German PWs in Rockingham County, 1944-1945

POWs waiting for ocean transport, from Arnold Krammer's
book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.

Fall is quickly approaching, and in the Valley, that means apples! The Shenandoah Valley has long been an agricultural center, and 70 years ago, our farms and factories were vital to the war effort—part of the “breadbasket of democracy,” as wartime propaganda films called the United States. (Don’t underestimate Rockingham’s importance—in August 1944, Fox Movietone, Pathé News, and MGM came to the Plains district to shoot newsreel footage of Rockingham’s food production and processing. Our turkey flocks, orchards, and processing facilities were broadcast to moviegoers nationwide!) However, the workforce available to harvest and process food was quickly dwindling. The Virginia labor force lost 300,000 able-bodied men to the armed forces, and still more left for higher paying jobs in government and other wartime workplaces. In 1943, state farmers found labor where they could—convicts from state prisons, the Women’s Land Army (a civilian organization), conscientious objectors released from Soil Conservation work, and vacationers from Washington, D.C. all helped bring in the harvest. The 1944 harvest was expected to be a bumper crop, and Rockingham County farmers hoped to use the same sources of labor that they used in 1943, as well as Boy Scouts and school students, for the growing and harvest seasons. County Agricultural Extension Agent Frederick Holsinger also applied to the Army’s Third Service Command at Baltimore for another source to supplement the labor force—German prisoners of war.

According to the 1929 Geneva Convention, prisoners of war (POWs or PWs) could work for the good of their captors, as long as certain criteria were met. First, they had to be either enlisted men or non-commissioned officers. PW labor could not be used for work directly related to the war effort, and all assignments had to meet certain safety guidelines. Lastly, the PWs had to be paid for their work.[1] Prisoners were a guaranteed product of combat in WWII, and keeping them in camps in the European war zone was problematic. The United States had never had so many war captives, and with no practical experience and only theoretical guidelines to work from, it seems they worked things out as they went. Shipping the prisoners back to the U.S. was a logical move. Rather than having to ship more food to Europe or sacrifice provisions meant for American troops, they could use the mostly empty supply ships returning across the Atlantic to ferry prisoners instead.

Branch Camp No. 7, Timberville, Virginia. From
Gregory L. Owen's book Wehrmacht Autumns.

In fact, from 1942 to 1946, close to half a million Italian and German PWs were transported back to American shores. (In May 1945, there were 425,871 PWs in the U.S.—371,683 Germans, 50,273 Italians, and 3,915 Japanese.[2])The first prisoners went to former Civilian Conservation Corps camps, unused parts of military bases, fairgrounds, auditoriums, and tent cities. By the end of the war, 155 more permanent base camps had been established, as well as 511 branch camps when the bases were too few to meet demand. The Italians and Germans were already using American PWs to fill their own labor drains as men went to the war, and the U.S. did the same to free up troops for overseas shipment. The first priority for labor was to military installations for essential war work. In base camps, skilled PWs also did everything from working as medical and dental aids to carpentry and plumbing to road and yard work to tending the camp PX or post office. More than 40 states appealed for help from the government due to workforce shortages, and by November 1944, there were more PWs employed in agricultural work than essential war work—over 115,000 by November 1945. Businesses and chambers of commerce could petition the War Department for labor, and that is what happened in Rockingham County. There is a lot of additional interesting information available about the bureaucratic workings of the PW program, the distribution of prisoners, Nazism in the camps, reeducation, repatriation, and the rest, but I want to focus on the local, small scale of Fort Pickett’s Branch Camp No. 7 in Timberville.

