Bring sneakers but no gloves to Sunday's baseball fun on Fort Pulaski parade ground

(NPS photos)

The old ball game won’t cost you a dime Sunday at Fort Pulaski National Monument outside Savannah, Ga.

The Civil War site is marking the National Park Service’s centennial through a celebration of 19th-century baseball. Participants, with a focus on youth, will learn how to hurl (pitch) and strike (bat) on the old parade ground that saw baseball games way back in 1862.

“They’ll be learning the rules and taking a crack at it,” said interpretive ranger Andrew Miller. Games are planned at the end of two sessions (11 a.m.-1 p.m. and 2 p.m.-4 p.m.).

A bonus is that admission to Pulaski, as it is at all NPS units, is free during National Park Week, April 16-24.

Visitors will get a history lesson on baseball at Fort Pulaski. In 1862, months after the fort fell to Union forces, Henry P. Moore took one of the earliest surviving photos of a baseball game.

In the photograph, members of Company G, 48th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment proudly stand at attention on the Fort Pulaski parade ground.

Behind them, other soldiers play a game that transcends geography and stations in life.

Miller is quick to point out that Sunday’s action will be less competitive. The main idea is to promote health and fitness, particularly among youngsters. He expects a good crowd.

Of course, many visitors to Fort Pulaski won’t be taking part in the baseball fun. “We’ll be trying to keep as many foul balls as possible corralled," said Miller.

And because the parade ground isn’t quite level and has some dips, “We want to emphasize safety. Do not try to run as fast as you can.”

Union soldiers, many from Brooklyn, followed the New York, or Knickerbocker rules. They are the basis for the modern game, and featured bases, the foul line and diamond shape of the infield.

There are no gloves or called balls. Hurlers throw the ball underhanded. A striker (batter) is called out if the ball is caught in the air or on one bounce.

The baseballs and bats to be used Sunday are reproductions of 19^th century equipment. 

The Fort Pulaski staff a few years ago played in a “Rumble on the River” annual series against Old Fort Jackson, a Confederate defensive fortification operated by the Coastal Heritage Society.

Baseball got its start in the Northeast, with several variations and sets of rules adopted before and during the Civil War. Southern troops had little familiarity with the sport and there is no evidence it was played at Fort Jackson.

Mustered in Brooklyn, the 48th New York served more than a year at Pulaski before being sent to Hilton Head, S.C., and on to the bloody fighting at Battery Wagner near Charleston, where it suffered heavy casualties. While at Pulaski, they were protected by Union gunboats and other troops, allowing them to enjoy some entertainment.

Brigade commander Col. William Barton is remembered for the Barton Dramatic Association, a theater group that entertained the troops.

Among the patrons who saw productions outside the walls were Union officers and enlisted men stationed at Hilton Head and Port Royal, S.C.

Soldiers at the garrison in Fort Pulaski traveled to those locations to play baseball. Miller said his research showed the men were competitive and likely played against fellow New Yorkers.

While baseball hadn’t yet caught on in the South, Confederate prisoners (including Georgians captured at Fort Pulaski) that were held at Castle Williams on New York’s Governors Island were known to occasionally play baseball.

Miller said he will probably umpire Sunday’s games. “I am going to be very lenient.”

3D sonar imaging will help confirm identity of Rebel blockade runner off N.C.

(Courtesy N.C. Office of State Archaeology)

A 3D sonar imaging device will aid divers next week as they continue to explore what’s believed to be the largely intact remains of the Civil War blockade runner Agnes E. Fry.

The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology on Monday said the Charlotte Fire Department offered the use of the technology for the investigation just off Oak Island, south of Wilmington.

Deputy state archaeologist Bill Ray Morris, in a statement, said the remains of the iron-hulled steamer match up with the Scotland-made Agnes E. Fry, one of three blockade runners that sank in the area.

“Fry was 236 feet long, and the vessel remains we have are 225 feet in length. The other runners, Georgianna McCaw and Spunkie are both considerably shorter and a much earlier design than Fry,” said Morris. “The boiler type, as well as the hull design of the wreck, are both indicative of a more modern vessel than either McCaw or Spunkie. The difference in the lengths has to do with the damage to the bow and stern.”

The wreck was first studied in late February with side-scan sonar images during remote sensing operations. Both engines and the paddlewheel shaft are missing, matching salvage records. Divers noted the missing pieces during a March 22 dive.

"Every piece of evidence we have examined to date, from sonar images to primary documentation, points directly to this shipwreck being Agnes E. Fry," said Gordon Watts of the Institute for International Maritime Research. "We look forward to working with the Charlotte team to confirm our suspicions." 

