Meet 'The Patriot Printer Boy,' whose image turned up on eBay

12th Connecticut Private Howard Hale died in Louisiana in 1863. (Courtesy George Bittner)

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During a research trip to the National Archives in Washington in 2015,  I found in a pension file a terrific cache of letters written by Howard Hale, an 18-year-old private who served in the Deep South with the 12th Connecticut. Eloquent and lengthy, the letters were a joy to read. But there was a major gap in Howard's story: a photograph of him. No image of the teenager turned up at the Connecticut Historical Society, Connecticut State Library archives or any of the other usual places I look.

Then came an e-mail Monday morning. Ebay seller George Bittner told me he discovered a CDV of Hale, with distinctive bushy eyebrows, among others in an album he had purchased at an auction. On the back of the photograph, perhaps a copy of an earlier image of Howard, Hale is identified as "The Patriot Printer Boy." Looking the part of a freshly minted soldier, the eldest son of David B. Hale of Collinsville, Conn., wears a fresh kepi and a serious expression. (Perhaps the image will somehow make it back home to Collinsville.)

Not surprisingly, Hale's father worried about his son and prized news from him throughout his army journey.  The pension file also included a letter from David Hale himself -- a letter that sadly proved prophetic.

---

Adapted from my book, Hidden History of Connecticut Union Soldiers. E-mail me here for information on how to purchase an autographed copy.

While camped near steamy New Orleans with his 12th Connecticut comrades, teenager Howard F. Hale delighted in writing long letters to his father, who lived 1,500 miles away in Collinsville and missed his eldest son desperately.

An engaging writer and highly literate, Howard wrote sarcastically about “our beloved [Pvt. Marcus] Edgerton,” the “man with one lung, who has done no duty since leaving Hartford” and was due to be discharged.  In another letter, he wrote how pleased he would be if older sister Anna could make a frame for his photograph out of the sea shells he picked out of the sand “one awful hot day” at Ship Island, the desolate barrier island off the coast of Mississippi where the 12th Connecticut was stationed in early spring of 1862.

Striking a serious tone, he also worried whether the army would “make something of me” during his three-year enlistment.  “I very often wonder what I was ever destined for,” the teenager wrote to his father, David, on August, 19, 1862, “and whether I am ever going to be good for anything or not. I get so overly discouraged a … great many times. You must write me a good cheering fatherly letter, and advise me in my troubles of mind, not of the body.”

Back of CDV of Howard Hale,  killed in Louisiana in April 1863.
The image may be a copy of another photograph.
(Courtesy George Bittner)

And Howard Hale also wrote about pests.

For soldiers from Connecticut, the Deep South was a strange, and often exotic, place.  After operations in Mississippi along the Mississippi River, the 12th Connecticut on May 1, 1862, became the first Union regiment to occupy New Orleans, camping its first night in the city in Lafayette Square. The regiment was later based at Camp Parapet, a former Rebel fortification about 10 miles upriver from the city. Especially during the wretched summer months, insects and other pests made life more miserable there than the Rebels, who never counter-attacked the fort after the Yankees assumed command and expanded it.

Howard and his friend, John Phelps, a sergeant from Simsbury who liked to swear, built a bed a foot and a half high over which they spread mosquito netting. It allowed the soldiers, Hale wrote, to “safely bid defiance to the bloody-thirsty wretches, whom we can hear buzzing outside, as if in rage.”

Flies were “thick enough in all conscience,” the private noted, and red ants, as “thick as were some of Pharaoh’s pests,” would get into anything edible -- even soap, which they would eat all the inside out into fine crumbs. “Then if you dare dispute ownership with them,” Hale wrote, “they invade your person and bite like the d-----d!” Lizards would often drop from trees onto soldiers, startling them before the little reptiles dropped to the ground. “Hadn’t I better try to bottle one up in spirit to take home?” the young soldier wondered. “I believe I could do it.” Camp Parapet even exhibited three alligators -- one that was “six or eight feet long.”

An envelope Howard Hale used to send money to his father in Collinsville, Conn.

Howard Hale's name appears on a monument in Collinsville, Conn., among the names 
of other soldiers from the area who died during the war.

