14. The DELMARVA Peninsula and Home

Tuesday & Wednesday, July 23rd & 24th -  We've driven the route from the northeast to Florida many times and we have always taken I-95 through Baltimore and Washington and it has always been a pain.  This time we decided to drive down the DELMARVA Peninsula.  For those not familiar with it DELMARVA stands for Delaware, Maryland and Virginia the 3 states that make up the peninsular.  It is on the east side of the Chesapeake Bay.  In Maryland they often refer to it as the Eastern Shore and it is where Rehoboth Beach and Ocean City are located.  Here is a map showing the peninsula.

Once you pass through Wilmington, DE, or cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge from New Jersey, you veer east on US-13 or DE-1 towards Dover, DE, the state capital.  Once you get past Dover it becomes fairly rural with lots of farm fields.  About 1/3 way down there is a bridge that crosses the bay just above Annapolis, MD.  After that, the only way off the peninsula is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel at the very bottom of the peninsula which takes you over the entrance to the bay and into Norfolk, VA.  That is the way we went.I can tell you that not having to face the traffic around Baltimore and Washington was really nice and the bridge-tunnel was interesting to see.

The bridge-tunnel is 23 miles long with 17.6 of those miles  over the bay.  Depth of water varies from 25 to 100 feet with 12 miles of low-level trestle, 2 one-mile-long tunnels, 2 bridges, 2 miles of causeway, 4 man-made islands and 5-1/2 miles of approach roads.  Here is an aerial photo of the bridge-tunnel showing some of the trestles a bridge section and a tunnel section.

That was the end of the excitement for this vacation.  We stopped outside of Fayetteville, NC,  for the night and made in home the next day.  Great trip but as usual, it's always nice to get home and sleep in your own bed.

Hope you have enjoyed this blog  as much as I have enjoyed putting it together.

13. Valley Forge

Sunday & Monday, July 21st & 22nd - After we left Gettysburg, we drove through the Pennsylvania Dutch area towards Valley Forge.  It was Sunday morning and all of the Amish were probably in church as we only saw one horse and buggy on the road.  If you did any bike riding around this area you would have to be careful as the bike lanes in this area are used by the horse and buggies and the lanes are liberally decorated with horse droppings.  The local highway crews must have a fairly vigorous street sweeper program otherwise these roads could get pretty ripe.

Valley Forge was not a battlefield, it was a winter encampment.  Back in the Revolutionary War, the armies usually didn't fight during the winter as moving around was very difficult with the snow and rain so instead they spent the winter in a fixed camp.  Valley Forge was the 3rd of 7 winter encampments during the war.  In September of 1777, the British had occupied Philadelphia so Gen. Washington wanted a location fairly close to Philadelphia so could keep British raiding and foraging parties away from central Pennsylvania.  They selected a high plateau just to the east of the town of Valley Forge as it was protected by the Schuylkill River on the north side and had steep slopes on the other 3 sides and was far enough from Philadelphia that the British could not surprise them.  Gen. Washington and his men rode in on December 19, 1777 and remained in this camp until June 19, 1777.

Up to this point in the war the Continental Army consisted of state militias and other volunteer units that had signed up for one year and were largely trained and supplied by their local communities.  When they rode in they were a rag tag bunch of soldiers who were poorly equipped, poorly trained and fairly demoralized. During the time at Valley Forge, Gen. Washington managed to convince the Continental Congress to take over responsibility for maintaining the army and to provide their supplies and equipment.  Enlistments were also changed to 3 years so you could have a guy long enough to get trained and be useful.  When the army left in June, they were a disciplined, well organized and equipped force with very high moral and confidence in their capabilities.  Valley Forge is generally thought of as the birthplace of the American Army.

We arrived in Valley Forge before lunch and went direct to the visitor's center.  We spent about an hour in the museum and then went to see an introductory movie and go on a short ranger hike.  Still pretty hot so the ranger rearranged his tour so we could spend most of the time in the shade.  The first surprise we received was that we had always pictured the soldiers living in tents and suffering from the cold.  By and large not true, when the army arrived here, the first thing Gen Washington had them do was organize into 12 man squads and build huts to a common design.  Within a month almost all of the men were in huts.  Here are 4 photos that show a hut, the interior of a hut, how they were organized in rows and a cook oven where each unit baked their bread and cooked their meals.  Each man in the army was promised a loaf a bread every day.  When you were in camp like this you got fresh bread other wise you got what was call "hard tack" which are basically unsalted, stale, thick crackers.

Along the bluffs the men build small earthen forts called redoubts.  Not much to look at today but apparently pretty effective in their day.  Here is what one looks like today.

