Douglas "Sopwith"

I love cemeteries.  I find them peaceful, and I love the beauty with which people honor their dead.

I don't, however, ordinarily spend a lot of time in Confederate cemeteries.

This one was worth it.

OK, so before the Civil War, Jefferson Davis advocated the use of camels as beasts of burden for use in the arid area of the US West.  It made sense, as horses were dying for lack of water (presaging the water supply issues of today.  But I digress....).  He obtained funding for his project, and bought camels in 1855 (more complete story here).

Camels don't get on well with other animals, and the camel project was a failure.  The last of the camels, Old Douglas, ended up seeing action in Vicksburg, having gained mascot status for Company A of the Forty Third Mississippi Infantry - who subsequently became known as the Camel Regiment.

The Vicksburg Siege lasted 90 days, and during that time, one of the casualties was Old Douglas, who fell to a Union sniper bullet.  There is some dissension about what happened next, whether Douglas was slaughtered and eaten by hungry Confederate soldiers, or whether he ended up on a Union plate.  But his cemetery marker (which is empty, in true cenotaph style) marks an empty grave, in either case.

I ran across the reference to the marker on the site http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/41405, and found it exactly where the site sent me.  And even Kathe got excited, taking pictures to send to our family in Dubai.

Location of Old Douglas' gravestone.

Kathe had not even been to this side of Clay Street in Vicksburg.
The cemetery is quite lovely.

I believe I will save an ebay search for "Old Douglas" and see if any of the bones ever come up for sale.  Even a fake one would be fun to have....

CS Cumming's Brigade

Driving home yesterday, and saw a nearly invisible red plaque at the top of the hill.

Proudly, prominently displayed monument.  No, seriously. If you squint you can see it....

This one is located on Confederate Drive, a windy road that roughly parallels the interstate.  Everything else in town seems to follow a decent grid, or at least a pie-wedge.  But Confederate seems to have been created for an amble.  The houselots are irregularly shaped - some quite large, and there are some beautiful homes on the street.  And a number of them have red bronze markers on the front lawn (red markers are Confederate markers.)  I have yet to wander into any of the back yards to see whether there are markers there as well.  Vicksburg has a bit of a history with guns...

So as I was driving along, I spotted the sign, unreadable from the road, and went to investigate.

It is fun to look through the history of groups like this, figure out where they had been assigned, look at who the leaders were, and discover a little more about them.  In the case of the 39th Georgia, there is a neat website run by someone who had a family member who fought in the 39th, and it gives some interesting background.

The end result was the same as everyone else on the 'red' side of the line.  The 39th, under the command of Brigadier General Alfred Cumming, surrendered on the 4th of July 1863, one year before the end of the conflict.  Four days later they were paroled back to Georgia, and were eventually exchanged (exchange rate discussed here).

Cumming's Brigade was also memorialized in a sign immediately adjacent. I love the vagueness of the text,  Something happened here, with some people from some brigade, and it might or might not have been with a piece of unknown artillery.  But we might be wrong.  And it might not have been here.



But we have it commemorated in perpetuity.

"We're not entirely sure". 

The location surprised me.  I suspected that when I got to the top of the hill (puff, pant, wheeze) that it would be a nice little plateau, with a wide flat area extending back into the woods.  Instead, what I found was a knife's ridge, only ten feet wide, with a steep drop on either side.  A nicely defensible position.  I am just not real clear which way I would have been defending.

On the ridge, looking down on the traffic on a Friday afternoon

Like many of the other locations I have seen with historical markers in town, the area is nicely turfed and sodded, with regular grasscutting as maintenance.  All around it are woods.  So the area is specifically cared for only because of the marker. The overhead from google shows how the area of the marker is carved out from the surrounding woods.  It amuses me, but it also means that I get a nice clear signal when there is a marker.  Just follow the green carpet into the woods.

Or maybe that ends up at the house made of gingerbread.  Not entirely sure....