After an initial meeting on June 5, 1944 to ascertain the interest in war prisoner labor, county agent Holsinger set the bureaucratic wheels in motion by submitting a certification of need in order to have prisoners allocated to the area. Branch Camp No. 7 was established on the farm of Herman L. Hollar, three miles west of Timberville, on a field full of jagged limestone that made it good only for grazing, not planting. The facility was planned to accommodate 250 prisoners, 50 soldier guards, and 8 officers. Americans and Germans alike would live in tents at the camp and have separate dining facilities. Local workers installed sewage, water, and electricity to the camp, and the first prisoners to arrive in August 1944 assembled the canvas tents, as well as 8’ barbed wire fences around the perimeter. The fence had gates in the center of the east and west sides, with a road bisecting, plus 8’ guard towers on each corner; the fences and guard towers were the only things in the camp built of wood. Soon the Timberville camp was full of German prisoners, who arrived by open truck with the town’s population lining the streets to watch. Those interested in obtaining PW labor applied to the county agent’s office. If they were assigned men, they would receive instructions about their responsibilities. Employers had to pick up PWs at the camp, though prisoners working at farms as far south as Harrisonburg and Bridgewater were trucked to the Greyhound bus station on North Main Street in Harrisonburg and picked up there. Demand for labor surpassed supply, so labor was allocated based on priorities—harvesting was priority number one. PWs also made hay, hauled in small grain, performed orchard work, cut corn, filled siloes, and worked in industry. (Zigler Canning Cooperative Inc. and Rockingham Poultry Marketing Cooperative Inc. were the two main industrial contractors for the Timberville camp, though PWs also worked at City Produce Exchange, the Harrisonburg Junk and Hide Company, and Mason’s saw mill, as well as food processing plants in the Timberville/Broadway area.) The government set three months as the maximum contract period, so a truck convoy returned the 170 prisoners to Camp Pickett on November 1, 1944. As anticipated, the year was a bumper crop for both apples and peaches, and the harvest might not have been brought in without PW labor. Because of this success, the camp opened again in 1945 from July 16 to November 16, when it served as a branch of the Front Royal base camp under the direction of Lieut. Nathan Mandel.

PWs enjoying a drink. From Arnold Krammer's
book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.

Conditions in the camps were good, partially due to the Geneva Convention and partially due to the prevailing idea that word would get back to Germany and make them more willing to surrender, knowing that conditions would not be bad. Farmers paid the army the prevailing local wage for each worker, and in turn the army paid workers $0.80 per day in canteen checks, which could be used to purchase things like toiletries, candy, soda, the occasional beer, and other items that weren’t scarce to point of shortage. (Any money they did not spend during the war went back to Germany with them.) Prisoners had responsibilities in camp, just as they would in their own barracks. German camp management solved discipline issues internally, and prisoners were accountable for keeping the camp clean. Their food was also prepared by German cooks, who received the same rations that their American counterparts did— coffee, tea, milk, corn flakes, jam, potatoes, rice, meat, fish, vegetables, eggs, and the like. In fact, some prisoners thought they had more food than they needed! Timberville PWs also had regular church services held by alternating local pastors with the aid of a German-speaking Lutheran pastor from Edinburg. (The Rev. Samuel Berry was one of those pastors, and his former church, St. John’s Lutheran Chapel, is now home to the altar made and used by prisoners in their services. It reads “Ehre sei Gott in der hoehe” – “Glory to God in the highest.” The PWs left the altar behind at the end of the war because they wanted a church to be able to use it.) The prisoners were housed, clothed, fed, and offered religious comfort in the beauty of the Valley. Former prisoner Herbert Vogt observed, “The countryside around Timberville is nice and is similar to the countryside around my hometown.”[3]

PW Herman Vogt, who had fond
memories of the Shenandoah
Valley. From Gregory Owen's
book Wehrmacht Autumns.

