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4/30/06
The Weekly Fireside 27 Nov 2005 - Part 1
4/30/06
4/30/06
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4/30/06
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4/30/06
4/30/06
Sunday, April 30, 2006
9:45:00 PM EDT
Stop by the NEW Genealogy Community Website. [http://www.genealogycommunity.com]
I would like to acquire copies of the following two books.
ALL WERE NOT HEROES by Edward C. Johnson - published in 1997 in Chicago
&
LIST OF THE U S SOLDIERS EXECUTED BY U S MILITARY AUTHORITIES DURING THE LATE WAR - published by the U S War Department in 1892
Please contact me regarding price and condition"
Frank Crawford
[IllinoisCW@aol.com]
Thanks
Robert Todd Lincoln arrived too late to stop three separate presidential assassinations.He met his father, President Abraham Lincoln, at the theatre after John Wilkes Booth had fired the shot. He went to a Washington train station to meet President Garfield, arriving only minutes after he was shot. And, he traveled to Buffalo, New York to meet President McKinley, but got there after the fatal shot had already been fired.
Lincoln had a cat named "Bob," a turkey named "Jack," and a dog named "Jib."
Lincoln's brother, half-brothers, and brothers-in-law fought in the Confederate Army.
For more fascinating Lincoln trivia, check out
[http://www.geocities.com/presfacts/lincoln.html]
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9:45:00 PM EDT
The Weekly Fireside 27 Nov 2005 - Part 1
"The Weekly Fireside"
of the American Civil War History
Special Interest Group;
Distribution Coast to Coast
Week ending 27 November 2005
of the American Civil War History
Special Interest Group;
Distribution Coast to Coast
Week ending 27 November 2005
NOTE: If you do not wish to receive the Weekly Fireside, PLEASE send email to [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com] or [CWWeeklyFirside@gmail.com] saying "UNSUBSCRIBE" and we will remove you from the distribution. On the other hand, if you know someone who would like to receive the newsletter, please have them send an email to [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com] with subscribe in the subject line.
NOTE from Jayne: Please be assured your email addresses are not shared with, nor sold to, anyone else.
NOTE from Jayne: Please be assured your email addresses are not shared with, nor sold to, anyone else.
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NOTES FROM THE HELPERS OF THE CIVIL WAR HISTORY CHATS
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NOTES FROM THE HELPERS OF THE CIVIL WAR HISTORY CHATS
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If you haven't gotten your newsletter, PLEASE do check your Spam Folder just in case it's there.
IF you respond to anything in they newsletter, PLEASE send it to [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com] screen name.
The hosts of the American Civil War rooms hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving and were able to spend it with family. We had several visitors both nights in the room and we're glad you took time to join us
We have MANY internet subscribers to the newsletter who can't access our AOL rooms, and I was wondering whether you all would like to have a Civil War chat scheduled on the internet, available to everyone. We've had several replies regarding the internet chat and they've been positive, and I thank you for your feedback. Anyone else have any ideas??
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You can visit the Genealogy Schedule by going to
[http://journals.aol.com/gchjenna/AOLGenealogyCommunityNews/] which includes our Civil War chats. Watch there for announcements for special programs in the chats... Enter your surnames, your brickwalls, Need help, GENTREK announcements, our Chat schedule, Your hosts can even let you know if they can't be in their chat and who might be subbing for them. Put this in your favorite places and visit if often.
You can also check out other Civil War chats,
Mondays 9-10 PM ET Trivia
Tuesdays 10-11 PM ET with FOREVERPATS
Wednesdays 9-10 PM ET some weeks there is a specific topic
Thursdays 9-10 PM ET Trivia
All are in the Mason Dixon Room (aol://2719:3-508-Mason%20Dixon%20Line) (on AOL only) They have some great Trivia quizzes
Stop by the NEW Genealogy Community Website. [http://www.genealogycommunity.com]
Unfortunately someone hacked into the site and Will is in the process of rebuilding it. Stop in occasionally to check on the process. Be sure to post your surnames on the appropriate message board.
