

After a hiatus from the military Rush had problems gaining a commission in 1861. He used his family’s name to eventually gain rank.

The 6th Pennsylvania initially mustered at Camp Meigs in the City of Brotherly Love where they actually trained with lances, a fad that Gen. George McClellan had advocated since his Crimean trip.

After the endless drilling common to any volunteer regiment of the Civil War, the 6th Pennsylvania was ordered to join the Army of the Potomac at Manassas. On their way to the Peninsula to take part in that debacle, they sat as peaceful spectators and viewed the battle of Hampton Roads where the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia dueled to a draw in mid-March 1862.

Wittenberg uses his subjects to tell their story with deftness and accuracy. Pulling from a slew of privates, officers and a chaplain, he allows the men of the 6th Pennsylvania and those who interacted with them to tell their tale posthumously.

This style picks up once the men are on the Peninsula and continues through the Maryland Campaign of 1862, Fredericksburg, Stoneman’s Raid and Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Gettysburg, the transition of Grant to the East, and the 1864 Valley Campaign.

Wittenberg’s work is filled with points of human interest, as well as strategic and tactical analysis, which make this regimental a more exciting read than many others. But it is not just the human interest and military analysis that make this book a keeper. It’s the group of troopers that Wittenberg chose as subjects.

I’m sure that stories as good as the 6th Pennsylvania’s exist, but there are none better. Taste these tidbits to understand what I mean. Why was Stonewall Jackson late in arriving on the Peninsula from the Valley? The 6th Pennsylvania.

Which was the only unit to get a shot off at Stuart’s troopers in their first ride around the Army of the Potomac? The 6th Pennsylvania. Who led brave charges into the teeth of hell at Brandy Station and South Cavalry Field at Gettysburg? The 6th Pennsylvania.

Theirs is a story that needed to be told. Frankly, I’m shocked it took this long with all the Civil War literature published these days.

Help in preserving important Civil War sites in the Fredericksburg area has come from many quarters, including developers.

The Silver Cos. recently completed its second donation of land at Grant’s Knoll, across from Ellwood in Orange County, according to the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust.

The land, deeded to the preservation group, is considered the gateway to the Wilderness Battlefield.

Silver, the Fredericksburg area’s largest commercial development firm, donated about 12 acres. That comes on the heels of a donation of about 6 acres near the intersection of State Routes 3 and 20 in 2001.

According to CVBT Secretary Erik Nelson, the donated ground is where Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters during his first confrontation with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1864.

Over the two-day battle, the Confederates turned both flanks of the Union army and fought to a standstill along Orange Plank Road.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of Grant’s determination late in the war, remarking, “When Grant once gets possession of a place, he holds onto it as if he had inherited it.”

In September, CVBT Executive Director Linda Wandres noted the importance of the donation in a statement to the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the Civil War Commission.

“It is indisputable that the actions of preservation-minded people over the next five years will determine the fate of the remaining Civil War battlefields in Virginia,” she said.

“What is not bought and saved by the time of the [150th anniversary] will be lost forever.”

Preservation of important Civil War parcels outside National Park Service battlefield boundaries is an urgent focus of CVBT at a time when sprawl is gobbling up what little land remains.

CVBT President Mike Stevens said the Grant’s Knoll land will now be protected in perpetuity, and he praised the Silver Cos.

“The donation is a generous contribution at a time when so much is developing so rapidly.”

Grant’s Knoll’s historical connections go way back.

“This is also the area where Lafayette camped” before the Battle of Yorktown in the Revolutionary War, Nelson said.

El Dorado Hills, CA October 10, 2007 — Historical book publisher Savas Beatie LLC and The Civil War Preservation Trust have teamed up to raise money for endangered Civil War battlefields.

