Atlanta symposium examines innovations that shaped, were shaped by the Civil War

For Prof. Seymour E. “Sy” Goodman, it’s as if the stars have aligned to make possible a Georgia Tech symposium on technology and the Civil War.

After all, the university’s formal name, the Georgia Institute of Technology, indicates the depth of interest in logistics, innovation and processes that made the operation of huge armies possible during the bloody, four-year conflict.

The campus itself was a terrifying no man’s land as Federal and Confederate sharpshooters and artillerymen faced off in the weeks before Atlanta fell to Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman in early September 1864.

Then, throw in the fact that the Atlanta Campaign occurred 150 years ago this spring and summer.

A flyer advertising the April 12 symposium at the Student Center Theatre features a familiar photo of the Ponder House, a residence east of what is now Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. It was an inviting target for Union cannons.

“That photo was taken from roughly where I am standing now,” Goodman told the Picket during a phone conversation Monday about the event, which includes discussions of field operations, photography, medical technologies and the care and preservation of technology.

The public is invited to the 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday symposium, which includes a free lunch and concludes with a walking tour -- led by Charlie Crawford of the Georgia Battlefields Association -- that will describe the campus in 1864. Pre-registration is encouraged.

Goodman, professor of international affairs and computing, jointly, at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing, is among those making presentations.

Sy Goodman

“This is a childhood thing that if I don’t get back to it now I won’t,” he said, referring to growing up in Chicago and learning about Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and others.

The professor teaches “Military History of the Civil War,” which covers aspects of what he terms the first major war of the industrial era.

Railroads, telegraphs and large ships were the signs of a massive mobilization of people and economies to fight.

David Wynn Vaughan, who has a nationally recognized collection of photographs of Confederate soldiers, is among the speakers, along with Shauna Devine, who will discuss the growing use of medical photography to aid physicians.

Goodman talked about the importance of photography. Images of the dead brought the war to people’s doorsteps.

“We were the first war where a large fraction of the population … was literate. We are the first war where mass printing was available,” he said. “Photography is one of the technologies that did not exist with Napoleon."

Hundreds of thousands of photographs were taken in studios of soldiers or in the field – although technology and mobility issues made “action” photography virtually non-existent.

Perhaps cameras could have been placed in balloons or in other high vantage points to make surveillance images.

But there were always technological limitations. For example, making photos of map overlays proved too much of a challenge.

“Most of this didn’t work, but it was part of the spectrum of things peoples tried,” Goodman said.

“(Photography) did affect the way people behaved, but not so much in a direct operational sense. People got photos of themselves, carried photos of wives and their children.”

Goodman, in his opening talk, will provide an overview of technology in the Civil War. Other speakers include:

-- Ken Johnston, National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus, "Inventing a New Navy"

-- Gordon Jones, senior military historian, Atlanta History Center.

-- Mary-Elizabeth Ellard, Georgia Battlefields Association, "A Sorrowful War: Veterinary Medicine During the War of the Rebellion" 

Library of Congress

Exhibits at the symposium will include Vaughan’s photos and material from the Atlanta History Center and the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, Ga.

An afternoon panel discussion will cover curation of Civil War technology and artifacts.

“In this session, Dr. Jones will discuss how to introduce audiences to interchangeable parts, ready-made clothing, or other aspects of the Industrial Revolution that formed prime ingredients in the Civil War and very much influenced its outcome.”

Goodman spends a good deal of his time researching and lecturing on computer networks, privacy and cyberattacks. But he points out the information technologies existed during the Civil War: The telegraph, Morse Code, signal corps, telescopes, photographs and the printing press.

It’s important to understand the complexities of the war machines of the Civil War, Goodman said.

“You look at these maps and battles and strategic movements and you see all these arrows. The question is: What happened to make those arrows possible?”

• More information, registration for event

Landscapes of War: Architecture students focus on forts, combatants and environment

Panels show where fortifications ran on what is now Georgia Tech

Most of Laura Hollengreen’s architecture students in her class, “Landscapes of War,” are native Georgians. But few knew much beforehand about the Civil War, which occurred literally in their front and back yards.

Their course work and time spent producing an exhibit on display at Georgia Tech campus whetted an appetite to learn more about the conflict, and its impact on the land and people.