A bigger worry, of course, was disease. In June 1862, Hale’s friend Phelps ate “anything and everything” although he had a bad case of diarrhea, which along with malaria often crippled the regiment.   “He’ll have to reform his ways,” Hale wrote in a letter home about Phelps, “or he’ll take his ‘six feet by two’ in the ‘Louisiana Lowlands’.”  Joseph Toy, the 12th Connecticut’s captain, had been sick since the regiment’s stay on Ship Island, wracked with the fever. He later died and his body was shipped back home to Simsbury strapped to a chair placed in a cask of liquor to preserve his remains. In mid-September 1862, Hale was given a “delicious does of castor oil” for his own bad case of diarrhea and later was prescribed quinine and even morphine, which he figured would make him sleepy.

In 1862, the 12th Connecticut bounced from bayous to sugar cane fields, destroying railroad bridges, hunting bushwhackers and destroying  Rebel camps. Writing that September that he was hopeful that he could be home at the expiration of his three-year enlistment in November 1864, Hale noted: “I won’t ‘crow before I am out of the woods,’ though.”  On October 27, 1862, the regiment saw its first fight, dislodging Rebels led by Gen. Dick Taylor, the son of former President Zachary Taylor, at Georgia Landing, near the La Fourche Bayou, about 60 miles upriver from New Orleans. In January 1863, the regiment helped destroy the Rebel gunboat “Cotton” on the Teche River.

The conclusion of one of Howard Hale's Civil War letters to his father.

On  Feb. 12, 1863, David Hale encouraged his son to preserve his 1862 diary and   other keepsakes: 
"Soon you may be sick or killed." (National Archives)

Worried about his son, David Hale urged him to preserve his 1862 diary -- “I should prize it highly,” he wrote on February 12, 1863 -- and all the letters he received from home. “You may sometime be called suddenly to move and lose or leave some of your things, which you would like to preserve,” Howard’s  fifty-one-year-old father noted. “If you and your comrades have things which you would like to send to your friends, I wish you would now or very soon  get together such things as you would like to send.

“… Talk the matter up now, do it at once,” David Hale emphasized. “Soon you may be sick or killed, and all will be lost. Act now.”

On April 9, 1863, a large force of Yankees that included the 12th Connecticut crossed Berwick Bay to attack the Rebels behind entrenchments at Centerville, in western Louisiana.  Four days later, the Federals led by Gen. Nathaniel Banks attempted to cut off  Taylor’s army near Brashear, Louisiana, at Fort Bisland, an unfinished, earthwork fortification with a ditch that “scarcely offered an obstacle to the advance of an army.” Sometime during the fighting, Howard Hale was shot in the abdomen. He died nearby two days later. His final resting place is unknown.

The first page of Howard Hale's letter home from Camp Parapet, near New Orleans, on June 15, 1862. 
"I joyfully take the present time to write and let you know how I  am progressing," he wrote. 
(National Archives)

---

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES:

Howard Hale pension file, National Archives and Records Service, Washington
--Hale letters home, June 15, 1862, August 19, 1862, September 11, 1862.
--David Hale letter to Howard Hale, February 12, 1863.

-- New York Times, April 22, 1863.

Pests, disease, death in Deep South for 12th Connecticut private

12th Connecticut Private Howard Hale sent money home from New Orleans in this envelope 
discovered in the soldier's pension file in the National Archives in Washington.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

Adapted from my latest book, Hidden History of Connecticut Union Soldiers. E-mail me here for information on how to purchase an autographed copy.

During a research trip to the National Archives in Washington last year, I requested the pension file for Howard Hale, a 19-year-old private who served in the Deep South with the 12th Connecticut. After I signed out the set of documents, I quickly returned to my desk and eagerly opened the thick, brown folder. The story of the young soldier's life poured onto the research desk. The file included legal documents and an Adams Express Co. envelope that once contained $35 -- money meant for his father, David, back home in Connecticut. And, most importantly, there were letters Howard wrote during the war to his family in Collinsville, Conn., a manufacturing village along the Farmington River. Hale's father prized news from his son during the war, so the fact the precious letters somehow survived more than 150 years isn't surprising. Included among them was one from David Hale himself -- a letter that sadly proved prophetic.