These are all recreations as this land had been farm land before the army showed up and was converted back to farmland as soon as they left and all of the wood put to other uses.  There were something in the order of 2,000 of these huts built and they denuded the countryside for mile around to provide the construction material.  Groups of huts were organized by which Corps, Division or Brigade the units belonged to and there were monuments all along the road showing where individual units were located.  Here is an example of such a marker.

These huts and the redoubts were built all around the periphery of this plateau.  In the center was an area called the Grand Parade where the troops trained and marched.  Here is a photo of that area.

On Monday we drove around the park.  There were a lot of monuments to the various units and generals so I will only show a sample.  Then main monument is the National Memorial Arch and here is a photo if it.

This inscription inside the arch lists the General Officers who commanded the various units that were in this encampment.

This next monument is the Massachusetts State Memorial.

These pair of columns straddling the road are the Pennsylvania State Memorial.

This next monument is to Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne who because of his habit of leading his troops from the front earned the nickname Mad Anthony Wayne.  When Pat and I were first married we lived in Dayton, OH, and there was a Mad Anthony Wayne Blvd in town.

While the soldiers and field officers lived in these huts, the general officers and their staff either rented or borrowed homes in the area.  This photo is of the Maurice Stephens House which was used by Brig. Gen. Varnum and his staff during the encampment.

Gen. Washington also rented a house and the following photos show the exterior, one of the downstairs rooms, Gen Washington's bedroom, one of his staff member's bedroom and the kitchen.

While driving around the park we also came across an area known as the artillery park.  Since this encampment was an enclosed rectangular area, if you set up your cannons on one side and an attack came from the other side you had a long way to go.  So the solution was the concentrate the artillery in one central area and this was it.

We also came across this monument to the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment.

During the time of this encampment, the officer who was primarily responsible for training this rag tag group and making and army out of them was Baron Friedrich Willhelm von Steuben who was a one time member of the prestigious Prussian General Staff but at this point in his life was out of work. He arrived in Valley Forge bearing a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin in Paris and quickly demonstrated that he knew his business.  Main problem was that he spoke almost no English.  So he wrote out the pages for the army field manual in French and Gen. Washington's staff officers translated them into English.  The same on the drill field, von Steuben would bellow out his orders in either German or French and a staff officer would then translate.  As for the cuss words, that wasn't a problem as the troops could easily tell when von Steuben was cussing them out even if it was in German.  Here is a photo of the monument to von Steuben.

The last major stop on our tour around the encampment was the Washington Memorial Chapel which is an Episcopal church that was built in early 1900s which was built as a tribute to George Washington and the American Patriots of the Revolution.  Here is an exterior photo of the chapel.

The tower to the right is a carillon with 58 bells, one for each state plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Virgin Islands, Midway, Wake Island plus the national birthday bell.  The size of each bell was determined by the population of each state and territory in 1920.  While we were visiting the chapel the carillon was being played and it does sound nice.

The church was built in a Gothic Revival style and the interior is very ornate with large stained glass windows.  Here is a shot of the interior.

The large window over the altar is known as the Martha Washington Window and was a gift of the Colonial Dames of Pennsylvania.  Here is a photo ot it.

The cross over the altar was a gift of the family of Abraham Lincoln.  Here is a photo.

The other windows on the side walls and over the entrance are dedicated to Gen. Washington and his staff.
The small inset panels show events from their lives.  The next 2 photos show 2 of these panels.

The primary colors of these windows was red and blue as those are patriotic colors.  To either side of the alter are the choir stalls that stand 19-1/2 feet high.  Each stall commemorates a brigade and the soldiers on the top show the different uniforms of the brigades.  Here is a photo of one section of that area.

Across the street from  the chapel is a monument put up by the Daughters of the Revolution and dedicated to the "Soldiers of Washington's Army Who Slept in Valley Forge".

Valley Forge was not a battle field and so there were not any combat deaths.  The winter of 1777-1778 was relatively mild, so cold and starvation were not serious problems.  The true scourges of the army were diseases and there were a large number of men lost to diseases such as influenza, typhus, typhoid, dysentery and in particular to small pox. To combat the death toll due to small pox, Gen. Washington used an early form of a "vaccination".  He would find an individual that had a mild case of small pox and then take a small blood sample from him.. He would then use that sample to infect other men.  Pretty crude but apparently worked as the death rate for men who got small pox on their own was 40%, for those who were vaccinated it was 4%.  Even so, the American Army lost about 2,000 men during this encampment of which about 2/3 were due to disease.

This was the last day of our vacation and tomorrow we head home.

