Image from Symposium Poster, available here online.

The Center for the Study of the Civil War Era cordially invites you to attend the 7th Annual Symposium on New Interpretations of the American Civil War, titled Alternative Southern Realities: African Americans and the American Civil War. The meetings will be held at Kennesaw State University, on March 19–21, 2010. The symposium is open to the public. Regular registration is $25.

The symposium will explore categorical themes of enslavement, abolitionism, resistance, freedom, memory, identity, soldiering, and battlefield tactics and strategies.  Distinguished national and international scholars will present innovative and relevant Civil War era research in  anthropology, American Studies, African American Studies, battlefield archaeology, medical history, military history, and social history.

Speakers

The keynote speaker is John Vlach, professor of American Studies and Anthropology at George Washington University. His expertise lies in material culture, folklore, and the African Diaspora. He has published several books, including Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, and The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings. He has served as guest curator and consultant to numerous museums for the past thirty years. He has developed exhibitions for art museums, historical societies and libraries from coast to coast including the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress.

Other notable presenters include Erskine Clarke (Columbia Theological Seminary), Allison Dorsey (Swarthmore College), and Margaret Humphreys (Duke University), Gregory Mixon (University of North Carolina-Charlotte), Thavolia Glymph (Duke University), David S. Reynolds (CUNY/Baruch College), Charmayne Patterson (Kennesaw State University), Samuel Livingston (Morehouse University), Patricia Davis (Georgia State University), Garrett Silliman (Edward Pittman Environmental, Inc., and an SGA member), and James Yancey (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library).

Symposium events

Additional symposium events include a demonstration by the 54th Massachusetts Reenactment Regiment, Co. I (Charleston, SC) at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, a performance by the Georgia Spiritual Ensemble, and optional tours, i.e. African American Heritage Tour or the Atlanta History Center Tour of the Turning Point Civil War Exhibit.

Symposium sponsors and supporters

This symposium is sponsored through a joint partnership with Kennesaw State University’s Center for the Study of the Civil War Era, National Park Service/Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, and the Georgia Humanities Council. Co-conveners and supporters include Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American History and Culture, The Atlanta History Center, Stevan Crew Associates, Old Zion Baptist Church Museum, Georgia African American Historic Preservation Network, Historic Mable House, and the City of Acworth.

Registration

Click here to go to the Symposium web page, where you can download the Civil War Symposium Program Booklet and the Symposium Poster. You can register by clicking here.

Symposium Registration fee: $25 (student discount available)
Lunch: $10 per day
Tours: $25
Symposium Poster: $10, or download for free here.

For additional information, go to the Symposium web page or call 678.797.2551.

A visit to the Bartow History Museum is indeed a trip back in time!

The museum documents the history of northwest Georgia’s Bartow County, spanning more than two hundred years since the Cherokee were the area’s primary residents. Artifacts, photographs, documents and a variety of interactive exhibits tell the story of settlement, Cherokee Removal, Civil War strife and lifestyles of the past.

The Bartow History Museum offers school programs, adult workshops, summer day camps, lectures and book signings, archives and much more. The hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm.

The BHM is at 13 North Wall Street, in downtown Cartersville.

For more information on the BHM, check their website by clicking here.

There is an admission fee if you’re not a BHM member.

The Greater Atlanta Archaeological Society will start off the new year with a stimulating presentation by Garrett Silliman of Edwards-Pitman Environmental, Inc., titled Current Research in the Archaeology of the Atlanta Campaign.

The speaker provided the following abstract:

The Civil War was a defining event in our state’s history, and has an enormous impact on how we define ourselves as Georgians. The war has been and continues to be a memorial force at the heart of our struggles with issues of race, class and identity. Civil War archaeology has the potential to offer a unique perspective on this defining event. This paper draws from the author’s research concerning recent investigations into the archaeology of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. The core of this study provides insight into the role of CRM in the preservation of Civil War-related sites in the Atlanta Metro area.

