Today a great fire engulfs the southwest Georgia town of Americus, a Confederate hospital town housing thousands of soldiers and located near Andersonville Prison. Two city squares in the downtown district are destroyed by the fire, which causes damages of over $3,000,000. The lost buildings include many businesses, hospital buildings, warehouses and storerooms. Among the…
Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) is a member of Atlanta’s Second Baptist Church and an Atlanta bookseller that, having “no ambition to acquire military renown and glory,” has managed to avoid service in the Confederate Army. The former Unionist maintains a home front diary during the war, and today, amidst noting family affairs, worries that he…
The war now fully engaged, territories controlled by the Union and Confederate armies are fluid. Thus far, battles have been fought on Southern fields, and Union armies are gradually pressing southward. In much of the upper South and Tennessee, civilians live in somewhat of a no-man’s land, their towns and farms seesawing between Confederate and…