12. Gettysburg

Thursday - Saturday, July 18th - 20th:  This afternoon we arrived in Gettysburg, PA, after having toured the Antietam Battlefield in Maryland.  Sharpsburg/Antietam was the Confederacy's first attempt to invade the north and Gettysburg was their second and last attempt.  The Confederacy had just beaten the Union at Chancellorsville, VA, and Gen Lee felt the time was right for another attempt to invade the North.  At this point all of the fighting was taking place on Southern soil and the Confederacy was doing poorly in the west.  So Lee's idea was relieve pressure on northern Virginia, force the Union to recall its forces from the west to help defend the north and, if the could win a decisive victory, convince the Union the end the war.

So after Chancellorsville, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia crossed over into the Shenandoah Valley and headed north with the plan to advance as far as Harrisburg or even Philadelphia.  They ended up approaching Gettysburg from the west and the north.  The Union Army of the Potomac was initially under Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker but President Lincoln was unhappy with his performance and just three days before the battle replaced him with Maj. Gen. George Meade.  Meade's army was a day behind Lee's and approached Gettysburg from the south and the east.  Lee's army had about 75,000 men and 275 cannons and Meade's army had about 93,000 men and 356 cannons.  Like Antietam, this would again be a battle where one side would hold the high ground and the other side would try to force them off of it but in this battle it was the Union who held the high ground.

As he was approaching Gettysburg, Meade wasn't sure where Lee's forces were and so sent his cavalry, under Brig. Gen. John Buford, west of Gettysburg to find and delay Lee.  Buford spotted Lee's advance forces west of Gettysburg and set up a defensive line on Herr Ridge, McPherson Ridge and Seminary Ridge west and north of town.  Unfortunately for Lee, the Confederate cavalry under Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart had been sent further north to reconnoiter the approach to Harrisburg and were not available at the start of the battle so Lee couldn't use his cavalry to scout out the Union forces and engage the Union cavalry.

So at 5:00 AM on July 1, 1863, the Confederate forces commenced an attack against Buford's cavalry.  It was going bad for the Union until they were reinforced by the Union I Corp at around 10:30 AM.  Most of the Union forces were still east of town and so the Confederacy had a decided numerical advantage in this early phase and so the Union forces gradually retired to Seminary Ridge and then through town to Cemetery Ridge on the east side of town.  This graphic shows the lines on the first day and the movement of forces and the battle progressed with the Union falling back to Cemetery Ridge and the Confederacy taking over the former Union lines.

This is where Meade had set up his forces.  Meade's lines were set up in the form of an upside down fish hook with the end of the long shank (left flank) on Little Round Top and the curve on Cemetery Hill and the barb on Culp Hill and Spangler's Spring (right flank).  This graphic, which shows the action of the third day of the battle, will give you a good idea of how the forces were configured.

The Union had a decided advantage as their lines of communication were short and they could move forces around to meet Confederate attacks easily while the Confederates had a long way to go to get for one end of their lines to the other.

The second and third days of the battle were fought with the Union holding the high ground and the Confederates attacking and trying to drive them off and failing.  On the second day, Lee's forces tried attacking the left flank, Little Round Top, and the right flank, Culp's Hill.  The Union left flank was almost lost as Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, whose III Corps was supposed to be holding the Little Round Top, unilaterally decided to move his forces down off the hill and closer to the Confederate lines into areas now known as the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard and the Devil's Den.  During the Confederate attack the III Corps was basically wiped out and Gen Sickles lost his leg, the Confederate forces started up Little Round Top which would have given them control of the Union left flank and a decided advantage.  Luckily for the Union, Brig. Gen. Gouverneur Warren of the Signal Corps saw the Confederates approaching and was able to pull up reinforcements with only minutes to spare.  As it was one of the units called up, the 20th Maine under Col. Joshua Chamberlain, ran out of ammunition and had to charge the Confederate forces with bayonets to drive them off.

The third day, Lee decided to try a frontal assault and this was the famous Pickett's Charge which actually consisted of multiple units under Pickett, Trimble and Pettigrew.  It was a total of 12,500 Confederate men charging across about a mile of open field against a force of 6,000 Union men who were behind stone walls on top of the ridge.  Only a small number of Confederates under Brig. Gen, Lewis Armistead made it over the stone walls and they were immediately cut down with Armistead being killed.  This is referred to as the "High Water Mark" of the Confederacy as it is the closest they ever came to success.

Of the 165,000 men engaged in this three day battle total loses for sides were around 55,000 killed wounded or missing with the Confederacy having the worst of it.

