"I am going to fight not for money, but for my country..." Pottsville, PA native William H. Werner traveled to California as a teenager in the 1850s in search of riches. He was there when the Civil War broke out. In a letter to his father in Schuylkill County, he detailed why he left a good job to fight for the Union. Read the full letter.
"It is truly wonderful that we had no lives lost in our company," wrote Sergeant James Silliman of Pottsville, PA in October 1861. His unit, Company A, 28th Pennsylvania, had fought hard with Confederate soldiers near Harpers Ferry, Virginia on October 16, 1861. Read his letter.
"We hope our borough council will pass an ordinance provided for the lighting of the streets upon every dark night..." This 1846 article highlights the dangers of walking around Pottsville, PA during the night-time hours when the street lights were left unlit. Read the full story.
"No arrests were made." In October 1861, the Miners' Journal of Pottsville, PA reported on a brawl at the Betz tavern in turbulent Minersville Street of the city on Election Night. Read the full story.
In a letter written in October 1861, Captain Oliver Bosbyshell of Pottsville, PA described the arrival of the 48th Pennsylvania at Fort Monroe in Virginia. Bosbyshell described the camp, the regiment's drill, and the events happening around the important Union base on the Cheseapeake Bay. Read the full letter.
"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.