The class researched and assembled “Surface + Depth: Civil War History Under Our Feet,” on display on the third floor of Clough Commons until Oct. 18.

“The students felt better informed about a local history that they have probably heard about their entire lives but did not connect directly to something they are doing today,” said Hollengreen, a historian and associate professor in the School of Architecture.

Rebel line ran where Grant Field sits.

Some even visited Andersonville, site of the infamous prison, in central Georgia. The visit became a personal connection for one student who lived nearby.

“Something in the context of the class had them look again,” the professor told the Picket recently.

The exhibit, featuring informational panels and large banners depicting photos, many taken by George Barnard after the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, is divided into two parts: The history of weaponry and defensive fortifications and what happened to combatants in Civil War landscapes.

The panels provide a wealth of information, often in academic terms. Still, visitors can get a broad understanding of the impact of “total war” on the environment and people.

Hollengreen hopes they will glean a deeper appreciation of the complexity of military systems – from fortifications to communications.

Prof. Hollengreen

“The battlefield (by the Civil War and World War I) has expanded immeasurably beyond what Napoleon experienced.”

The property where Georgia Tech now stands was largely a dangerous no man’s land as Union and Confederate troops warily eyed each other during the siege of Atlanta. Most of the activity involved soldiers trading sniper fire and artillery shells.

The heavily fortified Confederate line ran east-west on hills dotting the extreme southern edge of the campus, near North Avenue.

“That is where these forts were placed for maximum, strategic advantage,” says Hollengreen. Today, those sites are home to some of Georgia Tech’s main administration buildings, including Tech Tower.

The Union front line paralleled 10^th Street on the northern edge of campus. 

For their part, the architecture students in Hollengreen’s spring class learned about how historical events and settings can help foster “a notion of place, as opposed to space.”

She doesn’t expect their work on the exhibit to have a direct effect on design, but “the better informed of a history of place, the more sensitive and responsive a designer can be.”

The discourse over “place” and “space” played out in the 1970s as a backlash against modernism and buildings that “were put up pell-mell without a context of place,” says the professor.

“Those buildings were kind of arrogant and domineering and sort of generic in not responding to places where they were put.”

There was a new push to design at least some buildings that incorporate the past and context, “so that spaces are not super boring and generic, or so overbearing as to be unpleasant to be in.”

The “Surface + Depth” exhibit includes detailed descriptions of components of fortifications and where they stood on Georgia Tech. The hilly campus did not open until 20 years after the Atlanta Campaign.

One section describes memorialization of the dead, while another talks about landscapes and the human body.

"The body is the last redoubt in war: everything eventually telescopes down to that. The battlefield images exhibited here demonstrate the indignities of the dead in several of the major conflicts of the Civil War."

Diagramming fortifications at Ponder House

Visitors also will learn about the psychological toll of war in close quarters and outmoded military tactics in an era of deadlier weaponry.

"With these kinds of tactics and new heavy artillery resulting in merciless slaughter, is it any wonder that soldiers felt a complete lack of agency and control over their own fate?"

Hollengreen says her students were adept at conceiving the design of the exhibit. They chose Mylar as a material for the photo banners. Its translucent property allows visitors to see through the Civil War image to notice other visitors. "That would put the present and the past in a similar space."

A box on one edge of the exhibit shows a photograph of the damaged Ponder House. The image is broken into several successive panels to show the layers of Confederate fortifications in the area.

Such attention to detail is crucial for architects in the making.

"We want students and graduates to be .... observers of the sites they build," according to Hollengreen. "We want them to investigate those minute details (and) to see them in the first place."

• More details on the Tech exhibit

'To hell with Sherman': Lecture links Georgia Tech campus and a row of Civil War fortifications

Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson works by day in a building above where Confederate trenches once ran on the northern outskirts of Atlanta.

Georgia Tech photo

At night, he sleeps in the President’s House, not two miles due north, scene of the Federal siege line.

The distance between, in the summer of 1864, was a no man’s land – home to rifle pits and picket posts – that now is the heart of the Georgia Tech campus.

“There were people killed” between the main lines, said Charlie Crawford, a 1971 Tech mathematics alum and president of the Georgia Battlefields Association, a preservation group. Usually, one or two were killed at a time by potshots or stray rounds

“A record might read, ‘on the 21^st we lost Private Jones to picket duty,’” said Crawford.