Please register and be sure to post your queries on the message boards. More content is being added all the time. Once you get register, (it really is painless) try visiting one of the chatrooms to see what they look like. If we have enough interest, we could schedule a Civil War chat.
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"THE BOOK SHELF"
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"THE BOOK SHELF"
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OK folks I know there are those of you who read Civil War books all the time... How about taking a few minutes and telling us about them. It doesn't have to be long. Send your review to along with the title, author to [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com]
Civil War Book Review [http://www.cwbr.com/]
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--------OUR WEEKLY READING--------
(items from our Letters, Songs,
and Poems evenings)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
--------OUR WEEKLY READING--------
(items from our Letters, Songs,
and Poems evenings)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE WRECK OF THE PRISONERS TRAIN
sent to me by Tom Gladwell
This little-known accident caused more casualties than many well-recorded battles of the war. Many questions about its background and aftermath remain unanswered.
Not all the tragic waste of human life in the Civil War was on the battlefields and in the hospitals and prison camps. Fare removed from the fighting front, in the Northeast corner of Pennsylvania, near the little town of Shohola in Pike County, more soldiers died in the early afternoon of Friday, July 15, 1864 than were killed in many of the small battles that have received some notice in published Civil War history.
This is the story of that tragedy.
It has its beginning in the Point Lookout Federal military prison in Maryland. This prison camp (there were no barracks) served as a kind of distributing point for the transfer of Confederate enlisted men to other prisons farther north. Set up in August 1863, it often had a tent dwelling population of close to 20,000. Our story concerns 833 of these men, selected to be shipped to the Elmira (NY) Military prison when Grant's decision in the spring of '64 to discontinue prisoner exchange led to overcrowding at Point Lookout.
The first leg of the journey was by ship to Jersey City. Here in the early dawn of July 15, the men were transferred to a train made up of a hodgepodge of over 20 "emigrant" cars, box cars and the like. It carried a guard of about 125 soldiers stationed generally four to each car. two at the front and two at the rear. Security measures up to this point had be a bit leaky; the scheduled departure of the train at 4:30 a.m. was delayed for more than an hour by a search for three prisoners who escaped somewhere between the ship and the train.
The train finally got under way sometime after 5:30, and shortly before 1:30 in the afternoon was moving northwest toward Shohola on the single-line track of the Erie Railroad paralleling the Delaware River. At the same time, several miles up the line beyond Shohola, tragedy was in the making. An eastbound 50-car coal train came onto the main line off the Hawley branch four miles away at Lackawaxen. Conductor John Martin swung off to ask Duff Kent, telegraph operator at the junction if the track was clear for him to proceed. Kent had been carousing the night before, he was still suffering from the "morning afters," and although the flag-carrying pilot train preceding the prisoner-laden extra had passed his station giving warning, he unthinkingly gave Martin the go-ahead. So the coal train turned east at 12 miles an hour toward the now westbound prisoner train then approaching Shohola at twice that speed.
A mile west of Shohola lay a long, sharply curved cut called locally the King and Fuller's Cut from the contractors who had dug it. Track visibility in the deep cut was little better than 150 feet. There, without warning, the two engines met. A survivor described that meeting as a tremendous, crashing roar, with the engines rearing up "high in the air, face to face against each other, like giants grappling." The crash "was followed by a second or two of awful silence and then the air was filled by the most appalling shrieks and wails and cries of anguish."
The impact telescoped the leading prison car into a space of little more than six feet; all four guards and all but one of 38 prisoners were killed, most of them horribly mangled. The succeeding cars suffered proportionately less, but when survivors and the townspeople who hurried to the scene had laid out the bodies, some of them hastily pieced together from bloody fragments, the toll of the dead came to 51 prisoners and 19 of their blue-coated guards. In addition, of the civilian train crews, the fireman and brakeman of the coal train and the engineer and fireman of the Prisoner train all perished. This was not the final total; many of the 123 injured died within the next few hours.
