I’m trying to put a bit of a connection between us and the people who lived then. Many folks don’t realize how close we actually are to those events almost 150 years ago. In some cases, only a handshake away from the war.

My father met and talked with veterans of the Civil War when he was a boy. He remembers watching Civil War veterans marching in parades, and riding in cars and floats when they couldn’t march anymore.

I have had the good fortune in my life to shake hands and have a nice conversation with a woman who, as a young girl, used to sit on Joshua Chamberlain’s porch and listen to him tell stories about the war. That is simply amazing.

There is a quote from Bruce Catton which sums our interests up better than most anything I have read.

“We are a people to whom the past is forever speaking. We listen to it because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices. Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone went through fire and storm to break a path to the future. We are part of the future they died for; they are a part of the past that brought the future.”

Thanks again,

Respects,