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....