---

Howard Hale's name appears on a plaque on a Civil War
 monument  in Collinsville, Conn., that honors area soldiers
 whose bodies are believed buried in unknown graves
in the South.  Close-up of plaque below. For more on my blog
 on the monument,  click here and here.

While camped near steamy New Orleans with his 12th Connecticut comrades, teenager Howard Hale delighted in writing long letters to his father, who lived 1,500 miles away in Collinsville and missed his oldest son desperately.

An engaging writer and highly literate, Howard wrote sarcastically about “our beloved [Pvt. Marcus] Edgerton,” the “man with one lung, who has done no duty since leaving Hartford” and was due to be discharged.  In another letter, he wrote how pleased he would be if older sister Anna could make a frame for his photograph out of the sea shells he picked out of the sand “one awful hot day” at Ship Island, the desolate barrier island off the coast of Mississippi where the 12th Connecticut was stationed in early spring of 1862.

Striking a serious tone, he also worried whether the army would “make something of me” during his three-year enlistment.  “I very often wonder what I was ever destined for,” the teenager wrote to his father, David, on August, 19, 1862, “and whether I am ever going to be good for anything or not. I get so overly discouraged a … great many times. You must write me a good cheering fatherly letter, and advise me in my troubles of mind, not of the body.”

And Howard Hale also wrote about pests.

For soldiers from Connecticut, the Deep South was a strange, and often exotic, place.  After operations in Mississippi along the Mississippi River, the 12th Connecticut on May 1, 1862, became the first Union regiment to occupy New Orleans, camping its first night in the city in Lafayette Square. The regiment was later based at Camp Parapet, a former Rebel fortification about 10 miles upriver from the city. Especially during the wretched summer months, insects and other pests made life more miserable there than the Rebels, who never counter-attacked the fort after the Yankees assumed command and expanded it.

Howard and his friend, John Phelps, a sergeant from Simsbury who liked to swear, built a bed a foot and a half high over which they spread mosquito netting. It allowed the soldiers, Hale wrote, to “safely bid defiance to the bloody-thirsty wretches, whom we can hear buzzing outside, as if in rage.”

Flies were “thick enough in all conscience,” the private noted, and red ants, as “thick as were some of Pharaoh’s pests,” would get into anything eatable -- even soap, which they would eat all the inside out into fine crumbs. “Then if you dare dispute ownership with them,” Hale wrote, “they invade your person and bite like the d-----d!” Lizards would often drop from trees onto soldiers, startling them before the little reptiles dropped to the ground. “Hadn’t I better try to bottle one up in spirit to take home?” the young soldier wondered. “I believe I could do it.” Camp Parapet even exhibited three alligators -- one that was “six or eight feet long.”

The conclusion of one of Howard Hale's Civil War letters to his father.

A bigger worry, of course, was disease. In June 1862, Hale’s friend Phelps ate “anything and everything” although he had a bad case of diarrhea, which along with malaria often crippled the regiment.   “He’ll have to reform his ways,” Hale wrote in a letter home about Phelps, “or he’ll take his ‘six feet by two’ in the ‘Louisiana Lowlands’.”  Joseph Toy, the 12th Connecticut’s captain, had been sick since the regiment’s stay on Ship Island, wracked with the fever. He later died and his body was shipped back home to Sims-bury strapped to a chair placed in a cask of liquor to preserve his remains. In mid-September 1862, Hale was given a “delicious does of castor oil” for his own bad case of diarrhea and later was prescribed quinine and even morphine, which he figured would make him sleepy.

In 1862, the 12th Connecticut bounced from bayous to sugar cane fields, destroying railroad bridges, hunting bushwhackers and destroying  Rebel camps. Writing that September that he was hopeful that he could be home at the expiration of his three-year enlistment in November 1864, Hale noted: “I won’t ‘crow before I am out of the woods,’ though.”  On October 27, 1862, the regiment saw its first fight, dislodging Rebels led by Gen. Dick Taylor, the son of former President Zachary Taylor, at Georgia Landing, near the La Fourche Bayou, about 60 miles upriver from New Orleans. In January 1863, the regiment helped destroy the Rebel gunboat “Cotton” on the Teche River.

