Some New News About an Old War.
1. LEE-GRANT TWICE-- Came across the fact that Lee and Grant only met twice in their lives. Once near the end of the Mexican War and at Appomattox.
2. GETTYSBURG GRAND OPENING-- September 27th and 28th was the Grand Opening of the new $103 million Museum and Visitor Center. It opened in April, however. The 139,000 square foot building is designed to accommodate 2 million visitors a year and is very interactive.
There are 12 themed galleries, one of which is on the Gettysburg Address. Only 7% of the museum's 300,000 artifacts and 700,000 documents are on display at any given time.
Also, the 377 foot long, 42 foot high canvas "The Battle of Gettysburg" has been restored to look just as it did when French painter Paul Philippoteaux first showed it in Boston in 1884.
3. TRAIN WRECK-- A marker commemorating the July 15, 1864 train wreck, is at the north end of the town of Shohola, Pennsylvania. An Erie Railroad train carrying 833 Confederate prisoners and 128 Union guards to prison in Elmira, New York, collided with a coal train. Forty-eight prisoners and 12 guards were killed. Many of the survivors were cared for in Shohola.
The crash took place at a blind curve called King and Foller's Cut.
4. WILLIAM BUTLER, CSN-- The September 10th Goldsboro (NC) News-Argus about the local Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp, the Goldsboro Rifles, doing research and finding out about William Butler's grave in Willowdale Cemetery. All it had on it was his name and "He served his country."
They found out he had been a sailor aboard the CSS Neuse, a 158 foot Confederate ram built at Seven Springs and burned by her crew when Union troops took Kinston in March 1865.
Butler died 47 years later. The camp has put up a new military headstone.
Now, You Know. --Old B-R
The Battle of Fort Fisher, N.C.