Mr. Silliman’s research blends several approaches including new technologies. He uses GIS (geographic information systems technology) to generate a three-dimensional view of an area, GPS to pinpoint the locations of artifacts or structures, ground penetrating radar to reveal underground structures, such as earthworks, highly sensitive metal detectors, and soil testing, among other techniques. Mr. Silliman is employed by Edwards-Pitman Environmental, Inc., a Smyrna CRM firm. The company provides ecological, historical and archaeological resource surveys.

Mr. Silliman’s talk will be presented at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History on Clifton Road (just north of Ponce de Leon) on Tuesday, January 12th, beginning at 7:30 PM. Hope you can make it.

You may not know about free software that lets you “fly” across the Earth’s surface, viewing satellite pictures of the surface below. The software for doing this is provided free by Google, and is called Google Earth.

As they say on their website:

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.

Remember, you need a fairly fast broadband connection and video processor on your computer to do this.

One fun thing to do with Google Earth is to overlay old maps on the modern landscape. The example here is a historic map that I found in the Library of Congress online map collection. This map was created in 1864 by Robert Knox Sneden (who lived 1832–1918), and shows the Atlanta area as of 1 September 1864, complete with batteries, earthworks, and the locations of both Union and Confederate forces, as well as city streets. Remember that the city of Atlanta fell to Sherman’s army only a week later, on 8 September. The Virginia Historical Society holds the original map, which measures 45 x 34 centimeters.

In this article, I’m just examining a portion of the entire 1864 Sneden map, the part that spans downtown Atlanta. The top image shows the small cropped area of the old map on the right, with the same area from Google Earth (north is “up” in both cases). I’ve put arrows to the same features on both maps. They are a particular street and the location of the Civil-War-period train station. You can see the city plan is very similar, except for the interstate corridor east of downtown, and some alteration of the north-south rail line on the west side of downtown.

Below is a picture that shows how when you overlay the map image on Google Earth (or “drape” it), the software gives you bright green “handles” to stretch and manipulate the inserted image atop Google Earth’s satellite view.

Why don’t the maps match exactly? Do you know what the global positioning system is? How has map-making changed since 1864?

Here’s a link for the Sneden map.

The staff at New South Associates (NSA) has been very busy this year. In addition to the following Georgia projects, our employees have been working on a variety of additional projects in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, New York, and Puerto Rico. The Berry Creek Site (9MO487) was investigated by R. Jeannine Windham during March and proved to be a small upland Swift Creek site (see artifact feature elsewhere in this issue of The Profile). Although the site has been significantly eroded, small features and potentially structure-related curvilinear trenches were discovered. On going analysis suggests that this site was occupied for a short time period and/or possibly on a seasonal basis.

In March, Diana Valk conducted a Phase I Survey along SR 24 in the areas of a proposed new right-of-way (ROW). The project resulted in the expansion of a previously recorded historic house site and the discovery of a new historic artifact scatter. Both sites were not eligible for the NRHP. In addition to Phase I work, the possible existence of an infant burial in the proposed ROW was also investigated. The landowner informed us that the previous resident of the address indicated his stillborn brother was buried on the land in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. During that time period, it was not uncommon for rural families to bury their deceased relatives on their land. They would mark the burial with a formal stone, a field stone, or nothing at all. In this instance, the landowner said that he had never seen surface indications of the burial and that he could not be sure of its exact location or if it even existed. Surface examination and subsurface probing revealed no clues as to where the burial might be located. A smooth shovel trackhoe was brought in to scrape off the plowzone layer in the six-meter square area that the burial was purported to be. After shovel shaving the stripped area, several features were identified, but none appeared to be a graveshaft. We concluded that if a burial does exist on the land it does not lie in the area surveyed.

