otmanuscript.jpgThe stone observatory on the Bloody lane is now finished and ready for visitors. The view from this point alone is worth a visit to the famous Bloody lane as you can take in the entire right to the left nearly four miles. There will be, when all planted, nearly four hundred markers, giving one a good idea of the entire battle field with the advantage of the good roads. Every body ought to visit it and make a study of this great battle.
O.T. Reilly's Guide Book
Submitted by StephenRecker on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 5:02pm
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.
About
Hello. I'm Stephen Recker and welcome to my blog. In it I will be discussing the different projects I am working on related to the American Civil War with a focus on photography related to the battle of Antietam. I am particularly interested in how the battlefield has been interpreted throughout the years. I will be discussing how it was done then and how new technologies can be brought to bear to bring life to those old materials as well as new ones. See the 99 Places Every Antietam Battlefield Guide Should Know.
Sharpsburg Items
Antietam Valley Record
Thursday, September 5, 1895