From the July 27, 2011, Ypsilanti (Mi) Courier "From the archives: History behind Civil War artifact remains a mystery" by Laura Bier.
Somewhere in the attic of Sherzer Hall on the Normal College campus are two bottles. One has blood-saturated coal cinders and the other has whole blood. Both are from the Civil War. In 1951, a yellowed clipping turned up about these two bottles.
The bottles involved the fatal shooting of Union Col. Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York early in the war by James Jackson in Alexandria, Virginia. The New York and Michigan soldiers on the scene knew of the historic significance of the event and cut up the blood-soaked stair-runner and chipped pieces from the stained stairway as souvenirs.
A piece of the Confederate flag that Ellsworth took down that day is at the Smithsonian. No one is sure how the bottles, said to contain blood from both victims that day, turned up at the Michigan college, but most think that it came from a Michigan. Perhaps they came from Corporal Francis Brownell himself. Brownell was the one wh shot Jackson.
Early Souvenirs of the War. --Old Secesh
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