George Barnard photo of Ponder House (Library of Congress)

Modern view, looking east (Charlie Crawford)

For six weeks, Rebels held their line within sight of the Federals’ 20^th Corps while elsewhere generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood attempted to parry flanking movements initiated by their Union counterpart, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Crawford, who went on to an Air Force career and retired as a colonel, will detail what happened on Georgia Tech’s land at a Jan. 24 lecture on campus. He also will cover the importance of the Atlanta Campaign to the re-election campaign of President Abraham Lincoln.

His talk is being held in conjunction with “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War,” a traveling exhibit on display at the campus through Feb. 6.

Georgia Tech photo

The Georgia Institute of Technology was founded in 1885, and it opened its doors to students in 1888. The research university, built to support the industrialization of the South during Reconstruction, has since garnered an international reputation.

Crawford’s reference points will include modern-day views of Confederate fortification scenes taken by Federal official photographer George Barnard shortly after the fall of Atlanta. Those photographs are part of the Library of Congress’ collection.

“It wasn’t anything but a smattering of houses,” Crawford said of it the land. It wasn’t even a suburb.” North Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare on the south end of campus, did not exist.

While there are almost no traces left of what was hurriedly erected by soldiers, the Georgia Battlefields Association wants to impart history and encourage listeners to be preservation-minded. “We all come from somewhere,” said Crawford. “If you can tell the story in relatable terms…”

Case in point: Fans of the Yellow Jackets football team might be interested in knowing that the east-west Confederate line ran through what is now the south end of Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field, right next to the Downtown Connector.

The original defensive line, built July-October 1863, was closer to the city and downtown, with its apex near the current Fox Theatre. Atlanta was vulnerable.

Ponder House (Library of Congress)

“They (defenders) began to realize artillery fire was getting longer and had higher range,” said Crawford.

Slaves and other workers, in July 1864, furiously threw up more defenses, to the north and west of the old line, as Sherman’s troops closed in. “When the Confederates built the line they cut down almost all of the woods” that covered the current campus, according to Crawford. Lt. Gen. Alexander Stewart took command of the forces.

The Confederates used letters, X, Y and Z, to name their forts in the area. Fort Z was near the current administration building, known for the familiar Tech Tower. Fort Y rests below the campus student center or a nearby parking deck.

The Southern line also ran near what is now the landmark restaurant The Varsity, just east of campus.

The Federal lines generally ran across what is now the north end of the campus and private property. They held troops from the Northeast, including New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Barnard’s most-famous photo is of the shell-pocked Ponder House, which he referred to as the Potter House. It was owned by a wealthy land and slave owner and reportedly was used by Confederate infantry.

The residence, east of Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts (Fort X), was an inviting target for Union artillerymen.

Archaeological map includes Confederate, Union lines (click to enlarge)

“The Ponder House got hit by shells a lot,” said Crawford. “Part of it was because it was a big white building. It was the most significant landmark for miles around.” The heavily damaged home was razed after the battle.

Although Confederates had attacked three times during the campaign, the Federal siege lines on the Tech property weren’t built with such an assault in mind.

“The assumption was they weren’t going to have to defend their trenches. They made them better each night,” Crawford said.

Sherman determined he would not attack the city’s prodigious fortifications head-on, realizing it would be a waste of manpower. He had already bloodied Hood at Peachtree Creek, the Battle of Atlanta and at Ezra Church.

Rather, Sherman concentrated on extending lines, cavalry raids and seizing railroads in his eventually successful effort to cut off Atlanta. Hood was forced to leave after Jonesboro, south of Atlanta, fell.

The weary Rebels left their defensive posts on the Tech campus when the army evacuated Atlanta on Sept. 1 and Sept. 2, 1864.

Eventually, the city grew north, enveloping the Tech campus. The world headquarters of Coca-Cola is a stone’s throw from where Confederate trenches, chevaux de fries and forts once stood.

Students and visitors alike must employ a vivid imagination when conjuring images of the campus during its Civil War days.

“Parking lots, decks and buildings tend to smooth stuff out,” said Crawford.  

The preservationist remembers his student days at Georgia Tech.

“It’s fascinating to think of walking to class every day and sitting (in class) on top of a trench.” 

• More details on lecture, including time and location

• “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War"

• Georgia Battlefields Association