The Llama resembled the Agnes E. Fry (NCOSA)

Fire officials in Charlotte arranged for Nautilus Marine Group International, the company that provides sonar systems to its dive team, to bring the latest version of a sector-scanning imaging sonar to confirm the vessel’s identity

"This instrument will allow us to make a complete, multi-dimensional map of the site in a matter of days," Morris said in the statement. "Unlike usual methods, imaging sonar does not require good visibility and is considerably faster than on-site mapping. Visibility underwater on the site is so murky that it rarely exceeds 18 inches."

The Agnes E. Fry made several successful runs for the Confederacy before it ran aground near Wilmington in the closing months of the war.

Not a land mine, but maybe a cannonball?

A Civil War-era device found near Danville by a Hot Springs man that prompted the evacuation Thursday of a neighborhood was "definitely not a land mine," the Magnolia station archaeologists for the Arkansas Archeological Survey said. The device was destroyed by an ordnance disposal team. • Article

On Shiloh's 154th anniversary, an ode to a Union fifer who was there, and a note about social media

Veteran W.Y. Jenkins plays his fife (Courtesy of R. Serroels)

Shiloh National Military Park this week is marking the 154^th anniversary of the epic contest in the Civil War’s Western Theater. Visitors are tromping through fields and woods for hikes and tours that are bringing the battle to life.

Many more people are following activities through the federal site’s “aggressive” social media, which provide real-time updates for certain programming, such as today (April 6).

That outreach can elicit responses that add richness and context to the story of the two-day clash in southern Tennessee on April 6-7, 1862. Such was the case last weekend after the park posted photos of a whiteboard filled on both sides with the names of soldiers and their units.

Rangers had asked visitors to list ancestors who fought in the Civil War. They, like the men who fought here, tend to be from the Midwest or Deep South.

Richard Serroels, who has not been to Shiloh in about 30 years, was among those responding to a park Facebook post showing the whiteboard.

“My maternal great-grandfather, Warren Young Jenkins, was a fife player at Shiloh,” the Marietta, Ga., resident wrote. “The family donated his fife to the museum and it was put on display along with other battlefield instruments from the war. He was with the 9^th Illinois Infantry.”

Jenkins' fife is on display at Shiloh (Courtesy NPS)

The Picket spoke to Shiloh ranger Chris Mekow and Serroels on Tuesday, curious about the impact of social media and the story of Jenkins, who survived the war, was married for more than six decades and ended his days in Canon City, Colo.

In later years, Jenkins wrote a riveting account of the carnage at Shiloh, which saw more than 23,000 casualties and, eventually, a Union victory.

The 9^th Illinois, part of Hurlbut’s division, suffered enormous losses as it bore the brunt of Confederate assaults throughout April 6. Some 103 men were killed and 263 wounded, one of the highest rates for a unit at the battle. (Interestingly, the 9^th Illinois was positioned not far from where Confederate commander Gen. Albert Sydney Johnston was mortally wounded.)

Like other musicians, Jenkins, a private, served as a medical orderly when bullets and artillery rounds started flying. After one Rebel shell landed, the Company H fifer carried two wounded soldiers to the rear and went back for a third and found him sitting behind a large stump.

Jenkins, then age 23, wrote later:

“I said, ‘Come, now, and I will take you to the field hospital to have your wound dressed.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, I am mortally wounded; see here!’ and he opened his clothing, uncovering his wound. The shell had torn out three or four ribs on his left side and I could see his heart throbbing. He took out his watch and handed it to me, telling me to send it to his girl (I suppose his intended wife, a German name that I cannot remember). I wrote his name on a small bit of paper and closed it up in the back of the watch and later gave it to his captain with the written instructions to send it to the lady at Belleville, Illinois.” (Jenkins was from Hillsboro, Ill., about 50 miles south of Springfield.)

Jenkins came across the soldier’s remains three days later while on burial detail.

Whiteboard filled with soldiers' names at Shiloh (NPS)

He provided other details of the fighting, including his attempt to fire a weapon belonging to a killed comrade. He asked another soldier for a cap to prime the gun.

“He looked down to get a cap and a ball from the enemy passed through his cartridge box and blowed the cartridge box all to splitherines with 30 or 40 rounds of cartridges right up into both of his eyes and my left eye,” recounted the musician. “The injury to Arthur's eyes turned out serious in after years. He went totally blind. My left eye was injured for life.”

