Battlefield Park

I took Nuria to Petersburg's National Battlefield Park today. The Park is the site of the Civil War battle called the Battle of the Crater. If you're a Civil War history buff, you likely know about the Battle of the Crater. If you don't know about it, you're missing an important part of American history. But you can read about it on Wikipedia here: Battle of the Crater. 

The Visitor Center & Museum was open, displaying artifacts from that era and battlefield relics. The rest of the park was closed because of damage from the recent storm, which I wrote about in a blog post titled The Storm. Even though most of the Park was closed, Nuria and I did witness a Civil War cannon being fired. Firing the cannon required eight men, with each man playing a role in loading the cannon with black powder, cannonball, and fuzing the cannonball. The length of the artillery fuze determined the range of the cannon: the point in the cannonball's trajectory at which it exploded. A longer fuze meant a longer range for the cannonball. About one in five cannonballs were duds and did not explode. Sometimes someone will unearth a Civil War cannonball and inadvertently cause it to explode while they are cleaning or "restoring" it. Needless to say, a person who does that dies instantly. The latest such death I know of occurred in 2020.

We didn't get to see the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the Crater. I visited it years ago, but it was all new to Nuria, and I wish she could have seen more of the Park. Maybe we'll return when the park has been "repaired" and re-opened.

From the National Park Service website about Petersburg:

Nine and a half months, 70,000 casualties, the suffering of civilians, U. S. Colored Troops fighting for freedom, and the decline of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia all describe the Siege of Petersburg. 

And it's just two miles from my home, as the cannonball flies. 

Also in Petersburg is Blandford Cemetary, the second largest cemetary in Virginia. I have been to and driven past the Cemetary many times. The remains of 30,000 unknown Civil War soldiers are buried in Blandford. The oldest grave is marked from the year 1702. You can read about Blandford Cemetary here.

I feel close to the Civil War era. I've blogged on this subject before, but I live in a historical city. When I was a child, I explored the empty meadows and picked up Minié balls from Civil War battles, I found a brick water-well whose "top" was located just below the surface of the ground in my front yard, and a neighbor found a gold denture from a deceased Civil War soldier while digging in a flower bed near her house.

It's an odd thing that I live in the midst of so much history. History was my worst subject in public school, and I've never been interested in the subject. But the Civil War has many compelling stories, and to think it ended just a single human lifetime (81 years) before I was born gives the battles that occurred there a strange proximity to my own life experience. I once read that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all of America's wars since the Civil War until Vietnam. An estimated 850,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War.

A footnote: the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was never put on trial for treason, because many in America's government feared that if he were to be tried, there was a danger that the Supreme Court might rule that the South had the right to secede from the Union! In that case, the war would have been fought for nothing, and so the case against Davis was dropped on December 25, 1868.

Image: Civil War artillery crew re-enactors. Normally 8 men, one man is off-camera explaining what the men will do to load and fire the cannon. As you might imagine, the sound of the black-powder cannon being fired was extremely loud and generated a lot of smoke.