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Olmsted cast New Eyes on the Old South
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) was in the front rank of this country’s landscape architects, and many consider him the best. But he was other things, as well – farmer, journalist, public works administrator – and he approached all his work with the same vision,...
To Make Them Live Again
“Why are you so interested in history?" Oh, for a dollar for each time I've been asked that. My initial answer went something like this: "I was bitten by the bug when my grandparents took me to an old battlefield close to home." Later, I changed it to, "The people of...
Waterloo and The Civil War
A few days ago, I finished reading an outstanding book about the battle of Waterloo. Titled “WATERLOO: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles,” it was written by Bernard Cornwell. If you know anything about historical fiction, you've probably...
The first to fall for North Carolina
He was only 19. Fate or plain bad luck had brought him to a fight at Big Bethel Church in Virginia, in June of 1861. The young man had enlisted back in April, less than a week after the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The Tar Heel State had not initially joined...
The long road ends at Durham
For more than nine months, some 50,000 troops in the Army of Northern Virginia were dug in at Petersburg, in a situation that none other than Robert E. Lee had early on described, in writing, as “untenable.” During the long face-off, their contributions to the war...
Averasboro, and a civilian view
They're making this easy for me. The week ended with distant artillery at Fort Bragg jarring the foundations of this old house. Then, on Sunday, gunners in the reenactment at the Averasboro Battlefield Museum a few hundred yards south let go a couple of rounds with...
Old myths frustrate modern hopes
If you grew up white, Southern and embedded in the successor class to the Antebellum gentry, you've likely heard it -- more than once: "I was always told that they treated them like family." "Them" meaning slaves. It wasn't a lie; that was in fact what they -- the...
The Day Joe Johnston Stopped the War
The day after I became a teenager in 1960, Look magazine published a piece by American novelist MacKinlay Kantor, titled, "If the South Had Won the Civil War." At the time I found the title intriguing, but the substance eluded me. Having had more than half a century...
Gen. Sherman’s critical turn of events
As the summer of 1864 gave way to autumn, Maj. Gen.William T. Sherman was restless. What remained of Atlanta was under Union control. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood had by Sherman's reckoning lost his enthusiasm for head-to-head fighting. Instead, Hood busied himself...
Matters of time and timing
If a 19th-century Time magazine had picked a Person of the Year for any of the war years, Abraham Lincoln would have been impossible to ignore. The mere fact of his election in 1860 stirred South Carolina to declare the Union dissolved and begin expropriating U.S....
Hard times on the home front
Monroe is in the Hospital somewhere sick. Our 1st Lieut. is now Capt. and myself 1st Lieut. J.D. Currie 2nd Lieut. and Toler holds 2nd Lieut.'s place though he is not with us. He is at home, has hemorage (sic) of the lungs. Bill Davis died on his way to the Co. with...
Help tell it like it is, and was
Laws, Ian Fleming's villainous Goldfinger scoffed to James Bond, are merely "the crystallized prejudices of the community." That's harsh, and not entirely accurate. But it makes the useful point that our code of laws, no matter what the credits and credentials of...
Missing some of your history? Check this
Have you hit a dead end in trying to piece together your ancestors’ stories? Has an old cemetery gone missing? Can't find the will, birth or death certificate, or tax record you want? You could be looking in the wrong place. Maybe a county jumped out from under you....
When assets suddenly became liabilities
Not quite two years after the Civil War ended, John C. Smith of Cumberland County found himself in the same predicament as other planters suddenly confronted by the prospect of having to pay the help. The land that had made his grandfather, his father and John himself...
Tar Heel war stories need a binder
Some call the endless fascination with the Civil War puzzling -- silly, even. They should rethink that. There are no reliable figures for those who were wounded or maimed, or those whose health was wrecked. No one can quantify the grief and privation of families...
Confederates stalking Confederates
A good shake of the family tree often brings down a hail of Civil War soldiers, each good for at least one war story pieced together from unit records or one personal anecdote preserved in a letter or diary entry. But what did it mean to belong, as did several of my...
The South before the war: an island in time
The first thing a modern time-traveler would notice, on arrival in the antebellum South, would most likely be the silence. There might be movement among dry leaves, or the snort of a horse. Bird songs, surely, and, somewhere, a barking dog. But no dense overlay of...
Special Private Tour of Chancellorsville Battleground
Come join us on August 15. Click here for Tour Details! Want To Work With Us? Get involved with our exciting project. Phone: 910-491-0602 Email: info@nccivilwarcenter.org 824 Branson Street Post Office Box 53865...
A “family history” like no other — the musings of blogger David Ivey
My Civil War commemoration began four years ago, on April 12, 2011. I watched from The Battery at Charleston Harbor as a giant spotlight sent a beam into the night sky above Fort Sumter. At 4:30 a.m. that beam split in two, signifying the moment the first shot of the...
Waiting for the end in Sherman’s path
"The cloud of war is darkening and threatens to burst over our heads. Wilmington has fallen, Charleston and Columbia. Sherman is still making his onward march. Our own town is threatened and all is dismay and uncertainty." So wrote Jane Elliot from her plantation home...
Merit selection, it wasn’t
If you want to know how one of the nation's premiere military installations got its name, don't expect to find the answer in the Civil War service record of Braxton Bragg, who has been called "the North's favorite Southern general." Want To Work With Us? Get involved...
U.S. History, Meet the Present
There's no shortage of innocent assumptions, sneering one-liners, pseudohistory, off-topic diversions and mindless loops regarding the causes and conduct of the Civil War. If you've had enough of that cheap beer, then buy, borrow or check out Daniel A. Farber's...
High hopes and hard war
A Texas soldier stationed in Arkansas, one of eight Reb brothers born and reared on the same Cape Fear River plantation, was reservedly optimistic as the Civil War passed its first anniversary."If I am still blessed with good health," Jimmie Smith wrote his future...
Become a Charter Member of the Friends of the History Center!
On Thursday, May 8, from 7:30 – 9:30 PM, the History Center will launch its Friends program at a special gathering at SkyView on Hay in downtown Fayetteville. We will be premiering a special video about the History Center plans and we will be hearing from one of the...
Community Foundation Announces $500,000 Grant Investment
Leaders of Cumberland Community Foundation announced a major gift to the proposed North Carolina Civil War History Center. Plans call for the education center to be built on the grounds of the existing State-supported Museum of the Cape Fear, directly adjacent to the...
There’s no script for war
Abolish the unthinkable and you can have no more wars. Is there even a remote chance that Alexander McRae, a U.S. Army officer from Fayetteville, idly wondered during his time as a West Point cadet if he would die in New Mexico Territory battling rebels led by his...