When we got there the first thing we did was go to the Visitor's Center and Museum.  One of the major attractions of the Museum is something called a Cyclorama.  It is a large 360 degree painting that is 120 ft. in diameter, 377 ft. long, 42 ft. high and it weighs 12.5 tons.  Immediately in front of the painting is  a landscaped foreground so you can't tell where the foreground ends and the painting starts.  It was painted in 1883 and opened in a specially constructed building in Chicago.  It depicts Pickett's Charge on July 3rd.  The next three photos give you an idea of the detail in this painting.

Between the first afternoon and part of the second day we spent a lot of time in the museum which was very extensive and provided a lot of information on the battle as well as the armaments, people, etc.

The next three photos show some of the grounds over which the battle took place.  The first is a photo the Devil's Den which is a rock formation at the base of Little Round Top where extensive fighting took place.  There is a little valley and stream just in front of Devil's Den (just off the left side of the photo) and they earned the name Blood Valley and Blood Creek because of the amount of blood shed there.  The picture was taken form the top of Little Round Top.

This next photo was taken from the Devil's Den and shows Little Round Top.  Blood Valley and Blood Stream are in the vegetation in front of the cars.

This next photo shows the view from the top of Cemetery Ridge across the fields to the Confederate lines (trees) and shows the ground that the Confederates had to cover in Pickett's Charge. The stone wall in the foreground is what the Union men were sheltered behind.

The battlefield is large (about 25 square miles) has a lot of monuments, at last count 1,328 of them.  Obviously I couldn't take photos of all of them but here is a sample of the more interesting ones.  There are a lot of little ones that show where the ends of the various units lines were,  This photo shows the right flank marker for the 88th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment right next to the left flank marker for the 12th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.  These units were part of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, I Corps which at this time was under the command of Maj. Gen Abner Doubleday of baseball fame.  This was on McPherson Ridge and was the first day of battle.

Other monuments along this section of the battle line included the 6th New York Cavalry.

The 83rd New York Infantry Regiment.

The 56th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

And as you can see they just keep on going.



These were all on McPherson Ridge.  We then drove down Seminary Ridge which is where the Confederate forces were during days 2 and 3.  Here there were a lot of monuments to the various Confederate states, units or Generals.  This is the North Carolina Monument.

This is the Virginia Monument which also commemorates Gen. Lee.

This monument commemorates Maj. Gen. Stuart.

This is the Louisiana Monument.

This is the Mississippi Monument.

We then drove over to Cemetery Ridge and here were the Union monuments.  This next monument is to Brig. Gen. Warren who, as I mentioned earlier, was the guy that got the reinforcements to the top of Little Round Top and saved the day.

This monument is known as the Sickles monument but is not for Maj. Gen. Sickles, as he received a black eye for his actions in moving his men out of position without getting approval or notifying anyone.  Instead it commemorates the New York units that were part of his III Corps.

This is the Pennsylvania Monument.

This monument is for the 27th New York Infantry Regiment, the Tammany Regiment.

This next one is for the Irish Brigade which consisted of the 63rd, 69th and 88th New York Infantry Regiments.

This last one on Cemetery Ridge is for a Confederate General.  It shows the place where Brig. Gen. Armistead was mortally wounded and is the Confederacy's "High Water Mark".  You can see the stone wall he crossed in the background.

After we had completed our tour of the battle field we visited the Nation Cemetery which just happens to be on Cemetery Hill.  The hill was not named after the National Cemetery as the town cemetery had been there previously and the hill was named after it.  This cemetery is only for Union soldiers.  The Confederate dead were taken back south and a large fraction of them ended up in a Confederate cemetery near Richmond, VA.  The Graves are arranged in a semicircular pattern around a central monument.  They are arranged in groups by state with a state marker showing the number buried and then individual markers showing the name if it is know.  There was one group where they didn't even know what state they were from and this next photo shows that group.

Curiously this is where the New York State Monument was located.

The main monument in the cemetery is know as the Soldiers Memorial and is in the next photo.

We spent about 2-1/2 days at this battlefield and it really was not enough.  You could need to spend weeks here to begin to understand what took place.

The locals really had a problem when the battle was over.  The population of Gettysburg at that time was about 2,400 and they had 10 wounded to care for for every resident.  Every building that had a roof became a hospital.  We attended the local Catholic Church, St. Francis Xavier, Saturday evening and one of the stained glass windows commemorates its use as a hospital.  Nuns from the Sisters of Charity cared for the wounded in the church.  Incidental, when Pat went through nursing school many years ago, it was taught by the Sisters of Charity.

Tomorrow we head over to Valley Forge and switch from the Civil War to the Revolutionary War.