About three and a half years ago I had a heart attack followed by a stroke. After I was released from the hospital, while I was still undergoing therapy to help me be able to speak again, I was on a vacation with my wife at our friends Marcia’s and Jon’s house near Biddeford, Maine. They asked me if I wanted to see anything. I said “Yes, could you take me up to Bowdoin College to see Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s house.” The house is in Brunswick, Maine. It is across from Bowdoin College where Chamberlain was a professor, and later President of the college.
We went up there, met a facebook friend Noma, and had a very relaxing day touring the house. Noma took us onto the college to see some treasures the school displays that were owned by Chamberlain. After we came back to New York, I decided to write up a tour of the house and associated collection of artifacts.
I have been writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction for over a decade and a half. I had never written a travel guide to a specific Civil War site. In fact, since I had started up The Reconstruction Blog in 2019, I wrote mostly deeply researched articles on events after the war. Unfortunately, the stroke and other illnesses have left me with somewhat diminished cognitive abilities. I enjoyed writing the description of Chamberlain’s house and college, in part, because they were less demanding than what I had written in other articles. Most other articles take 20-40 hours of research before I post them, and they attract a lot of criticism. The write-ups of the photo tours are much quicker and I don’t see a large amount of opposition to them.
Now, in the past, I had gotten very large numbers of viewers for my old Immigrants’ Civil War Blog. One of my posts got over 150,000 visitors. But the Reconstruction Blog gets a much smaller number of readers. A lot of the posts I put up just get a few hundred viewers. However, the Chamberlain article got nearly 4,000 visitors. The next week, I posted an article on Chamberlain’s statue and the collection held by Bowdoin and it enjoyed a similar viewership.
After I saw the interest in these two installments, I thought of comments I had seen on Civil War social media lamenting the disappearance of Civil War monuments. A number of people said that they liked to travel through the South because that was where most monuments were located and that the removal of several dozen meant that Civil War commemoration was almost extinct. I thought that most of the negative commentors did not realize there were monuments in their own neighborhoods that were dedicated to the Civil War. Hell, New York City has the second most Civil War monuments in the United States after Gettysburg.
Over my previous sixty years I had visited many of these “unknown” monuments. I figured that visiting them again. photographing them, researching them and their communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction would be a good diversion from my declining physical condition. As I began to go out and take pictures, I would often include walks in the neighborhood. My cardiologist told me later that I was walking about 15 miles per week in this project-Good for my heart!
Only a few of the photo tours were planned as “photo tourism.” 196 sites were visited while I was going to court, an academic conference, for family vacations, to follow my Buffalo Bills around, or to present to the New York State Legislature. Only about a half-dozen were planned solely to take pictures. So, for example, I posted this week about the William McKinley monument in Buffalo. I did not travel eight hours from Long Island to photograph the monument. I went to Buffalo to watch the Bills play the Kansas City Chiefs. We won!!! Last week I began posting several sites I visited while travelling to my niece Alice’s home for Thanksgiving. I went to my nephew’s wedding a month ago in Georgia and photographed the sites associated with Roswell where civilian workers making Confederate textiles were rounded up and shipped North. These sites are everywhere, North and South. I don’t need to make special trips to see them, I just need to consult my reference works to see what is available along my travel routes.
I have gotten some help. I was in Massachusetts last year when a runner came over to me to tell me that he had just run by a monument on top of a hill near by. I photographed that. Another time we were in Portland, Oregon, where I could not find any monuments and my wife took me to the Spanish American War monument and told me that the cannons at the base were from the Civil War. When we went to Ireland in 2024, Damian Shiels, an archeologist and PhD, told me about a statue of the commander of Corcoran’s Legion near Sligo. Some come from my hard work and others are revealed to me by people who know about this obsession of mine.
I am also glad when people find out about these sites in the articles I have written and follow my directions to get to them. A lot of the time, also, people wander by a local monument and have no idea that it is connected to the Civil War. For example, after I posted an article on the Grand Army Plaza Arch in Brooklyn, I got several notes from Brooklynites who were thankful to learn what the monument they had passed by hundreds of times was without knowing its significance.
My stepson was in Saratoga and he went outside that city and he and his girlfriend came upon Elmer Ellsworth’s grave nearby. He looked the site up to find out about the grave and after reading the article he gave me a call because I had written the article! So helping our younger generation learn our history is confirmed in my own family.
I also like that my articles bring out hundreds of visitors to sites that are otherwise neglected. As local townspeople see tourists visiting the monuments it helps build support for their preservation. When I visit many sites, local people will stop to tell what the monument is about and they are happy that someone from outside their community is interested.
I have developed a list of where the sites are that help people find the monuments. They are broken down by geographic area and by subject. I also created a Google Earth map with the location of more than 200 monuments.
And while the Civil War monuments are important, I have also posted articles on Reconstruction. Here is a site where an existing Jim Crow schoolhouse for Black children is undergoing restoration. There are other sites where women are featured like the Clara Barton school house in New Jersey. Immigrants, who made up a quarter of Union forces are also commemorated. I have also created tours of museums as well.
If I am somehow unable to travel in a couple of years, I have one hundred more sites I have photographed that I will post after my ambling days are done.
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