The authorities acted promptly. A coroner's inquest was held at Shohola and strangely, though the criminal carelessness that had caused the slaughter was well known, everyone connected with the disaster was exonerated. Duff Kent was not molested; in fact, while the victims of his drunken stupidity lay dead or pain-wracked from their injuries, he callously attended a dance that night at nearby Hawley. Next day, however, he disappeared, never to be heard of again.
The railroad company took over the sad task of mass burial. A local undertaker supplied individual pine boxes for the Union dead; the Confederates were buried four in a box. A great trench 76 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 6 feet deep was dug the night of the disaster between the railroad and the river 200 yards away. In this were placed the 72 Confederates then dead. They were buried in their gray uniforms, their feet toward the river.
For 47 years, the last sleep of these Southerners in an alien soil was undisturbed save by the river floods which periodically carried away some of the bones. Then, in 1911, and act of Congress provided for re-interment of the remains in the Woodlawn National Military Cemetery at Elmira, NY. On Tuesday, June 8, 1911, after three days of labor, the removal was completed. A number of relics; knives, pens, ink bottles, daguerreotypes, uniform decorations, and the like, were turned over to the local historical society.
Traces of the tragedy have long since been obliterated, but local historians still seek the answers to two questions; What became of the author of the disaster, Duff Kent? What happened to the five prisoners who escaped in the confusion of the wreck? Somewhere in northeastern Pennsylvania or adjoining New York, it is believed are the descendants of at least one who was known to have worked in a coal mine and later lived at Matamoras. But what of the others? Did they find their way back to fight in the South's last battles, or did they begin new life in a northern land?
sent to me by Tom Gladwell
This little-known accident caused more casualties than many well-recorded battles of the war. Many questions about its background and aftermath remain unanswered.
Not all the tragic waste of human life in the Civil War was on the battlefields and in the hospitals and prison camps. Fare removed from the fighting front, in the Northeast corner of Pennsylvania, near the little town of Shohola in Pike County, more soldiers died in the early afternoon of Friday, July 15, 1864 than were killed in many of the small battles that have received some notice in published Civil War history.
This is the story of that tragedy.
It has its beginning in the Point Lookout Federal military prison in Maryland. This prison camp (there were no barracks) served as a kind of distributing point for the transfer of Confederate enlisted men to other prisons farther north. Set up in August 1863, it often had a tent dwelling population of close to 20,000. Our story concerns 833 of these men, selected to be shipped to the Elmira (NY) Military prison when Grant's decision in the spring of '64 to discontinue prisoner exchange led to overcrowding at Point Lookout.
The first leg of the journey was by ship to Jersey City. Here in the early dawn of July 15, the men were transferred to a train made up of a hodgepodge of over 20 "emigrant" cars, box cars and the like. It carried a guard of about 125 soldiers stationed generally four to each car. two at the front and two at the rear. Security measures up to this point had be a bit leaky; the scheduled departure of the train at 4:30 a.m. was delayed for more than an hour by a search for three prisoners who escaped somewhere between the ship and the train.
The train finally got under way sometime after 5:30, and shortly before 1:30 in the afternoon was moving northwest toward Shohola on the single-line track of the Erie Railroad paralleling the Delaware River. At the same time, several miles up the line beyond Shohola, tragedy was in the making. An eastbound 50-car coal train came onto the main line off the Hawley branch four miles away at Lackawaxen. Conductor John Martin swung off to ask Duff Kent, telegraph operator at the junction if the track was clear for him to proceed. Kent had been carousing the night before, he was still suffering from the "morning afters," and although the flag-carrying pilot train preceding the prisoner-laden extra had passed his station giving warning, he unthinkingly gave Martin the go-ahead. So the coal train turned east at 12 miles an hour toward the now westbound prisoner train then approaching Shohola at twice that speed.