Savas Beatie is a leading independent publisher of military and general history books. Many of its titles focus on specific battles and campaigns, and so have been used by various groups and individuals to raise funds for various preservation causes. The Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) is America’s largest non-profit organization (501-C3) devoted to the preservation of our nation’s endangered Civil War battlefields. The Trust also promotes educational programs and heritage tourism initiatives to inform the public of the war’s history and the fundamental conflicts that sparked it. Recently, CWPT picked up two special editions of Savas Beatie titles – Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg, by Timothy Smith, and Chicago’s Battery Boys: The Chicago Mercantile Battery in the Civil War’s Western Theater, by Richard Brady Williams—as premiums to help raise money for newly-acquired property on the Champion Hill battlefield.

When customers purchase any Savas Beatie book(s) from the company’s website (www.savasbeatie.com), they can include the coupon code “CWPT” with their order. Whenever an order is placed with this designation, Savas Beatie will donate 10% of the purchase price of the order to The Civil War Preservation Trust.

“People who know me know I care deeply about preserving endangered battlefields,” explains Savas Beatie Managing Director Theodore P. Savas. “Our new partnership with CWPT offers our readers a unique opportunity to acquire any of our titles—from ancient Rome to modern military science and sports history titles—and know that part of the purchase price will go directly to the best, most effective land-preservation company in the business. Over time,” continues Savas, “this could be a significant amount of money.”

David Duncan, Director of Membership and Development for CWPT agrees. “The Civil War Preservation Trust is thrilled to be working with Savas Beatie, the company that has been responsible for such tremendous Civil War scholarship—and other history—for so many years,” Duncan says.

“The fact that they freely offered to donate a portion of every purchase—regardless of genre—made by a CWPT member to saving hallowed ground speaks volumes to their dedication to preservation. Ted Savas ‘gets it,’” Duncan continues, “and while he is looking to sell books (which is fine with us), he is also looking to give back, which is all too rare in many corporations today.”

“Here lies the steed with his nostrils all wide,
But through it there rolls not the breath of its pride.
The foam of his gasping lies white on the turf,
And as cold as the spray of the rock-beaten surf.”

Ah! The horses—the blacks and bays, the roans and grays, the sorrels and chestnuts that pulled Lee’s army from the Rappahannock to Gettysburg and back, and all the other horses that pulled and tugged at the wagons, at the batteries of artillery; the horses that carried the men, the unstabled horses and the half-fed horses.

Let my right hand forget its cunning if I forget to pay proper tribute to those noble animals that suffered so much for their masters. How often my mind goes back to that horse my mind’s eye saw coming across the field from the front at Bull Run with his sides all dripping with blood. He was a hero and coming back home to die.

The cavalryman and his horse got very close to each other, not only physically, but also heart to heart. They ate together, slept together, marched, fought and often died together. While the rider slept, the horse cropped the grass around him and got as close up to his rider’s body as he could get. The loyal steed pushed the trooper’s head gently aside with his nose to get at the grass beneath it. By the thousands, men reposed in fields fast asleep from arduous campaigns with their horses quietly grazing beside them, and nary a cavalier was trod upon or injured by his steed.

They were so faithful and unfaltering. When the bugle sounded, they were always ready to respond, for they knew all the bugle calls. If it were saddle up, or the feed, or the water call, they were as ready to answer one as the other. And they were so noble and so brave in battle. They seemed to love the sound of the guns. The cavalryman might lie low on the neck of his horse as the missiles of death hissed about him. But the horse never flinched, except when struck.

Lo! As we should, we build monuments for our dead soldiers, for those we know, and for the unknown dead. So with the ultimate sacrifice of our lamented fallen honored upon their noble deaths, is it not also just that we recall their valiant steeds? What would you think of a monument some day, somewhere in Virginia, in honor of Lee’s noble horses?

What could General Lee have done had all his horses balked in unison? Nothing! Then all honor to Lee’s horses, which pulled and hauled and fought and died that this might be a very great nation.

“The good black horse came riderless home,
Flecked with blood drops as well as foam;
See yonder hillock where dead leaves fall;
The good black horse dropped dead—
That is all.