On  Feb. 12, 1863, David Hale encouraged his son to preserve his 1862 diary and
  other keepsakes: "Soon you may be sick or killed."
(National Archives)

Worried about his son, David Hale urged him to preserve his 1862 diary -- “I should prize it highly,” he wrote on February 12, 1863 -- and all the letters he received from home. “You may sometime be called suddenly to move and lose or leave some of your things, which you would like to preserve,” Howard’s  fifty-one-year-old father noted. “If you and your comrades have things which you would like to send to your friends, I wish you would now or very soon  get together such things as you would like to send.

“… Talk the matter up now, do it at once,” David Hale emphasized. “Soon you may be sick or killed, and all will be lost. Act now.”

On April 9, 1863, a large force of Yankees that included the 12th Connecticut crossed Berwick Bay to attack the Rebels behind entrenchments at Centerville, in western Louisiana.  Four days later, the Federals led by Gen. Nathaniel Banks attempted to cut off  Taylor’s army near Brashear, Louisiana, at Fort Bisland, an unfinished, earthwork fortification with a ditch that “scarcely offered an obstacle to the advance of an army.” Sometime during the fighting, Howard Hale was shot in the abdomen. He died nearby two days later. His final resting place is unknown.

SOURCES:

Howard Hale pension file, National Archives and Records Service, Washington
--Hale letters home, June 15, 1862, August 19, 1862, September 11, 1862.
--David Hale letter to Howard Hale, February 12, 1863.

New York Times, April 22, 1863.

The first page of Howard Hale's letter home from Camp Parapet, near New Orleans, 
on June 15, 1862. "I joyfully take the present time to write and let you know how I
 am progressing," he wrote.
(National Archives)

Then & Now: Connecticut Civil War memorial dedication shots

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The dedication of a Civil War monument was a very big deal in the Canton, Conn., village of Collinsville on Memorial Day 1903. Thousands of people, many dressed in their Sunday best, gathered for speeches at the large, white-washed Congregational Church impressively decorated with massive, patriotic bunting. Afterward, the crowd that included many Civil War veterans walked a short distance up a steep hill for the dedication of a monument to honor 39 area Union soldiers whose bodies were believed to be buried in unknown graves in the South.

An unknown photographer captured the scene that day, taking images at the church and cemetery as well as a photo of the flag-draped memorial before it was unveiled. On a frigid Monday afternoon, I aimed to replicate the long-ago photographer's work, shooting images with an iPhone 6 instead of a cumbersome glass-plate camera. The 1903 shooter probably shot the cemetery crowd image (bottom) from the second floor of the house across the street or from another elevated position, so I was unable to duplicate that effort.

Be sure to check out my other Then & Now Civil War images, also created using the excellent, free Juxtapose tool.

(Note: The glass-plate images are courtesy of Clifford T. Alderman. Images were scanned by Peg Giles.)

Then & Now: Memorial Day 1903 in Collinsville, Connecticut

THEN: A crowd gathers at Collinsville's Congregational Church shortly before a nearby
 Civil War memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day, May 30, 1903.
 (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: The church has changed little since 1903.

Four decades after more than 250 area men marched off to fight the Civil War, 4,000 people gathered in the village of Collinsville, Conn., to honor 39 of those soldiers whose bodies were believed to be buried in unknown graves in the South. On a Memorial Day afternoon, May 30, 1903, the Collinsville Brass Band performed on the small town green across from the Congregational Church, a clergyman offered a prayer, politicians delivered speeches and a choir sang "Aware, Put On Thy Strength" and "America" before a parade that included many veterans formed and the crowd walked up a steep hill to the town cemetery.

A rare ribbon from the Civil War monument 
dedication on May 30, 1903 in Collinsville, Conn.
(Courtesy Clifford T. Alderman)

In a corner of the terraced Village Cemetery overlooking the factory town where bayonets, axes and picks were made for the Union army during the war, a huge American flag draped a granite Civil War memorial. A large chorus sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" after the grandsons of two of the men listed on the monument removed the flag to reveal a large bronze plaque that included the names as well as the date and site of death of the Connecticut soldiers.