A mile west of Shohola lay a long, sharply curved cut called locally the King and Fuller's Cut from the contractors who had dug it. Track visibility in the deep cut was little better than 150 feet. There, without warning, the two engines met. A survivor described that meeting as a tremendous, crashing roar, with the engines rearing up "high in the air, face to face against each other, like giants grappling." The crash "was followed by a second or two of awful silence and then the air was filled by the most appalling shrieks and wails and cries of anguish."
The impact telescoped the leading prison car into a space of little more than six feet; all four guards and all but one of 38 prisoners were killed, most of them horribly mangled. The succeeding cars suffered proportionately less, but when survivors and the townspeople who hurried to the scene had laid out the bodies, some of them hastily pieced together from bloody fragments, the toll of the dead came to 51 prisoners and 19 of their blue-coated guards. In addition, of the civilian train crews, the fireman and brakeman of the coal train and the engineer and fireman of the Prisoner train all perished. This was not the final total; many of the 123 injured died within the next few hours.
The authorities acted promptly. A coroner's inquest was held at Shohola and strangely, though the criminal carelessness that had caused the slaughter was well known, everyone connected with the disaster was exonerated. Duff Kent was not molested; in fact, while the victims of his drunken stupidity lay dead or pain-wracked from their injuries, he callously attended a dance that night at nearby Hawley. Next day, however, he disappeared, never to be heard of again.
The railroad company took over the sad task of mass burial. A local undertaker supplied individual pine boxes for the Union dead; the Confederates were buried four in a box. A great trench 76 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 6 feet deep was dug the night of the disaster between the railroad and the river 200 yards away. In this were placed the 72 Confederates then dead. They were buried in their gray uniforms, their feet toward the river.
For 47 years, the last sleep of these Southerners in an alien soil was undisturbed save by the river floods which periodically carried away some of the bones. Then, in 1911, and act of Congress provided for re-interment of the remains in the Woodlawn National Military Cemetery at Elmira, NY. On Tuesday, June 8, 1911, after three days of labor, the removal was completed. A number of relics; knives, pens, ink bottles, daguerreotypes, uniform decorations, and the like, were turned over to the local historical society.
Traces of the tragedy have long since been obliterated, but local historians still seek the answers to two questions; What became of the author of the disaster, Duff Kent? What happened to the five prisoners who escaped in the confusion of the wreck? Somewhere in northeastern Pennsylvania or adjoining New York, it is believed are the descendants of at least one who was known to have worked in a coal mine and later lived at Matamoras. But what of the others? Did they find their way back to fight in the South's last battles, or did they begin new life in a northern land?
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THE HELP DESK
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THE HELP DESK
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Do you have a question that you didn't get to ask in the chatrooms??
Send us and email [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com] and we'll post it here to see if some of our readers can help you. If you get an answer to your question, please let us know.
Send us and email [CWWeeklyFireside@aol.com] and we'll post it here to see if some of our readers can help you. If you get an answer to your question, please let us know.
From IllinoisCW
I would like to acquire copies of the following two books.
ALL WERE NOT HEROES by Edward C. Johnson - published in 1997 in Chicago
&
LIST OF THE U S SOLDIERS EXECUTED BY U S MILITARY AUTHORITIES DURING THE LATE WAR - published by the U S War Department in 1892
Please contact me regarding price and condition"
Frank Crawford
[IllinoisCW@aol.com]
Thanks
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DID YOU KNOW?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DID YOU KNOW?
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If you have something we could use here, PLEASE send it along. Thanks!!!!
Robert Todd Lincoln arrived too late to stop three separate presidential assassinations.He met his father, President Abraham Lincoln, at the theatre after John Wilkes Booth had fired the shot. He went to a Washington train station to meet President Garfield, arriving only minutes after he was shot. And, he traveled to Buffalo, New York to meet President McKinley, but got there after the fatal shot had already been fired.
Lincoln had a cat named "Bob," a turkey named "Jack," and a dog named "Jib."
Lincoln's brother, half-brothers, and brothers-in-law fought in the Confederate Army.
For more fascinating Lincoln trivia, check out
[http://www.geocities.com/presfacts/lincoln.html]
Written by cwweeklyfireside Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
