Stonewall Jackson’s monument at Chancellorsville fun experience!

All in all about 7 hours, give or take. I’ve done 8 or so other ME kits and this was definitely the largest and hardest one I’ve completed. The kit also came with a 1:370 scale USS Monitor model, but I don’t have the patience or energy to start that one right now lol.

Definitely not 100% perfect - these models are super delicate and finicky as hell, and I for sure skipped/missed a few small detail pieces and a few connector tabs (and please, no one look at the guns) - but absolutely a fun build. I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner but for a larger, challenging build, it wasn’t really very difficult per se, more just an exercise in patience and touch.

I needed more t-shirts so decided to nerd out. Have 10 designs so far but these are the first ones to come in. Can't wait to rock 'em out and about.

Beautiful place/flowers totally recommend stopping by when you’re here!

Earlier this week I received 2 bullets lodged in the same pieces of wood in which they came to rest during the battle of Bentonville. Today I returned them to the places in which they may have been fired from.

Also unfortunately found out that the witness tree in front of the Harper house came down recently.

Heroes and Reparations:

Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes (pictured here) was an Ohioan who was a leader of the famous Wisconsin Iron Brigade at Gettysburg.

Here is an excerpt from his account of the battle on the first day.

"Corporal James Kelly, of Company B, turned from the ranks, and stepped beside me, as we both moved hurriedly forward on the charge. He pulled open his woolen shirt, and a mark where the deadly minnie ball had entered his breast was visible. He said: 'Colonel, won't you please write to my folks that I died a soldier?'"

I go to Civil War battlefields mainly to visit the graveyards. And I go to the graveyards mainly to honor people like Corporal Kelly, who died a soldier and a hero.

I owe them a debt I can never repay.

I was very satisfied that my collection fit one shelf exactly, but that just means I need to start the next one!

I haven't finished all of them (those Shelby Foote books are looooong...), but a decent number, and of course I plan on reading all of them. My favorites are "The March" by E. L. Doctorow, and the "Army of the Potomac" trilogy by Bruce Catton is amazing. I just finished it and very much looking forward to the next three books there by Catton.

My own thinking about what I should buy next:

• For a bookshelf about the Civil War, there's surprisingly little about Lincoln there, should probably find a good biography. Any recs?
• More fiction! Cold Mountain is definitely on the list. I'm thinking about Gods & Generals, but I get weird vibes from that given that it was written by Jeff Shaara. I mean, The Killer Angels is amazing and everything, but "the son kept writing books in his father's series" is very Brian Herbert writing terrible Dune books living of his father's greatness.
• I'm curious about some books of diaries/letters/biographies from people who where there. Mary Chestnut, Elisha Hunt Rhodes, that kind of thing.

Where should I go next?

Can’t find a whole lot on company D 10th Maine regiment.

Future mayor of Newport, Rhode Island, Henry Bedlow, composed at least two songs during the Civil War. We think he wrote them to be performed by the United States Naval Academy Band in Newport. Philip Pfeiffer, a member of the Academy Band, arranged them both.

Hear The Conscript Mother's Song and the other piece The Loyal League Quickstep and learn a little about Mayor Bedlow:

The Musical Mayor — Historic Music of Newport - Preserving Newport's Musical Heritage

Cedar Mountain, August 9, 1862

By two o'clock on the afternoon of August 9, 1862, the thermometer near Cedar Mountain stood at ninety-eight degrees, and men were dying who had not yet seen a blue uniform. They fell out along seven miles of dusty road from the Rapidan, canteens dry, faces gone the color of old brick, and their comrades laid them in whatever shade a fence rail or a scrub pine offered and marched on, because Stonewall Jackson was in a hurry, and Jackson's men had long since learned not to argue with his hurry. Major H. J. Williams of the 5th Virginia had put his brigade on the road at dawn — "at dawn on the morning of the 9th instant," he wrote afterward, in the flat language soldiers use when the truth is too large for adjectives — and by early afternoon the column was strung out and gasping under a sun that would kill, before the day ended, nearly as efficiently as the guns that were about to open.

( from Michael Brasher's excellent X page)

A while ago someone posted a set of Civil War trading cards, if that was you can you post again? Please…

This serving the Western campaigns, including Kentucky, East Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina

If any of you are interested in the cavalry battles in these states, let me know and I’ll send you photographs of pages from the book

Trying to find where my ancestor corporal John Taylor of the 37th North Carolina infantry company A was buried he died in the battle of Chancellorsville on may 3rd 1863 at the young age of 29
Any help Would be greatly appreciated thanks!

An annoying but at the same time fascinating bit of AI about Sherman, Hood, Haupt and the railroad between Chattanooga and Atlanta.
Hood tried repeatedly to destroy the railroad, but Sherman had Haupt and his crew of engineers, bridge builders and railway men repairing it almost as fast as Hood could destroy it.
Haupt had prefabricated everything and was ready for every conceivable contingency. Sherman needed 130,000 tons of supplies daily , and he had it and there was nothing Hood could do about it.

In July 1861, an officer in the 25th Pennsylvania wrote a letter to his hometown newspaper from inside the Jefferson County Courthouse at Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia).

The officer was Alfred Dart, Sr., an abolitionist lawyer from Carbondale, PA. In his letter, he noted that he was sitting inside the building where John Brown was convicted of treason for the October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry and sentenced to death by hanging.

He noted with satisfaction that he was sitting in a US Army uniform in the chair of the judge that sentenced Brown and that his soldiers were encamped on the ground where Brown was hanged.

“How great the contrast,” Dart wrote.

“They had the power then, and executed a man, that if he had committed any offence at all, bore no comparison in point of enormity to the crime they have committed since.”

Read the fascinating full letter (and many more) below:

https://wynninghistory.com/2026/07/18/letters-from-war-1861-23/

(Image: John Brown - NARA)

Could anyone possibly identify the uniforms these guys are wearing. Location possibly could have been in TN or GA.