Before the war, many of those men, ranging in age from their late teens to early 40s, were employed as laborers and factory workers in the Collinsville area. George A. Tatro worked as a polisher, perhaps in the town's Collins Co. factory that supplied John Brown with pikes for his ill-fated slave rebellion in 1859 at Harpers Ferry, Va. A 27-year-old private in Company E of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, he was killed at Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864. Orrin Case, a 41-year-old 2nd lieutenant in the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry, was a lawyer from Collinsville. He was killed on Aug. 6, 1864 in Petersburg, Va.

Asa L Cook, a stone mason from Canton, was a corporal in Company E of the 16th Connecticut. When the Rebels captured Plymouth, N.C., on April 20, 1864, he was shot in the head and taken prisoner with nearly his entire regiment. Married to a woman named Julia and  father to a 9-year-old son named Walter, he died 19 days later. Another 16th Connecticut soldier, 19-year-old private Miles Shepard, died of pneumonia in a government hospital in  Knoxville, Md., on Nov. 12, 1862. His mother, who lived in nearby Simsbury, relied on Miles' support ever since her husband had died in 1854.

Asa Cook and Julia Gleason were married on Jan. 5, 1851. A corporal in the 16th Connecticut,
Asa died of a head wound at Plymouth, N.C., on May 9, 1864. (fold3.com)

Fittingly, three of the soldiers listed on the monument are grouped together. Apparently close friends, Martin Wadhams, Isaac Tuller and Henry Sexton, privates in their 20s in the 8th Connecticut, wrote and signed a thank-you note on patriotic stationery to a woman from Canton Center on Dec. 16, 1861. A member of a soldiers' aid society, Sophronia Barber had sent the three soldiers a care package that included mittens and socks.

"May the richest of Heavens blessing rest upon the ladies who so kindly remember us," read the letter from a camp in Annapolis, Md., "and we hope that this war soon be over and none of the Stars that now are emblazoned on the Flag of our Country be effaced and we be returned to our homes again and see our friends again in a free & united country, under the same old flag the heroes of the revolution fought under."

Within 10 months, each of the soldiers was dead.

Henry Sexton, Isaac Tuller and Martin Wadhams were comrades in the 8th Connecticut.

Delirious and frothing at the mouth, Sexton, a teacher, died of jaundice aboard a schooner in Annapolis Harbor on Jan. 7, 1862. "It took five of us to hold him and keep him from tearing his face with his hands," wrote his friend, Private Oliver Case of the 8th Connecticut. On May 12, 1862, a captain in the 8th Connecticut relayed the circumstances of the death of Tuller, who succumbed to typhoid fever on April 9, 1862 in New Bern, N.C., to his sister back in Connecticut.  "...You have lost a noble brother," Henry Hoyt wrote of Isaac, who worked as a clerk before he enlisted. "I have lost a man whose loss we all deeply feel. He was noble hearted and generous to a fault." A teamster in the 8th Connecticut, Wadhams was killed at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862.

Lawrence Gleason, a private in  the
1st Connecticut is buried in
Arlington National Cemetery.

Another soldier listed on the bronze plaque, 1st Connecticut Cavalry Private Lawrence Gleason, survived until the hostilities ended only to die of pneumonia in a Washington hospital on June 16, 1865. Before the war, Gleason was employed as a mule spinner in a textile mill in Providence, R.I., and much of his earnings helped support his widowed mother, Bridget, who immigrated to the United States from England with her son after her husband had died in Ireland in 1849. Perhaps enticed by a bounty offered in Connecticut, Gleason enlisted on Aug. 13, 1864.

Unlike his 38 other comrades on the Civil War memorial, Gleason does have a known grave. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Grave No. 12502, under a weathered, pearl-white tombstone.

SOURCES: 

fold3.com, pension records for Lawrence Gleason, Asa Cook and Miles Shephard.

Hartford Courant, June 1, 1903, Page 9

1860 U.S. census

THEN: A chorus sang The Star-Spangled Banner after the flag that draped the memorial 
was removed at the 1903 Memorial Day ceremony.
  (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: The Civil War memorial in Collinsville, Conn., attracts little notice today. A bronze plaque
 lists the names of  39 Civil War soldiers from the area who died during the war.

THEN: At the end of the dedication ceremony, Taps was played. 
 (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: Collinsville Cemetery is also known as Huckleberry Hill Cemetery or Village Cemetery.

Collinsville's Village Cemetery: A girl named Hattie

The tiny grave of Hattie L. in Village Cemetery. She was 8 months old when she died.

