My Antietam Blog

I have put my "99 Places Every Antietam Battlefield Guide Should Know" online. It is a work in progress and is currently a bit of a mess, but I thought it would be fun to get suggestions before I spent too much time adding some new places I have learned about. For the record, this is not a list of obvious places a guide should know. These are those special places that guides have discovered that are fun to share with those who really care about minutia. Right now there are still some easy places on the list, but my hope is that will change soon. Any suggestions?

At the end of William Frassanito's seminal work "Early Photography at Gettysburg," he mentions photographs by an obscure photographer:

One of the most obscure series of Gettysburg stereos produced during the period of memorialization was taken ca. 1890 by a J.G. McPherson of McKeesport, Pa. (to date I have examined only one view from McPherson's series).

I have actually found three of McPherson's Gettysburg views and three of his Antietam views. I have also found one of his Johnstown Flood views.

I really wanted to have some of his images in my upcoming book about Antietam images, but I wanted to get up to McKeesport to find out a little about him first, and I have proceeded to do just that - I went up there and found little.

Which reminds me of a story: When Mary Todd Lincoln was asked about how she met Abe, she said Abe came up to her at a party and he said that he wanted to dance with her in the worst way, and then he proceeded to do exactly that.

Anyway, I took a two-day trip up to McKeesport to see if they had any of his images. No luck. What they did have, though, was his first name. I got that within ten minutes of being there.

It is at a moment like that that I find myself wondering how far I need to go with my research to make the time worthwhile. Obviously I would hope to go further than his first name, but how far? I spent three more hours and found neither an obit nor a grave site. He was not mentioned in the thousand pages of G.A.R. records I perused. I did have two addresses for him and went to those locations and took photographs. But, how much do I know about those locations? One of them looks like it was there in 1889 when he lived there, but if I take the time to search the deeds, how relevant is that to people who are curious about Antietam photographs?

Now, the answer, of course, is that one often finds the best stuff while looking for the trivial. Like hunting for gold, that huge vein might be an inch away when you give up the hunt. So, being new to this whole 'historian' thing, I will follow whatever rabbit holes his name leads me down, time permitting, and try to parse out what is of value to readers of my books and find somewhere else to record what may be meaningful to someone down the road.

In an earlier post I related a story about a collector friend of mine who asked me to ID a relic of his. In our discussions I mentioned a piece that I had bought from a fellow who, some believe, had slightly misrepresented what the piece was. Ironically, he actually made it less desirable with his not-so-fact-based description. But the fact was that I was aware of something about the piece that made it very valuable, although the seller was unaware of this fact. My friend and I decided that the best case scenario is when you actually know more than the seller about a piece and get yourself a great deal.

I think I have changed my mind. I think the best thing is when the dealer does not know something about an item, you buy it a a great price, and find out when it arrives that you did not know something cool about it and it is so much better than you had imagined. This just happened to me.

I recently won at auction a group of Antietam stereoviews. Four of them are Phreaner views of the battlefield and two are later printings of the Gardner death studies. I really wanted the Phreaners and figured I could sell the Gardners to pay for the lot. I got them at a low enough price that I could still resell a few images at fair prices and make my money back. But when the images came I had a very happy surprise. The back of the images contain the writing of none-other-than Solomon McFarland, the Antietam veteran/photographer whose photographs are the heart of my upcoming book. He even signed and dated one. I could not believe it when I saw it. The only down side is that now I can't split this set.

The death studies mean a lot more to me now than before. You see, when W.H. Tipton was up in Gettysburg in the 1880s-90s, wanting to publish a set of the Antietam Gardner studies on his own mounts, he was having trouble getting his hands on a set. So, Solomon McFarland loaned him his for Tipton to copy. I have one of these Tipton Antetam stereoview 'copies'. It will be interesting to compare these with that one to see if I can verify having just bought one of Tipton's copy photos.

Speaking of projects, a few years ago I met O.T. Reilly's family and they asked me to re-publish his famous guide book. I had the privilege of not only seeing but scanning his original hand-written manuscript and his battlefield guide log books.

When I get back into that project in earnest I will blog about it, but for now let me just say that I am happy to be able to do it at all. You see, our family moved to Smithsburg from Hagerstown about a year ago. In the move I 'lost track' of the project files. Everything. The scans and the InDesign files. You see, I got my first computer in 1986 and have kept just about every computer, hard drive, and file since then. I have stacks of boxes. When I was in Hagerstown I could find things, but having consolidated everything for the move, well, that made it harder to find things. But yesterday I made a point of going through hundreds of discs and a stack of hard drives. Finally, there they were!

I had forgotten how much work I had already done. I have six different releases of his book and I had gone through them all and reconciled the texts and scanned the photographs. And when O.T. first put out the book there were a lot more pages of photographs. He took a bunch out to make way for his stories. In my new version, all of the pictures and all of the text will be united as never before. I am just thankful that I don't have to do all of that work again.

Every year I give a tour to a bunch of nice folks that come out on the day that the illumination candles come out. They are big relic guys and it is always fun to compare notes on our latest finds. One guy recently acquired what was represented as a shingle from the Dunkard Church. When he was first researching the piece he found an old post of mine in which I quoted O.T. Reilly from an old 1892 newspaper item:

The old roof of the Dunkard church has been replaced with a new one. O.T. Reilly bought two spring-wagon loads of the wood and will sell some of it as relics of that historic church.

During our tour he mentioned the shingle and I, forgetting about the earlier post, chimed in about the article I had that dates when O.T. probably got the shingle he owned. The problem was that I got the year wrong. He corrected me, but I did not mind because, I jested, I was being corrected by such an "authoritative source"...myself!

Anyway, he asked if he could send me a photo of the tag to see if I thought it was O.T.'s writing on his artifact. I pieced together his image with some samples from Reilly's own hand and I have attached the result. I have my opinion, but you can decide for yourself.

Well, the upgrade is going well. It will still be a few weeks before I get the URL switched over, so between now and then I will just be working away. The technical difficulty I am hitting now is getting the panoramas into a format that will play well on current browsers and within Drupal. I am probably going to be using Flash for Drupal and HTML5 for mobile apps. It is amazing how far HTML has come. It was an old, sorry language there for a while, but now it seems to be where the action is.