Later in the evening, Jenkins cared for more wounded at a steamboat landing and helped build a makeshift coffin and bury an orderly sergeant who had suffered intensely.

Today, Jenkins’ fife, which he was known to proudly play throughout his life, is on display at Shiloh’s museum. The family donated it in the early 1990s, Mekow told the Picket.

The ranger said the whiteboard, which was labeled “Find Your Park” as part of the National Park Service’s centennial celebration, is part of an effort to get more interaction with visitors, whether in person or via social media. Many interested in the battle – such as Serroels -- cannot get to the remote location. “You have got to make a trip to get here,” said Mekow.

The park is active on five platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr. 

“Shiloh has the most active and so far most engaging Facebook page of any Civil War park in the Southeast,” said Mekow. “We have been very aggressive. We are a daily poster. We follow live events in real time.”

“(This) actually gets our programs to people who will never be able to step foot on this battlefield.”

Two comrades in arms, music (R. Serroels)

Posts and video’s aren’t just about the military action, though there is plenty of that. Some look at the park’s natural features, or music. Readers really like the behind-the-scenes stuff, Mekow said, such as remodeling or work on a park feature.

An example was then-and-now photos of a monument dedicated in 1913. “That one went off the charts.”

Shiloh National Military Park has several activities planned to mark the NPS’s 100^th birthday, including a summer concert series. In November, memorial luminaries will be placed in the park’s Corinth, Ms., unit and around that city.

Shiloh and other NPS sites regularly tell the stories of men such as Jenkins, who served a couple stints before mustering out in August 1864. (Jenkins tells a sweet story of visiting home a few months before he got out, playing “Home, Sweet Home” on the fife to his mother.)

Jenkins described the scene as he and other boys returned home.

“Nearly every one of the 29 men that arrived at Hillsboro August 29, 1864, had been absent since April 17, 186(1), 3 years, 4 months and 12 days. When we left there were 110 of us marched to the depot. Where were the 81 missing boys? Why most of them were sleeping the sleep that knows no waking. Some of them in unknown graves.”

9th Illinois monument (background) at Shiloh cemetery (NPS)

The 9^th Illinois went on to take part in the Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea, and seeing further action in the Carolinas before mustering out after war’s end. It listed 417 men having died from wounds or disease.

A few months before the farmer mustered out, Jenkins had married Susan – a union that produced numerous children and lasted 62 years until her death in 1926. They lived in Illinois and Kansas before moving to Colorado in 1899. Jenkins was active in the Grand Army of the Republic and assisted a fellow veteran in receiving benefits. He would occasionally play his fife, a wooden flute that produces shrill notes. He passed away in 1929 at 90.

A member of a GAR lodge in Colorado a decade before adapted a seven-stanza ode to honor Jenkins’ “historical fife,” which he continued to play on Memorial Day. The verse concludes:

Now worn and gray like the comrades brave,
Who faced the bullet and screaming shell,
It sounds no more in the camps or field
The old commands in a thrilling swell.

When Jenkins answers the last roll call,
And departs from this mortal sphere,
I am sure he would rest more peaceful all
If he knew his old fife was near.

'Saving my soul': Bullet-struck Bible's poignant story will be told at Monocacy battlefield

(Courtesy of Perry Adams Antiques)

On a hot summer day in 1864, Pvt. Thomas Cox, hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland, with a grievous chest wound, asked a fellow prisoner to inscribe a message in his battered Bible.

“The ball that struck this book entered my left brest (sic) and came out of right – it saved instant death & will be the means of saving my soul. Thomas Cox,” reads the penciled writing on the margins of a few pages. On succeeding pages is written: “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.”

Cox, a member of the Red House Volunteers, Company A, 21^st Virginia Infantry, would not live to return home to his family.

Cox, 33, died on or about Aug. 15, 1864, and was buried in Baltimore, home to the gloomy and unventilated hospital where he languished after suffering the wound five weeks earlier at the Battle of Monocacy near Frederick, Md.

The rare, bullet-struck Bible that belonged to the Confederate soldier is now at Monocacy National Battlefield, where officials have big plans to eventually display it in a special exhibit. (The site last month displayed the artifact for a day.)

(Perry Adams Antiques)

“We overwhelmingly have Union artifacts. We would like to have a more balanced nature to our artifacts,” said Tracy Evans, acting chief of education and visitor services at the National Park Service site. “It is a very personal artifact and belonged to a man who sacrificed his life fighting for his company here. We want to do it justice.”

Before then, Evans plans to conduct extensive genealogical research about Cox (or Cock or Cocke, according to various regimental and other spellings), the hospital and the 21^st Virginia.

