Seeking Your Civil War Places

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The Civil War didn’t take place just on the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania. It also had a profound impact on small towns throughout Vermont. From September to December, historian Howard Coffin visited museums, historical societies, town halls, and churches in all of Vermont’s 14 counties, speaking about Vermont Civil War sites he had found and inviting the public to share information of their own.

 

Researching a book on Vermont Civil war sites he plans to publish for the Civil War’s 150^th anniversary beginning in 2011, Coffin invites Vermonters to continue sending him information that can help excavate

Seeking Your

Civil War Places

Vermont’s connections to its Civil War past. He is looking for drill fields, recruiting offices, halls where abolitionists spoke and war meetings were held, cemeteries, homes of soldiers, factories that produced war items, monuments, and more.

 

“I am totally open to suggestion,” he says. “This is such a massive project that I need help in all parts of the state. I don’t know just what is out there and I am very willing to listen.”

 

Among the sites he has already located, with local help, are a quarry in Dorset which produced stone for the Gettysburg National Cemetery; a cave in the hills of Windsor County where a man hid for four years to avoid the draft; and the adjutant general’s Woodstock office which made the town the Pentagon of Vermont’s Civil War effort.

 

If you have information you wish to share with Howard Coffin, please call Larissa Vigue-Picard at 802-262-2626 ext. 306.