Echoes of Reconstruction & Civil War Historic Sites

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.

As many of you know, I had a life-threatening medical issue last March that led to me taking A LOT of very long walks. I try to take many of those walks near Civil War memorials and Reconstruction historic sites! I have done about 60 of these history walks in the last ten months and I took a lot of photos. I decided to record them on a Google Earth project which can be easily jumped into on a computer and (with the free app) on a phone. I wanted to see if some of my friends at Emerging Civil War could take a look at the Google Earth project here:

Google Earth

This Google Earth thing is something I began working on in December and I am wondering if it is useful to others. I invite questions, criticism, suggestions, etc. in the Comment area below.

None of the sites are MAJOR BATTLEFIELDS. Yes, I have been to Gettysburg, Fort Sumter, Manassas, Antietam, Monocacy, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness, Apache Canyon, Chicamagua, the entire Atlanta Campaign, et many al. You will not find those famous places here.  These are mostly local sites that I came across.

One site is a one-room school house constructed when Black children were barred from enrolling in the local white schools in Virginia. Another is a little triangular piece of land in Queens, New York where a sister honored her immigrant brother killed at Spotsylvania in 1864. A third is a statue of Union General Phil Sheridan in a National Park dedicated to Stonewall!

I visited these sites either on my daily three mile walks or while on business trips. So far all are between Maine and Virginia, and most I saw since last March when I was in the hospital.

You can find a site on the map that is marked with the RED historical site icon. Here you can see all the sites I posted in December and January. The scenes below are screenshots. To explore the actual Google Earth project, just click here.

Below you can see the RED icon for the Elmira Prisoner of War Camp in Upstate New York.

If you click on the RED icon, a pop-up will appear with a photo of the site and a brief description. You will see some text underlined with a link. If you click the link (in blue), you will see a full page on the historic site, including my touring suggestions and six to twenty photos.

If you look in Upstate New York at the small city of Auburn, it looks like there is only one site there.

If you zoom in you will see four sites appear. So scroll around and zoom in and out.

Let me know if this is at all useful. I plan to add more sites, but I don’t want to waste my time if this is not of interest to folks. Not all of the entries are complete yet, and I will be adding fifty more over the coming months as my walks get longer and longer. Stay tuned.

 



7 Responses to Echoes of Reconstruction & Civil War Historic Sites

  1. Absolutely, keep it up. The only problem I have is I don’t have Google Earth on my iPhone. I’ll have to view it from the desktop.

    I’ve actually adjusted or added some Google map markers in the past. Surprisingly, some historical places or cemeteries are not identified or the marker is not precisely located for someone to drive or walk there correctly.

  2. With retirement coming up, I will be interested in spending time travelling, and your project is just the kind of odyssey that I will be looking for! I, for one, would encourage to continue your quest to provide myself and others with a most interesting journey.

  3. This is useful, but you missed some extreme important sites. You should definitely include Thaddeus Stevens’s house and statue in Lancaster, PA ,Thaddeus Steve statue in Gettysburg and Caledonia State Park near Chambersburg, which was the site of Stevens’s iron mill and an important stop on the underground railroad.

    and statue n Lancaster, PA and the Thaddeus Stevens s

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