Salt Creek Civil War Round Table

08/09/2026

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in 1885, an estimated 1.5 million people lined the streets of New York City to witness Ulysses S. Grant's funeral procession, one of the largest public mourning events in American history. Military units, civic organizations and dignitaries, about 60,000 in total, marched alongside the former general and President of the United States' casket.

To symbolize his fight for unity, Grant wanted half his pallbearers to be U.S. generals and half to be former Confederate generals. To fulfill his request, President Grover Cleveland chose Generals William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan as well as Joseph E. Johnston and Simon B. Buckner for the role. The respect shown Grant by both Northerners and Southerners was echoed in the fiercely partisan Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch which wrote, “[Grant] was so pervaded by greatness that he seemed not to be conscious that he was great.”


Image: "General Grant's Funeral: The Procession Passing Up Fifth Avenue." Image from Harper's Weekly, circa August 1885. Shows Grant's casket being drawn by a team of horses as soldiers and other dignitaries walk alongside and thousands of civilians line the street (Library of Congress).

08/03/2026

https://www.wvtm13.com/article/tsa-stolen-civil-war-cannonballs-suitcase-gulf-shores-airport-alabama/73323716

A TSA agent discovered a set of stolen Civil War-era cannonballs in a passenger’s suitcase during a routine security screening at an Alabama airport earlier this month, law enforcement officials said.

08/02/2026

Today we remember the passing of Albert Woolson, the last Union soldier who passed away on August 2, 1956. https://suvcw.org/albert-woolson

07/29/2026

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It is with regret, we need to share that over this past weekend, someone saw fit to remove & take one of our interpretive displays.

The loss of this jacket saddens us for several reasons. It not only deprives visitors of an educational opportunity, it also creates the need for unnecessary expenditures to replace it.

More importantly, the jacket was made & donated by one of our volunteers who has since passed away. The display represented an opportunity to keep this individual's memory & love of history alive for a very long time.

We would ask the responsible party to return the jacket, no questions asked to the Chemung County Historical Society.

07/23/2026

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Exactly on this day in 1885, America lost its ultimate Civil War hero: General of the Armies Ulysses S. Grant.

The world knew him as the iron-willed commander who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Abraham Lincoln to save the nation. He was the stoic strategist who accepted the surrender at Appomattox, ending the bloodiest conflict in American history.

But the final chapter of his life was his most harrowing, emotionally devastating battle.

In 1884, Grant was swindled in a massive Wall Street financial scam. In a matter of days, the former president was completely wiped out. He was bankrupted, left deeply in debt, and forced to watch his family suffer the public humiliation of poverty.

To make matters worse, just days after losing his fortune, Grant was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.

He was facing a literal death sentence, but he refused to give up. Driven by a fierce, protective terror that his wife, Julia, would be left penniless and homeless after he was gone, Grant signed a contract with his close friend, Mark Twain, to publish his personal memoirs.

What followed was one of the most agonizing, heroic races against time in human history.

For months, as the cancer aggressively tore through his throat, Grant sat in a wicker chair wrapped in blankets at a small cottage in New York. The pain was so intense he could barely swallow water. When the disease stole his voice, he kept writing. When his hands shook too violently to hold a pen, he dictated notes on small scraps of paper.

He didn't see his manuscript as a book; he saw it as a lifeline for his family. He was literally burning his remaining life force onto the pages to keep his wedding vow.

On July 18, 1885, Grant finally laid down his pen. He had finished the last sentence of his memoirs.

Exactly five days later, on the morning of July 23, his body finally gave out. He had held onto life by sheer, unadulterated willpower until the mission was complete. His book went on to become a massive bestseller, earning his widow the equivalent of millions of dollars and permanently protecting her future.

07/17/2026

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Two sailors stayed at their post for 140 years

When engineers finally lifted the 150-ton turret of the USS Monitor off the seabed on 5 August 2002, ending a six-week operation by NOAA and Navy divers 240 feet down off Cape Hatteras, they found more than the world's first rotating gun turret. Amid the two great Dahlgren guns and a century and a half of debris lay two nearly complete human skeletons, one atop the other, sailors who had been inside the turret when the revolutionary ironclad foundered under tow in a New Year's Eve storm in 1862, taking 16 of her 62 men. Forensic teams in Hawaii spent a decade trying to name them, LSU experts rebuilt their faces in clay, and a spoon engraved JN found near the younger man pointed to 21-year-old seaman Jacob Nicklis, while the older strongly resembled the ship's Welsh fireman Robert Williams. Nothing could be proven, and the Navy buried them as unknowns.

Their funeral on 8 March 2013 may have been the last of the American Civil War. Dressed caskets carried on horse-drawn caissons, one team of six black horses and one of six white, bore the two shipmates through Arlington National Cemetery before a crowd of thousands, including 21 descendants of the Monitor's lost crew, to graves near the victims of the battleship Maine. The Navy Secretary called them possibly the last Civil War sailors who will ever be buried at Arlington, and a marker at the site carries the names of all 16 who died. The turret that held them faithfully for 140 years now stands at the Mariners' Museum in Virginia, and the wreck itself, America's first National Marine Sanctuary, keeps the other 14 forever.

07/14/2026

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in 1863 one of the largest civil uprisings in U.S. history took place in New York City. The New York Draft Riots occurred in response to the first federal draft, which required all male citizens aged 20–35 and unmarried men aged 35–45 to serve in the Union Army unless they paid a $300 commutation fee or hired a substitute. Working class men, especially white Irish laborers who could not afford to pay the fee or hire a substitute, were angered by what they considered to be the promotion of a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The main target of their wrath was African Americans, who were exempt from the draft due to their race. For four days, rioters attacked Black homes and businesses. The official death toll was given as about 120, with over $1 million in property damage. The riot was eventually stopped by local police and federal troops sent from the recent battlefield of Gettysburg.

Image: The burning and looting of the Colored Orphan Asylum during the NY Draft Riots (Sarin Images/Granger)

07/04/2026

06/30/2026

A Night of Pandemonium in Downtown Frederick

The Union’s Army of the Potomac marched through Downtown Frederick on its way north to Gettysburg - and on the night of June 30, 1863, the eve of the battle, things got out of hand.

Journalist Whitelaw Reid was there that night and captured the scene in a letter written right here in Downtown Frederick:

"Frederick is Pandemonium. Somebody has blundered frightfully; the town is full of stragglers, and the liquor-shops are in full blast. Just under my window scores of drunken soldiers are making night hideous... The worst elements of a great army are here in their worst condition; its cowards, its thieves, its sneaks, its bullying vagabonds, all inflamed with whiskey, and drunk as well with their freedom from accustomed restraint."

Frederick County was famous for its rye whiskey. The soldiers had found it. The following day, July 1, 1863, the sound of guns to the north could be heard as the Battle of Gettysburg began. The stragglers marched north, feeling a little worse-for-wear after their rowdy evening in Frederick

Photo: Union soldiers on North Market Street, 1862