George Ellsworth Gen. John Hunt Morgan Mention wiretapping and everyone automatically thinks of FBI, NSA, smarmy illegal eavesdropping by unethical private investigators and various other modern scenarios, but it actually began long before. Some people elevated it to an art form during the Civil War. George Ellsworth was one of those men. Ellsworth was Canadian…

Vivandiere’s were first used by the French. They were women who followed the armies, as sutlers or canteen keepers. In the American Civil War, they assumed nursing duties mainly, often tending wounded on the battlegrounds even during the battles. Sometimes, just taking water to wounded was enough to save a life. Several of these women…

It will come as a surprise to many that older blacks, slave or free, were referred to as “Auntie” or “Uncle” by many people whether they knew them or not. I had read this before, but wasn’t really sure about the truth of the matter until I started reading diaries and letters. In Sarah Morgan’s…

Frank Stringfellow Stringfellow headstone, which has a pointed top as many Confederate stones do so Union sympathizers can’t sit on it. The television show Mercy Street has introduced a character Frank Stringfellow. I had high hopes for the show and in a lot of ways I enjoy it because they get a lot of things…

I have a steamer trunk similar to this and it would be like some of the trunks Lorena and Imogene have. Some of the traveling Victorian vanity cases in were quite elegant. With the outbreak of war, supplies of medicines and manufactured goods soon became a problem in the South, which was definitely a agrarian…

Whoa ho. We’re half way through the month. Apparently I don’t know how to write a short blog post. sigh. During the war of 1812, the British burned the United States Capitol building in August, 1814. Congress built a Federal-style brick financed by Washington real estate investors as temporary quarters. The building became known as…