The NPS last summer purchased the Bible for $12,500 from brokers in Petersburg, Virginia.

Monocacy got a tip from Emmanuel Dabney, a curator with Petersburg National Battlefield, who saw the “unique” item advertised online by Perry Adams Antiques.

“There are many Bibles that belonged to soldiers but there was only one of this particular soldier,” Dabney told the Picket. “This one has been struck by a bullet on a field that the nation has preserved at Monocacy National Battlefield. This man believed that he would be preserved on Earth and took the time to write that in his Bible, only to not survive in the end. To me it exemplified the concern with the ‘Good Death’ by so many soldiers in Union and Confederate armies who were Christian as they went to war.”

Binding shows damage from bullet

(Courtesy of Perry Adams Antiques)

Officials currently know very little about Cox. The cover of the Confederate Bible, which was printed in Atlanta in 1862, indicates he was from Morris Church, in southwest Virginia’s Carroll County. He is believed to have enlisted in June or July 1861.

The 21^st Virginia counted Jackson, Lee and Early among its commanders, and saw action in many engagements, including Cold Harbor, Chancellorsville, Cedar Mountain and Seven Days’.

Cox was wounded and captured on July 9, 1864, at Monocacy Junction, where his unit served under Brig. Gen. William Terry.

Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s Confederates were menacing Washington, D.C., and were met at Monocacy by a makeshift Union force led by Maj. Gen. Lewis Wallace. Early prevailed over stiff resistance, but Grant rushed Federal troops to the capital’s defense.

According to an NPS battle summary: “Wallace’s defeat at Monocacy bought time for these veteran troops to arrive to bolster the defenses of Washington. Early’s advance reached the outskirts of Washington on the afternoon of July 11, and the remaining divisions of the VI Corps began disembarking that evening. Monocacy was called the ‘Battle that Saved Washington.’”

Evans said she has not opened the fragile New Testament since the purchase. The item will need care from a conservator before it is permanently displayed.

Perry Adams photos show a gaping hole in the center of the book.

“We are thinking it must have gone in sideways,” said Evans, adding that is perhaps the reason Cox was not killed outright.

(Photos courtesy of  Joe Canner)

The soldier presumably died from his Monocacy wound. Another prisoner who was treated at West Building’s Hospital, located near a Baltimore dock, described it as unhygienic, with poor food and water.

Cox got the writing assistance from Pvt. H.S. Shepherd, a Confederate who was captured at Gettysburg in July 1863 and assisted sick comrades while serving as a ward master at the Baltimore hospital.

“I was with Thos. Cox when he died,” Shepherd wrote in the Bible. “He was willing … & appear ready to leave this world for a better one to come."

Another inscription indicates Cox asked that his ring be sent to his wife in Virginia. The soldier was buried at Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore. A Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter in recent years raised money for new gravestones, replacing a Cox marker that had become unreadable.

Interestingly, Shepherd by early 1865 had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States, saying he had become “heartily disgusted with the Confederacy.” President Abraham Lincoln approved the request.

Ben Greenbaum, co-owner of Perry Adams Antiques, said his firm brokered the Bible for a reputable collector.

“We had it for about a year or two and took it to a number of shows,” he said.

Greenbaum said there are multiple elements that made the Bible and its poignant messages attractive to buyers.

“Not only could you make conclusions from the shape of the hole in the Bible, this was a Confederate imprint, which is rare … in addition, there were all the annotations and the period writing.”

The appraiser said bullet-struck items always have an appeal. But he noted that buyers should be cautious. “When you get into certain hard items, buckles or buttons, they can be forged or faked.”

Greenbaum said, “I absolutely had no concern whatsoever” about the Cox Bible’s authenticity.

(Courtesy of Perry Adams Antiques)

Evans, with Monocacy National Battlefield, said the park did its due diligence. She asked a few experts to take a look at the artifact.

“Normally, it is hard to get quality artifacts at a premium like that,” she said. “Everything came together that we had the funding to be able to purchase it. It is the first Confederate-identified artifact we have.”

The Bible is believed to have been in the family for many years before it was sold to an individual in 1995.

Evans said the Monocacy museum needs a revamp and she hopes the Cox Bible will be the centerpiece of an exhibit, perhaps to open in mid-2017.

Petersburg’s Dabney, who engineered the acquisition by Monocacy, said it is “extremely rare” for Confederate objects to turn up, given so many have been donated to museums, historical societies or university research libraries.

“This Bible can connect with people who can view it in an exhibition and then go see where Cocke was wounded and captured,” he said.