While I climbed the steep, terraced slope of Village Cemetery in Collinsville, Conn., last weekend, the gravestone for a young girl named Hattie caught my eye. Only 8 months old, she died on Nov. 11, 1861, seven months after the Civil War started. But I didn't photograph Hattie's grave because of any connection to the war. Rather, I was struck by the carving of a small lamb, so whitened by the elements that it appeared to be snow, atop her tiny, well-worn gravestone. And because, well, little Hattie's marker looked kind of lonely among all the much larger gravestones, many of them broken, tilted or otherwise neglected in a cemetery that could use some tender loving care.

I doubt whether many people have visited Hattie's final resting place lately. The grass in the cemetery looked as if it had not been cut for weeks. And besides, who would venture to the out-of-the-way spot, halfway up the hill of an old cemetery? The graves of Hattie's parents appear to be just to the right of her marker, but I don't know that for sure.

So who was Hattie L.? And why did she die so young?

Someday I'd  like to find out.

Best of my 2011 Civil War photos



Factory complex in Collinsville, Conn. Collinsville Co. supplied axes and more to the Union army.
CLICK TO ENLARGE ALL PHOTOS.

Another view of the old Collinsville Company.

Spring sunrise at Antietam National Battlefield.

Springhouse at Roulette Farm at Antietam is bathed in warm morning light in this shot
taken in October. This photo is not quite tack sharp, but I just have a Blackberry to shoot with!

This broken gravestone of "Darling Allie," in Center Cemetery in Rocky Hill, Conn., is
next to the grave of Jarvis Blinn, who was killed at Antietam.

Using special effects on picnik.com, the photo of West Avon (Conn.) Congregational Church is
turned into a "painting." Civil War soldiers are buried in the cemetery next to the
church, including many from the congregation.

The 16th Connecticut monument at Antietam.

Ornate gravestone of John McCall of the 8th Connecticut in Yantic Cemetery in
Norwich, Conn. McCall, wounded at Antietam, was killed at Drewry's Bluff.

A ghostly salute, Blackberry in my hand,  at the graves of Sergeant Charles Lewis and his
fiancee, Sarah Hyde, at Carey Cemetery in Canterbury, Conn. Lewis was killed at Antietam.

Civil War under my nose: Collinsville, Conn.

The Collins Co. supplied the Union Army during the Civil War.

Canton Historical Museum Civil War
display: Swords and blades made at Collins Co.

The Union army needed bayonets, axes, plows, swords, picks and shovels. Lots of them. The Collins Co. in Collinsville, Conn., filled a good chunk of the army's orders. In fact, the sprawling facility along the Farmington River made 200,000 bayonets during the Civil War, according to an historian at the Canton Historical Museum in Collinsville. The company also has a tie to the famous John Brown, whose raid on Harper's Ferry, Va., in 1859 was a spark that helped lead to the Civil War. Pikes that Brown wanted to use to help incite a rebellion of slaves were made in Collinsville. The old Collins Co. houses a large antiques store and other businesses now. (All the photos in this post were taken with my Blackberry.)

A large antiques business is housed in one of the old Collins Co. buildings today.

Civil War under my nose: Collinsville, Conn.



Civil War monument in Collinsville, Conn., cemetery.

 

Close-up of back of monument.

Thirty-nine Civil War soldiers are listed on a well-kept monument in Collinsville Cemetery, about four miles from my home. They died in such places as Irish Bend, La.,; Andersonville, Ga.; Drewry's Bluff, Va., and Sharpsburg, Md.. Their bodies were never returned home. The monument was erected in 1903 by the Collinsville Cemetery Association and the state of Connecticut to honor these men from Canton who died during the war. Among the names listed: Martin L. Wadhams, who served with the 16th Connecticut and was killed at Antietam. I wonder if he's related to the Wadhams brothers of Litchfield, Conn., each of whom was killed in an 18-day span in Virginia in 1864.


The bodies of all 39 men listed on the monument were never returned home.



Farmington River on steroids (again)

The Farmington River went into overdrive last year after a few days of heavy rain. It went nuts again this week as you can see here in two cellphone videos I recorded over the weekend. (Audio on bottom video only.)