Va-Hist subscriber Randy Cabell alerted me to this article in the
Winchester Evening Star of Monday, 16 March 2009:
 
 
Area residents keep remnants of Civil War from fading away 

By Laura Oleniacz 
The Winchester Star

________________________________

Winchester - Years ago, Jim Tubbesing noticed an old, abandoned house
not far off Papermill Road, and decided to investigate it for artifacts.


"Just the age of the house itself suggested it may have something of
value in it," the now 81-year-old Winchester resident said. 

Tubbesing checked the attic, and found "hundreds and hundreds" of
papers, he said, strewn all over the floor. He and a friend took the
papers home to examine what they had found. 

One document was a bill of sale for a slave sold during the Civil War.
The transaction is handwritten on a now yellowed piece of paper, and is
extremely faded. 

"It had been abandoned," he said of the attic and its contents. 

Tubbesing brought the document along with several other Civil War
artifacts to Winchester on Saturday so the bill could be scanned and
digitally preserved by Library of Virginia staff. 

Tubbesing, a collector of historical artifacts, was one of 14 area
residents who took part in the Library of Virginia's effort to digitize
diaries, letters, and other documents from the American Civil War. 

Local residents shared their Civil War documents and photographs from 9
a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center at
1400 S. Pleasant Valley Road. 

Once the documents are scanned, they will be analyzed, catalogued and
placed on the Library of Virginia's Web site. 

The Library of Virginia, in collaboration with the Virginia Commission
on the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, plan to take the
preservation effort to every county in the state - if funding can be
secured. 

The Winchester preservation effort, as well as one in Danville, will be
used as a pilot study for the statewide effort - which is part of an
initiative to recognize the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil
War. 

Lyndon H. Hart III, director of Description Services for the Library of
Virginia, said the pilot studies will help officials apply for a grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete the project. 

"It [helps] us know what's out there, and how willing people are to
share," Hart said. 

The local Winchester-Frederick County Civil War Sesquicentennial
Committee had requested that the preservation effort be conducted in
Winchester. 

"So much happened here during the war," said Terry Heder, program
manager for the field services of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields
Foundation and co-chair of the local Sesquicentennial committee. 

The digitization project is aimed to give "a human face to the war and
to make intellectual information available," Hart said. 

As time progresses, there will be fewer surviving primary source
documents relating to the Civil War. 

"In 200 years, the records will be gone," he said, adding that the
memory of the event will fade as the people whose relatives had actual
memories of the war age. 

Heder said that putting the privately owned documents and photographs
online makes them available for the use of researchers or the public,
but not to the detriment of their owners. 

"They do not give up intellectual property rights," he said. 

Close to 200 images from area residents were scanned on Saturday, Hart
said. 

Items included several photographs from Civil War veterans reunions, a
letter from a soldier to his wife giving advice about the children and
the farm, and a pass allowing a civilian to cross army lines. 

Harry Ridgeway, a member of the board of trustees for the Old Civil War
Courthouse Museum on the Loudoun Street Mall, brought in the diary of a
Union provost guard stationed in Winchester. 

The Infantryman's duty as a provost guard was to "basically keep the
peace," Ridgeway said, adding that the soldier, named David Hicks, had
etched his name on the courthouse walls during the Union's occupation of
the city. 

Although he hasn't read the diary yet, Ridgeway said he knows that Hicks
was enlisted in the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment Co. B. during
the First Battle of Kernstown in 1862. 

He was then stationed in the city, Ridgeway said. 

"We believe that's when he wrote his name on the courthouse wall," he
added. 

The diary was found by a collector in the collector's market, and
brought to the museum. 

The Library of Virginia's digitization project is a collectors dream,
Ridgeway said. 

"As a collector and a researcher, any such publication is hugely
valuable," he said. 

 


______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html