Mary McTamaney

For so many reasons, it is a good time to look back, way back. Our country and our local community have been through far worse confusion, worry and pain than we are experiencing now.

Read your way through the decades back into 1863. What would neighbors have been discussing as they met in the marketplaces of Newburgh at that mid-point of the Civil War?

Thousands of our local men were off fighting many states away, spread along battlefields from Maryland into the Gulf Coast. Hundreds lay in rough hospitals hoping to recover from severe battle wounds and disease. All were uncomfortable, tired and scared. We know many of their personal feelings about fighting the Civil War because they wrote letters home. We are blessed that their letters were often shared by parents and loved ones and published in the local Newburgh newspapers. The words that rise from those old pages grip us now, one hundred sixty years later and try to teach us lessons long forgotten.

Many letters sent home by the men of the 124th Regiment of the New York State Volunteers, our Orange County unit, and then published in the newspapers, were saved and compiled by Newburgh’s first City Historian, Edward Ruttenber. He left them to the Newburgh Free Library and they were transcribed and uploaded to the archives of the New York State Military Museum. Go to their website: museum.dmna.ny.gov and start reading. That museum located in Saratoga Springs inside the old district armory is a storehouse of incredible history.

What you will discover as you listen (yes, read the letters aloud to yourself) to the words of local men like William Chambers and John Hays is a clear picture of the physical and emotional hardship of war. The scenes revealed continue somewhere in the world every year. Men and women are feeling the same way now in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Syria. For example, John Chatfield’s son wrote this to him from the shore of the Rappahannock River: “This seems to have been once quite a farming country but I see nothing here now pertaining to farming: no ploughing, no grain in the fields, no cattle having range over the acres.” Newburgh’s young men walked hundreds of miles through the devastation of war in the 1860s and left words to remind us what it looks and feels like.

One touchstone of the Civil War was recently unpacked at the Newburgh Historical Society. It is a sword. Presented to a young Newburgh soldier leaving for the front in 1862, his friends and co-workers at Washington Iron Works on South Water Street chipped in to buy it wanting him to have a token of their affection. The story of Henry P. Ramsdell, the young lieutenant they honored and wished godspeed is an epic life drama. It will be highlighted at the historical society’s monthly “Cocktails and Collections” lecture this Thursday, July 18th at 7 p.m. Not only will Lt. Ramsdell’s masterfully inscribed sword be on display but so will the memory book of one of Newburgh’s Civil War veterans’ organizations, The Ellis Post of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Like the letters archived in the state military museum, the pages of the post’s memory book tell of close friendships and dangerous moments in battle as each veteran’s story chronicles where these local men fought and survived. Those chronicles can also be accessed online through the state archive’s wonderful website, New York Heritage.