"You will imagine how painful it was to see our brave men lying dead around us, and to hear the groans of the wounded..." This letter from a Schuylkill County soldier on the front lines of the Mexican-American War in 1846 wrote this letter home to a friend in Pottsville. It was later published in the Miners' Journal newspaper. Read the full letter.
"Sherman was right when he said war was hell." Private Luke Higgins of Pottsville, PA wrote home to his sister from the front lines of France during World War I. In his letter, he described hellish scenes of dead bodies, artillery barrages, and mud everywhere as the American Expeditionary Force launched an offensive. Read the full story.
September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest day in American history. Pennsylvania's Coal Region was in the middle of it. Letters home from soldiers at the front, coffins arriving by train, and then the draft riots and labor unrest that Antietam's aftermath set loose across eastern Pennsylvania. Read all the stories here.
A 12-pound artillery shell left behind by New York troops had been lying around Anthony Burns's house near Pottsville, PA for a year as the Civil War drew to a close. Someone brought it inside and the results were horrifying. Read the story.
Shot in the foot at Bull Run — and too stubborn to stop moving When a Confederate bullet hit Josiah Wildermuth in the foot during the Second Battle of Bull Run, he got up, fell down, got up again, and kept going. What followed was a days-long ordeal on improvised fence-rail crutches that took him from a field hospital to Centreville, Virginia to Washington. He told the story 38 years later at a veterans' reunion in Pottsville, PA. Read the story.
Walking in the footsteps of Schuylkill County soldiers in Albuquerque | 1916 While in Albuquerque for work, I kept walking past the same adobe church that Coal Region soldiers wrote home about in 1916, on their way to the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa raids. Their letters home are full of curiosity and surprises.
The first Schuylkill County men to bomb Berlin - honored with war bonds | 1944 In August 1944, four Schuylkill County airmen gathered at the Pottsville Republican office to collect $50 war bonds for being the first county sons to fly over Berlin. One mother accepted on her son's behalf. Read more.
Lieutenant John Ryan of Pottsville was captured during Pickett's Charge and spent nine months in Libby Prison. He came home with scurvy, dysentery, blackened teeth, and an ulcer eating through his leg. Explore more of his story of survival during the Civil War.
In a letter to the "Miners' Journal," Private James K. Helms of the 6th Pennsylvania describes the scenes as the US Army crossed the Potomac River at Williamsport, MD in June 1861. The young soldier's account vividly describes their first march toward the enemy in Virginia. Read the full letter.
Letters from War: 1861 was featured by WVIA News this week. Roger DuPuis and I talked about the project, the chaotic opening months of the Civil War, and what these Coal Region soldiers' letters still reveal 165 years later. Read more and find the full interview.