Category: my favorites

Captain William Renwick Smedberg was in command of Company F, First Battalion, 14th United States Infantry in combat at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He was seriously wounded in the Wilderness in 1864 and lost his right foot to amputation, but survived the war and served another 5 years in the US Army afterward. Here…

I’ve been through thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the cards which make up the Compiled Military Service Records (CMSR) for my guys. I’ve never seen a card like this one (transcription below). It is from the CMSR jacket for Benjamin Franklin Taylor. He rose from Private to Colonel of the 2nd Maryland Infantry, USA…

I’ve consulted this fine map on more than one occasion during my recent research into signal officers and surgeons at Antietam. It is annotated with the locations of US Army field hospitals and signal stations on and near the battlefield, and is a compilation of two earlier maps which supported the after-action reports of Army…

Here are two excellent CDVs of Federal Surgeon Bernard Albert Vanderkieft from Mike Fitzpatrick’s collection. From 16 September 1862 to 13 May 1863 Dr Vanderklieft was in charge of the largest Antietam field hospital, known as the Antietam or Smoketown Hospital, and he and the other surgeons there treated hundreds of patients during and after…

New-to-me is this hand-made newspaper published in April 1865 by Confederate prisoners at Fort Delaware. Apparently it was the only edition and perhaps 3 or 4 copies survive. This one is online from New York Heritage, a project of the New York Historical Society. I came upon this while looking into Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin “Frank”…

An announcement in the Sacramento Daily Union of 3 January 1893. And here’s a reproduction wanted poster seen recently in the American Hotel in Cerro Gordo, California. This 2017 photo of the poster is from Dave’n’Kathy on their Vagabond Blog. Sadly, a fire destroyed the hotel, Billy Crapo’s cabin next door, and presumably that poster…