Tuesday, May 19, 2009

New Civil War research project

I recently purchased in Gettysburg four tintypes of Civil War soldier Van Buren Towle. He served with the 14th Massachusetts Infantry, which became the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. Towle, a 36-year-old shoemaker from Haverhill, Mass., was captured at Harris Farm during the Battle of Spotsylvania (Va.) Courthouse on May 19, 1864. He was sent to the infamous Andersonville prisoner of war camp in Georgia and was paroled in December 1864. Towle died aboard the Northern Light on his way back home and likely was buried at sea. I hope to do more research on Towle soon in the National Archives in D.C.

3 comments:

  1. John--I will look forward to learning more about Van Buren Towle. Researching this young soldier and making his life's narrative known rescues him from obscurity--what a great tribute!

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  2. johnbanks8:25 PM

    yeah, allright, so you take down some posts. you still should get another picture of lindsay lohan.

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  3. Hello John,

    You have some awesome pictures on this post! My name is Brandon Samuels and I really enjoyed reading some of the material on your blog. Since you have an interest in blogging, I thought that you might want to know about a new web site, timelines.com. The idea is to create an interactive historical record of anything and everything, based on specific events that combine to form timelines. We're trying to achieve a sort of user-created multimedia history, in which no event is too big or too small to record. Feel free to create events using excerpts and/or links from your blog. You will generate traffic and awareness of your blog, and you will be contributing to the recording of history.

    With your interest in the American Civil War, you should check out this timeline. So far it is a work in progress and we would definitely love for more people to contribute. http://timelines.com/topics/american-civil-war.

    Give us a try and let me know your thoughts.

    Thanks,
    Brandon Samuels
    brandon.samuels@timelines.com

    ReplyDelete