Rouviere Media

Interesting Civil War Sites, Virtual and Real

The Town of Rome, Georgia, has a Civil War tour aboard its public excursion boat to show the city’s historic vistas and the power of the water in fighting Union forces.
The cruise costs $5 for adults and $2 for children under two. It last two hours.

The Kentucky Department of Travel and Tourism has a new state program to link Kentucky’s Civil War sites, www.kentuckytrails.org.The trails include more than 50 sites that can receive visitors and  are near major routes.The 54 sites in the state’s Civil War Heritage Trail Program include the James A. Ramage Civil War Museum in Fort Wright, which includes an earthen fortification that is credited with saving Cincinnati from Confederate attack in September 1862.Sites on the Unverground Railroad network also are included, as well as battle sites.
Kentucky was one of four border states that stayed in the Union. The govenror of Kentucky was a Southern sympathizer and  the state legislature was mostly pro-Union. Kentucky provided slave labor to southern plantations and shipped Southern products such as  tobacco and whiskey to markets in the North.
Lincolin was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and Jefferson Davis was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

The National Park Service and Virginia Historical Society have created a traveling exhibit called the Civil War 150 HistoryMobile. The 53-foot expandable walk-through museum on wheels is stopping at various areas around Virginia. It includes four sections – Battlefront, Homefront, Journey to Freedom, and Loss-Gain-Legacy. It’s focus is personal stories showing the effects of the war on men and women on both sides.
Among it is a letter from a wounded Mississippi soldier as he lay dying in Spotsylvania, Virginia, in 1864:
"This is my last letter to you...I have been struck by a piece of shell and my right shoulder is horribly mangled and I know death is inevitable. I am very weak, but I wrote to you because I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son. I know death is near, that I will die far from home and friends of my early youth...

. My grave will be marked so that you may visit it if you wish to do so. I would like to rest in the graveyard with my dear mother and brothers, but it's a matter of minor importance.... Give my love to all my friends. My strength fails me. My horse and my equipment will be left for you. Again, a long farewell to you. May we meet in heaven....Your dying son, J.R. Montgomery."

Frazier History Musuem in Kentucky has opened an exhibit focusing on how the Civil War fractured families and communities in Kentucky.  It includes the first public display of papers related to  the commitment of Mary Todd Lincoln to an Illinois mental institution, initiated by her son, Robert, in 1875.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, is displaying the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln and several skull fragments from him.
Other macabre items in the museum are a photograph nearly covering a wall of the museum’s new Civil War exhibit that shows amputated legs stacked like firewood and the shattered bones of U.S. Army Maj. General Daniel Sickle’s lower right leg, mounted or displayed beside a 12-pound cannonball like the one that hit him during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Reenactors

Chapters of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War thrived in Wiosconsin in the early 20th century, but the organization died out there in the 1960s. Two chapters of it have been revived, one in Milwaukee and one in Manitowoc, because of interest in the war spurred by the sequicentennial. The new chapters are cooperating  with Confederate groups. Their main focus is raising money to support veterans' scholarships and participating in Memorial Day and Veterans Day observances.