For the last 12 months, Heather Mauldin has been working in conjunction with ecologists at PB World on the first year of a 3-year contract for Georgia Department of Transportation borrow pits through Edwards-Pitman Environmental. To date, she has completed 61 individual survey tracts throughout the state, ranging from Catoosa County, to Glynn, from Burke to Clay, to Rabun, and a variety of places in between. While criss-crossing the state to locate proposed pit areas, this project has allowed Heather to explore often unseen corners of our great state, and sample a few great “out of the way” barbecue places on the way! Additionally, Ms. Mauldin has worked on a number of additional transportation and bridge replacement projects in Barrow, Clayton, Bartow, Gwinnett, Forsyth, Walton, and Fulton counties as a member of the Express Projects Team at NSA.

Christopher Espenshade, Mark Swanson, and Shawn Patch conducted archival research and archaeological survey of a portion of the Resaca battleground for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Parks, Recreation, and Historic Sites. The fieldwork included an intensive metal-detector survey of 37.35 acres of former pasture on the floodplain and terraces of Camp Hill Creek and surface survey and the mapping of trench remnants and possible rifle pits on 7.60 acres of wooded hillside, at the north end of the project’s Area of Potential Effects (APE). The metal-detector survey, which covered the entire floodplain and terrace portion of the APE, recovered 126 artifacts that can be securely attributed to Civil War military action and an additional 26 horseshoes, which may be from the battle. A well-preserved trench line and three possible rifle pits were also discovered on the hill slope. The artifact patterns suggest that the APE saw action on May 9, 1864, when the Federal probe reached at least as far east as the APE. The probe may have been repelled, in part, by Confederate artillery fire from a battery near the present I-75 interchange (outside the APE). The Federal troops were members of the XVI Corps, including the 66th Illinois and the 9th Illinois Mounted Infantry. The APE also witnessed action on May 14, 1964, when the Federals took the hills east of Camp Hill Creek, including the trench system in the northern end of the APE. Members of the XV Corps, including the 12th Missouri and either the 46th Ohio or the 97th Indiana, were engaged in the APE. New South recommended that due to the possibility of battlefield graves, the archaeologists monitor the removal of plow zone in all the proposed construction areas, and that further steps be taken if burials are found during monitoring.

Over the last three months, TRC has become very busy with a number of large archaeological projects across the Southeast. Here in Georgia, we’ve conducted archaeological investigations in Cobb, Coweta, Forsyth, Fulton, Gordon, Hall, Henry, Lowndes, and Whitfield counties. The most exciting project we’ve been working on is for a planned Civil War battlefield park in Henry County. Due in large part to the efforts of local historian, Mark Pollard, and like-minded preservationists, the county was persuaded to condemn a 200-acre parcel that was proposed for development as a subdivision. Now the county is in the process of developing the site as a park that will interpret the history of two Civil War engagements that took place on site in 1864.

Bullet recovered from Nash Farm battlefield.

Mark Pollard has been collecting artifacts from the property for many years, keeping very good records of his findings. Taken together with his historical research, the archaeological information Mr. Pollard had assembled gave us a great head start on our investigation of the property when the county asked us to get involved in the project. Essentially, TRC is investigating the archaeological potential of the resources within the park tract, providing recommendations for future research avenues and stewardship, and packaging historical and archaeological information in a format to facilitate the development of interpretive signage and materials at the park.

Partial iron kettle lid with handle.

The archaeological investigations, headed up by Dr. Jim D’Angelo, were made difficult by the waist-high hay across the site, which encumbered our metal detection efforts. Nonetheless, we did find a handful of interesting artifacts (see pictures), and were able to find evidence of the various encampment and battle areas located within the tract. Of course, on a site that has been a working farm ever since the war, and has also been picked over by relic collectors, we were not expecting to find dense, in situ artifact concentrations. But archaeologists are not motivated primarily by an interest in mining a site for artifacts; recording the context of finds, and evaluating the integrity of site deposits is of equal importance. In the case of the Nash Farm project, TRC was able to make an assessment that will help the county as it develops and maintains the park in years to come. As for filling the display cases in the farmhouse museum on site, they will probably want to solicit donations from collectors who’ve been busy on site for far longer than us! For more information about the park and its history, please visit Henry County’s Nash Farm Battlefield web site.