TRI-LAKES AREA — Meeting this week with people involved with the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War brought back a lot of memories for me.
First, I have to face the fact that I remember the centennial of the War Between the States, as it was often called then. It is a term I haven’t heard used this time. I wonder if that reflects a change in point of view, or maybe it is just easier to text “Civil War.”
I remember my grandmother always called it the “Old Civil War,” which I thought was an unusual term for a woman born barely 20 years after the war ended.
I grew up around the battlefields of one of the turning points in the war, and there were markers every few miles explaining troop movements and skirmishes.
On the way to work from my first apartment, I passed a monument in which a cannon is downturned in memory of a Union general who died on that spot. On the same trip, I also passed a marker showing where Andrews’ Raiders were hung after the Great Locomotive Chase.
If you are not familiar with it, there is a Disney movie of that name starring Fess Parker that tells the story.
The city zoo, built on the battlements of a Confederate fort, once featured the pursuit train from that chase, and there is also a 360-degree painting and 3-D display of the Battle of Atlanta.
In the huge picture, there is a Union officer riding a white horse. My grandmother told me it is my great-great-grandfather, who was a captain in a Union regiment from Tennessee. His gravestone in the Georgia mountains is a Union soldier’s marker.
My father’s family was divided by the war. I am from the side of the family that wore blue, and we don’t even spell our name the same way as our distant cousins whose forefathers wore gray.
I know the same story can be told about a lot of Arkansas families. Several months ago, I talked with Patti Hays, a member of the genealogical society in Garland County, who told me of a small action during the war.
The Garland Count y home of Nancy Brown Fletcher was burned by a pro-Union group led by Southern abolitionist Enoch Vance. Fletcher was her mother’s great-grandmother, and Vance was her father’s great-grandfather, Hays told me.
The commemorations of the war will stir up many old issues - bigger than family histories - that we will have to face again. I remember how difficult that could be during the centennial in the early 1960s. I like to think things have changed over the last 50 years, and I hope it will be easier to remember and learn from the lessons of the war this time around.
Tri-Lakes, Pages 58 on 07/22/2010