A Luzerne County soldier sat down in a just-vacated Confederate camp at Bunker Hill, Virginia and wrote home to a woman in Wilkes-Barre in July 1861. The rebels had left so fast they didn't take their food. The writer shares his unvarnished thoughts about his rebel foes. Read the letter.
In the spring of 1933, Rabbi Louis Levitsky of Wilkes-Barre stood before a women’s club and said what much of the world wasn’t ready to hear. Across the Coal Region, Jewish communities were already organizing, writing, and raising money — while the rest of the world looked away. Read my latest for RealClear Pennsylvania.
"The Christian men to whom God has given control..." Reading Railroad president George Baer meant his reply to a Wilkes-Barre photographer to be private. Within weeks it had been telegraphed across the country and handed the striking miners of 1902 the perfect villain. Read both letters in full.
"The battle lasted half an hour" After months of drilling at Camp Slifer and a long march south, Charles Cyphers finally had a battle to report. Writing fast from Martinsburg on July 7, he gave Pittston Gazette readers their first eyewitness account of Hoke's Run — and the dozens of locomotives the rebels had burned on their way out of Martinsburg, VA. Read the full letter.
"The enemy's balls whistled like hail about our ears." Sergeant Francis Woodhouse stood his ground as cannon fire tore through the lines at Hoke's Run and watched two Pittston men fall wounded beside him. He came through without a scratch and wrote home four days later with one of the most vivid firsthand accounts in this series. Read the full letter.
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.
Sergeant John Williamson was a young laborer from the Coal Region village of Eckley who enlisted in the United States Army in 1861. One year later, he was killed during the brutal fighting at Charles City Crossroads in Virginia. Today, a photograph preserves the story of his short life in his hometown. Read the Full Story.
Charles Cyphers and the 8th Pennsylvania have left Camp Slifer behind. Soldiers are everywhere he looks, Harpers Ferry looms on the horizon, and Cyphers tells his editor to expect news of a battle soon — provided no secessionist puts a bullet through him first. Read the full letter.
In a letter to the Carbondale Advance, Captain Alfred Dart described looting relics from the Marshall House in Alexandria, Virginia - site of the death of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth. He also describes the movements of the 25th Pennsylvania and the situation at Alexandria. Read the full letter.
A soldier from Carbondale, PA spent a night in the very hallway where Colonel Elmer Ellsworth had been shot dead days earlier - the floor still stained with his blood. Then he shipped out to fight Confederate artillery on the Potomac River. He wrote home to describe all of it. Read the full letter.