Vogt was typical of the average PW at the Timberville camp—or at any of the hundreds of camps across the country. He was barely 19 years old when he was captured in France in June 1944. Local resident Benjamin May, who was six years old when the PWs first arrived, remembered the children expecting the Germans to be “ten feet tall and supermen and mean.”[4] Instead, they discovered a group of unthreatening teenagers, not that much older than themselves. The only “escapee” from the Timberville camp was 18-year-old Kurt Krott, who disappeared and then returned 12 hours later, saying he had been sleeping in the woods nearby. Krott was only 5’2” and 107 pounds, and often spoke of being homesick. While there were many critics of the PW program, especially those living near camps who were afraid of escapes or who had family in the military and saw PWs as symbols of the enemy, eventually the Germans were largely accepted because of their strong work ethic, cleanliness, and good manners. One woman who lived on Main Street in Timberville remembered the PWs coming through town in a truck singing melodies in German with good voices on the way to pick tomatoes. Others recalled them singing often while working the farms, seemingly content. “I guess they were happy to be out of the war,” Benjamin May said on the subject years later.[5] John Yeich of Broadway agreed. “They were out of the war…They were pretty happy to be there, I suspect.”[6] The PWs weren’t asked to work any harder or differently than a local man would be; they were often mixed among local workers. They had hourly breaks and square meals—though they were supposed to bring their own lunch from camp, farm wives often prepared home cooked meals for the laborers. Guards for the prisoners at work were often armed with only a sidearm or not at all, and by September 1945, American MP shortages meant none of the industrial work details had a guard at all. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Germans stuck to the rules. PWs at Hollar’s Orchard convinced 13-year-old Jacob Saylor, who delivered water to them, to break the rules and buy them some snuff. He liked to think of German water boys doing the same and getting tobacco for American PWs, because to him the Germans were “just like Americans.”[7]

Prisoners working at Fort Story, Virginia. From Arnold
|Krammer's book Nazi Prisoners of War in America.

The camp, composed largely of impermanent structures, was dismantled after November 1945. The Daily News Record didn’t report the last prisoners leaving when the camp closed, though whether that was due to lack of interest or more pressing news items is impossible to say. In general, branch camps shut down after war and the land and materials were sold at auction. Today, nothing remains of the Timberville PW camp except a few concrete slabs and guard tower foundations on private property along Orchard Drive. The PW program was ultimately successful in feeding, clothing, housing, entertaining, and even reeducating German servicemen. The U.S. government made $100 million profit on prisoner labor in 1944, which made the camps basically self-supporting. PWs contributed immensely to feeding the nation and its men overseas. In seven months over two harvests in Timberville, German PWs provided 26,081 man days of labor, including 5,573 man days in agricultural work and 5,873 man days in food processing in 1944 and 8,202 man days in agricultural work and 6,433 man days in processing in 1945.[8] The experience seems to have been largely positive for the German prisoners as well. A survey of more than 20,000 PWs leaving Camp Shanks, New York showed that “74 percent of the German prisoners of war who were interred in this country left with an appreciation and friendly attitude toward their captors.”[9] Germans who returned home to the Russian Zone often depended on food packages from concerned friends they had made while imprisoned in the U.S., while American and British Zone repatriates often found work with the U.S. Army or American Military government because they had learned English in captivity. Many former PWs returned to visit and relive their days in the camps across the country, including in the Shenandoah Valley. In the late 1970s, Timberville resident Dow Souder ran into a German man at the bank who had brought his wife, friend, and friend’s wife to see the area where he’d been held during the war. At a camp reunion in Texas in the 1950s, former PW Wilhelm Sauerbrei told a reporter, “I’ll tell you, pal, if there is ever another war, get on the side that America isn’t, then get captured by the Americans—you’ll have it made!”[10]

Compared to fighting on the front lines, harvesting apples in the beautiful Valley must have been a positive experience for German PWs. As for Rockingham County residents, meeting “the enemy” in person and seeing that the Germans weren’t much different from the locals may have been equally positive. This is a fascinating part of our county’s history, and I’m grateful to Gregory L. Owen for all the work he has done in researching and recording it. I highly recommend reading his works for more information, particularly Wehrmacht Autumns: German Prisoners of War in the Plains District of Rockingham County, Virginia During World War II, which is available at Massanutten Regional Library in the Genealogy room (GEN 940.412 O).

by Kristin Noell

[1] See 1929 Geneva Convention, part III, third section, articles 27-34 for more information on PW labor
[2] Owen, HRHS Newsletter, 1.
[3] Owen, Wehrmacht Autumns, 94.
[4] Ibid., 47.
[5] Ibid., 40.
[6] Mellott.
[7] Owen, Wehrmacht Autumns, 59.
[8] Ibid., 24.
[9] Krammer, 263.
[10] Ibid., 267.

