Letters from War: 1861 | Captain Alfred Dart writes from the banks of the Potomac River on the Fourth of July

A Fourth of July firefight at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Captain Alfred Dart's Fourth of July opened with a skirmish across the Potomac River. He found time to write home to Carbondale on the holiday. Read the full letter.

Frank Jones and a Lynching in Chambersburg: A Civil War Murder and Its Forgotten Legacy

While researching Letters from War: 1861, a single line in a Coal Region newspaper stopped me cold. A sergeant had written home describing the murder of a Black man by Union soldiers. This is the investigation into what really happened on June 1, 1861 and the lynching of a man named Frank Jones.