Folklore, Social History and a Haunted Village---Civil War Ghosts of Sharpsburg, Maryland

Civil War Ghosts of Sharpsburg, Mark P. Brugh and Julia Stinson Brugh, History Press, 2015, 130pp, 40 b/w photographs, bibliography, index, $19.99.

Keep in mind that a Pennsylvania court decision states that in terms of copyright, ghost stories are folklore.  The authors of Civil War Ghosts of Sharpsburg seem to have this in mind when they state that "...  another perspective gathers in and attempts to understand that impact [on a community] by combining eyewitness accounts, personal experience and the logical consequences and resulting folklore." (p. 16)

Civil War Ghosts of Sharpsburg provides brief discussions of the historic architecture and ironwork of the village and sketches of the effects of battle upon the civilian population. Relying upon period press coverage of the desolation wrought by war, the authors offer concise descriptions of post-battle injuries, sickness and deaths among the civilian population.  Striking are the stories of hasty Confederate burials and later disruption of graves by dogs and hogs, farmers and weather. "Flooding from heavy rains and fast snow melts sometimes washed Confederate bones . . . [and] brought the bones directly to the town square, where they floated and bobbed in a slow-draining temporary pond that would form." (p.40)

Among the 26 short chapters are 14 that contain ghost stories.  In the table of contents, the authors have placed an asterisk beside each of those 14 chapters. The other chapters focus upon men, women and children who lived through the battle and left a record of their memories, a few of which supply background information regarding a ghost story in another chapter.

The bibliography offers an indication of the authors' diligence in research: a booklet published in 1868 regarding Confederate burial places, Kathleen Ernst's very fine Too  Afraid To Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign and Wilmer Mumma's essay The Aftermath among others. Items which would have enhanced Civil War Ghosts of Sharpsburg are a map of the village with the locations of those houses and farms and a map of the battlefield with those nearby villages mentioned in the text. Additionally, a brief history of the founding and the growth of the village  would have benefited the work. Overall, the authors have set the folklore of hauntings with the context of a major historical event.

News---Three Inch Schenkl Unfired Artillery Shell Found Buried On Sharpsburg Farm

 

Sharpsburg Man Unearths Live Civil War-Era Shell, Dave Rhodes, Herald Mail, April 11, 2013
A Sharpsburg man planting trees at his Powell Road home Thursday unearthed a live Civil War-era shell that authorities later disposed of by setting it off at a neighboring farm. “When I saw it I knew what it was,” J.D. Taylor Jr. said. “It was the second one I found here. 

“It was some kind of experience.” Taylor said he at first thought he hit a rock with his steel shovel while digging in his yard about a mile from Antietam National Battlefield sometime between 8:30 to 9 a.m. He pushed the shovel under the object, which was five or six inches deep, and knelt to pry it out.

The Maryland State Fire Marshal’s office said in a news release that the object was a 3-inch Federal Navy Schenkl that had not been fired and had an intact fusing mechanism. Taylor said it weighed about eight pounds, was about nine inches long and had a spring-loaded detonator on the end. “It looked like a torpedo without the fins,” he said.

Taylor said he wasn’t afraid to handle it. “I said, ‘Oh my Lord, there’s another one,’” he said.
He had prior experience with another one found 30 years earlier and about 12 to 13 feet away.
Taylor said a contractor working to build his home in 1983 found one just like it while digging on the site.

He said he left the first one at a tree in the woods and it eventually disappeared. He thinks it was probably taken by Civil War artifact hunters.  After finding the second shell on Thursday, Taylor called the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, which requested bomb technicians from the state fire marshal. Those technicians were joined at Taylor's home by U.S. Army bomb technicians from Fort Belvoir, Va. Fire and emergency medical service personnel from Sharpsburg stood by, according to the fire marshal’s news release. Taylor said Maryland State Police were also at the scene.

Authorities using computers in their vehicles researched the device and determined it had been used by both the Union army and navy during the Civil War, according to Taylor. The technicians took the shell to the neighboring farm and detonated it, he said. “It made a decent boom,” Taylor said.
No one was hurt. The on-site research showed that had the shell been inert, it would have been worth about $600 to a collector, Taylor said.

Text Source: Herald Mail
Image Source: ICollector

News---Drink Beer and Support Civil War Museums

Civil War Beer Crafted In Frederick, Ike Wilson, Frederick News Post, October 8, 2012.

The first of nine beers to commemorate the 150th Civil War anniversary -- Antietam Ale -- is now on tap. The concoction was derived from a number of beer recipes from the 1800s and researched by National Museum of Civil War Medicine researcher Terry Reimer. Monocacy Brewing Co. in Fredeerick  bottled the first batch Sept. 28 for distribution.