‘All? O, God! It is all I can speak.
Question me not; I am old and weak;
His saber and his saddle hang on the wall,
And his horse is dead—
I have told you all.”

With eternal thanks (and apologies) to Trooper George Baylor, his poignant lines have been somewhat revised.

10/15/2007
Manassas Journal Messenger (VA)

Tucked behind rows of new single-family homes and town houses are approximately 134 historic acres now open to the public as Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park in Bristow.

Historians and residents celebrated the park’s grand opening this weekend with tactical demonstrations, tours and living history exhibits.

Park visitors got to see what a Civil War field hospital would have looked like, complete with a field surgical chest, various medical tonics, a body cleaning area and other items.

Washington, D.C., podiatrist and living history demonstrator Dr. Charles Raugh said the replica hospital camp on display Sunday was positioned as a front line hospital in the center of the battlefield during the war.

Raugh said Civil War field hospitals typically consisted of two surgeons, two tables and “hordes of wounded” in the front.

Historical re-enactor James Owens of Silver Spring, Md., and his fellow members of Company D 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry demonstrated various Union Army formations for visitors Sunday.

As the 1st Minnesota re-enactors demonstrated “capping off,” or clearing their muskets before battle, Owens explained that the first thing soldiers learned when they enlisted during the Civil War was the school of the soldiers.

The school served as uniform rules about formation and techniques for battle.

Owens explained how the troops were formed into two lines of battle with officers at the back. As casualties occurred, the gaps would be filled by other soldiers, he said.

During the skirmish demonstration, Owens explained that the main idea behind the formation of firing in pairs was to keep the loaded musket closest to the opponents.

After one soldier fired, another would move up to cover him, Owens said.

Sunday marked the 144th anniversary of the Battle of Bristoe Station.

On Oct. 14, 1863, Confederate Lt. Gen. A.P. Hill’s corps stumbled upon two corps of the retreating Union army at Bristoe Station and attacked without proper reconnaissance.

Union soldiers of the 2nd Corps, posted behind the Orange and Alexandria Railroad embankment, mauled two brigades of Henry Heth’s division and captured a battery of artillery.

Hill reinforced his line but could make little headway against the determined defenders.

After this victory, the Federals continued their withdrawal to Centreville.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Bristoe offensive sputtered to a premature halt.

After minor skirmishing near Manassas and Centreville, the Confederates retired slowly to Rappahannock River destroying the Orange and Alexandria Railroad as they went.

Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park is located off Bristow Road (Va. 619 West) near the intersection of Va. 619 and Va. 28 South.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”

Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and academic libraries in New England that includes the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts, said it would work with the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing the books among the libraries’ 34 million volumes whose copyright had expired.

“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal library of John Adams.

Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and Microsoft, and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working with them. And several libraries are working with both Google and the Open Content Alliance.

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign many more,” Mr. Smith said.

“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline information online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the resources to do this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users, publishers, authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we provide an improved user experience, which then means users will come back to Google.”

The Library of Congress has a pilot program with Google to digitize some books. But in January, it announced a project with a more inclusive approach. With $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the library’s first mass digitization effort will make 136,000 books accessible to any search engine through the Open Content Alliance. The library declined to comment on its future digitization plans.

The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so much public-domain content.

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.

The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different, coming from a community project to build joint collections that can be used by everyone in different ways.”

Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well, but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books online, and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.

Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as did Yahoo, which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with Mr. Kahle about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.

A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft’s.

“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of these copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay Girotto, group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft. Institutions working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of California and the New York Public Library.

Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.

Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said that several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,” he said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best, a short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”

The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not seem to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by our agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the university.

The University of California, which started scanning books with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google. Robin Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps increase the volume of the scanning.

Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett, director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at both Google and Microsoft.

“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block commercial search services other than Google, he said.

Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to pay the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from organizations like the Sloan Foundation.

The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with $845,000 for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to the Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston Public Library. Other members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University.

The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and are available through its Web site. Search companies including Google are free to point users to the material.