Local History & Genealogy

This book is an organizational examination of North Carolina's Confederate hospitals and why they existed. The first two chapters provide the reader with a general understanding of the Confederate Medical Department and the military and civilians that were essential in the day-to-day operations of a hospital. The remaining chapters are arranged chronologically and discuss the key military operations and events that occurred in the state or in Virginia that drove hospital requirements.

On a crisp fall day in October of 1862, a precocious seventeen-year-old boy went into a bookshop in his hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland, and purchased a composition book. Into his new diary, John R. King would steadfastly record what he did, saw and heard daily, as the Civil War raged around him. During May of 1862, after learning the photography trade, John took portraits of Union soldiers stationed in the Shenandoah Valley. Then, on May 23, 1862, when he heard the sounds of battle, he attempted to flee on a wagon. He was soon captured by Stonewall Jackson's troops. His treasured diary was taken. Force marched to a Confederate prison, John vowed revenge. Two weeks after escaping from captivity, John joined the Union Army. He fought with fury, courage and valor, was wounded three times and became a war hero. Later, John was not only appointed by two presidents to prestigious positions in the Pension Bureau, but he also became leader of the Grand Army of the Republic. After being lost for 150 years, his diary was recently discovered and is now being published.

This book is the second in a series on marriage records of Clarke County, Virginia. The first book covered marriages from 1836 to 1886. This volume covers marriages from 1887 to 1925. The county maintained a marriage register beginning in 1865. Information on this register included the individual's age, status, names of parents, place of birth and residence, date and place of marriage, date of license, and husband's occupation, as well as additional comments as to consent, etc.

Jeffrey Amherst was Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty's Forces in North America during the French and Indian War. Documents from his records relating to the war are located in the British Public Records Office as "W.O. 34: General Sir Jeffrey Amherst 1712

Native Vermonter Aldace Freeman Walker, valedictorian of Middlebury College's Class of 1862, future lawyer and Chairman of the Board of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, gave his commencement speech in the uniform of a First Lieutenant, U.S. Volunteers, and promptly set off for war. After nearly a month of initial training in Brattleboro, Vermont, Walker's regiment, the Eleventh Vermont Infantry, arrived at the Seat of War in early September 1862. For the next twenty months Walker and his regiment occupied the forts in the northeastern quadrant of the Defenses of Washington, drilling socializing and fretting that the war might pass them by.

in mid-May, 1864, as Lieut. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac began the bloody Overland Campaign against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, the Vermont "Heavies," as they came to be known, were called up to active campaigning, joined the famous "Old Vermont Brigade," in the Sixth Corps, and participated in every battle of that unit from Spotsylvania until the end of the war.

Walker's 288 letters to his parents and younger sister are regular, often long, and always lucid and opinionated, Historian Benjamin Franklin Cooling III, who has written extensively on the defenses of Washington during the Civil War, opined that " no better account of the 'life and times' of junior officers in the wartime defenses of Washington remains" than Walker's letters home.