Antietam Ale is based on a recipe for an English-style ale once brewed by Brewer's Alley -- a style commonly referred to as an ordinary bitter, Brewer's Alley marketing manager Jim Bauckman said. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine provided brewmaster Tom Flores with a variety of historic recipes that likely resemble the flavor profile of Antietam Ale, Bauckman said.  The strength is relatively low compared with that of modern beer renditions, Flores said, but making the brew still involves a lot of complexity. "The harmony of all the flavors, and making all the delicate intensity work, was important," Flores said.   Antietam Ale has a slight hoppy presence that is quickly balanced by the flavor of specialty malts, Bauckman said.

Full Text Continued at Frederick News Post October 8, 2012 

CWL: On Saturday while eating a meal in the Pry House Barn on the Antietam Battlefield I bought a National Museum of Civil War Medicine glass tumbler and refilled it twice.  A good beer with good food at a good place.

 

CWL---The Real War Is Getting Into the Books: First Person Accounts of Carnage, September 1862

Misery Holds High Carnival, Judson H. Nelson, America's Civil War, September 2007, pp. 30-39.

". . . a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice and maggots hold high carnival . . . . " Surgeon Daniel Holt, 121 New York Volunteers, began writing letters home after the battle of South Mountain, Maryland on September 14th. Rare is the soldier who wrote the Mrs. of Rebels with brains blown out, eyes popped out, and arms lifted in the air.

John H. Nelson, author of As the Grain Falls Before the Reaper: The Federal Hospital Sites and Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, a CD-Rom, has collected a series of striking remarks from surgeons, newspaper correspondents, U.S. Sanitary Commission and U.S. Christian Commission worker, civilians and rank-and-file soldiers and organized them into an article.

At the Smoketown Hospital, really shebangs for the wounded, "The medicines are on the grounds, and tables, boxes , etc. without order or regularity. There is want of attention to police the wards and camp. Direst and garbage are accumulated in large quantities. . ." describes Assistant Medical Director W. R. Mosely. He contrasts the Smoketown shebangs with the Locust Spring Hospital, that had 24 tents each with their own stone fireplaces and superior bedding, that is bedsteads described as sacks filled with straw and covered with sheets, quilts and blankets.

Among the many descriptions Nelson has presented, CWL fully appreciates the material on the Otto Farm, located on the west side of Burnside's Bridge, a discussion that may be representative of the blight upon the farming community. With damages in excess of $2,300, Otto received a settlement check for $893.85. Another farmer,
Ephraim Getting whose farms held a portion of the Locust Spring hospital, claimed $1,238.45 in damages. He received no settlement.

For CWL, the article is a unfootnoted tease. CWL hopes that Nelson expands the article and North and South Magazine publishes it.

CWL --- After 100 Years, E.A. Carman's Maryland Campaign To Be Published In Hardcover ; Companion Volume to LC Digitized Maps Online

The Maryland Campaign of September 1862: Ezra A. Carman's Definitive Study of the Union and Confederate Armies at Antietam, Joseph Pierro, editor, Routledge Publishing, 926 pages, $95.

In the words of Joseph Pierro, editor

Release Date and Size:

+ The release date is now September.

+ The book runs over 400,000 words (2-3 times the length of the average book). It will also be produced in a larger trim size (i.e, the pages are physically bigger than most books) in order to accommodate the volume of text. As to a final page count, the book is still in production, so that's still an open question. (No text will be cut, but the publisher is experimenting with a number of formats, some of which radically change the number of pages necessary.) The final stage (work on the index) will begin in about two weeks--and we're very hopeful that the book will be available for the 145th anniversary of the battle of Antietam this September 17.

Maps, not in the book but on the WWW:

+ It does NOT contain maps--which may sound odd for a work of this type, but there is an explanation. At the time Carman was compiling this massive history of the campaign, he was also working on a complete Atlas of the battle, covering the entire action in 14 large plates (the same size as the maps in the OR Atlas). Unlike his history, Carman's Atlas was published by the U.S. government (in 1904, with a second edition in 1908), though it's now long out of print and very difficult to find outside of major research libraries.

+ As it happens, however, the Library of Congress has recently digitized the entire Atlas and made it available on its website--along with free software that enables users to zoom and move across the maps and reproduce any section with crystal clarity. Anything less than Carman's original maps seemed a disservice to his text, and thus the editors chose to provide the website for the Atlas. Someday, hopefully, it will prove cost effective for a publisher to reproduce these absolutely beautiful maps in a new print edition.

The link to the digitized Atlas itself is:

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g3842am+gcw0247000))

or

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3842am.gcw0247000


Bibliographic Notes:

+ You will be happy to know that not only has the manuscript been annotated (rectifying one of the major obstacles to using Carman's manuscript--a decided lack of citations for much of his quoted material), but that the text is laid out with footnotes at the bottom of each page.