Bibliography

1. “10 German PW’s at Work Here.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 24, 1945.
2. “200 Prisoners of War Available in Rockingham after July 16th.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 6, 1945.
3. Austin, Luanne. “On the Homefront.” Daily News-Record, Mar. 15, 2007.
4. “Every Source is Being Tapped to Get Farm Labor.” Daily News-Record, May 11, 1944.
5. Gansberg, Judith M. Stalag, U.S.A.: The Remarkable Story of German POWs in America. New York: Crowell, 1977.
6. ICRC. Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, Jul. 27, 1929. https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp?documentId=0BDEDDD046FDEBA9C12563CD002D69B1&action=openDocument
7. Jost, Scott. Shenandoah Valley Apples. Chicago: Columbia College Chicago Press, 2013.
8. Krammer, Arnold. Nazi Prisoners of War in America. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.
9. Mellott, Jeff. “'Migrant' Workers – Exhibit Recalls When POWs Rescued Farmers.” Daily News-Record, Sep. 22, 2010.
10. Moore, John Hammond. “Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Virginia, 1943-1946.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85(3), Jul. 1977.
11. “Nazi Prisoners Come to County.” Daily News-Record, Jun. 16, 1945.
12. Owen, Gregory L. “Prisoners of War in Rockingham County During WWII.” The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society Newsletter 29(2). Spring 2007.
13. Owen, Gregory L. Wehrmacht Autumns: German Prisoners of War in the Plains District of Rockingham County, Virginia During World War II. Timberville, Va.: Gregory L. Owen, 2003
14. Patterson, Dana L. “Church Altar a Reminder of German POWs in Area.” North Fork Journal. Sep. 16-22, 1992.
15. “Timberville’s Peach Harvest in Full Swing.” Daily News-Record, Aug. 23, 1944.
16. “War Prisoner Camp Meeting.” Daily News-Record, Jun. 1, 1944.
17. “War Prisoners Arrive Today.” Daily News-Record, Aug. 1, 1944.
18. “War Prisoners to Leave Today.” Daily News-Record, Nov. 1, 1944.
19. “War Prisoners to Work Here.” Daily News-Record, Jul. 20, 1945.

Monroeville, Alabama - Yesterday and Today

Courtesy Library of Congress.

There has been a lot of talk in the media about Harper Lee’s new/old book, Go Set a Watchman, since long before its publication on July 14. Is it unpolished? Is Atticus a racist? Was Lee in a fit state to authorize publication? Does it diminish To Kill a Mockingbird? (To see the MRL community’s thoughts on the novel, see our Goodreads review.) Instead of revisiting all of these ideas, I want to visit the town halfway between Mobile and Montgomery that served as the inspiration for Maycomb, the setting of both novels—little Monroeville, which was named the literary capital of Alabama in 1996. For another “visit” to Maycomb, please join us at the Main branch on Saturday, September 5 at 1:00 for a showing of the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

The 1930s

While Maycomb could be any small rural town in the South (which is probably why it resonates with so many readers 55 years later), you can find its landmarks in Monroeville if you know where to look. Mark Childress, the author of Crazy in Alabama and a Monroeville native, says that Mockingbird was the first “grown-up book” he ever read. “Books had always been magical objects to me, but distant from my own experience. Authors were invisible wizards who swept me off to far places to work their spell on me. To Kill a Mockingbird was fiction, but it was real. It came from this place where I sat. It was a written by a lady my parents actually knew, a lady who had signed her name in this book I held in my hands. It told a story about a childhood lived on this very street, in these houses, in that schoolyard back yonder.”[1] Monroeville residents have always believed that Mockingbird is based on Lee’s experience. An older friend of the Childress family often pointed out Boo Radley’s home and the tree where he left trinkets for Scout and Jem as if he were a real man. In fact, when Lee was a child, a young man named Son Bowler broke some windows in the school, and his father made a deal with the authorities that he would keep his son out of trouble if they wouldn’t press charges. Son Bowler became a prisoner in his father’s house, eventually dying in his 30s of tuberculosis.

The old Monroe Country Courthouse.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Like Scout, Jem, and Dill, the children of Monroeville played on the red clay streets in the 1930s. One old-timer once recounted a story of Truman Capote (Lee’s inspiration for Dill) gathering up the boys playing ball on an abandoned lot and taking them to the drug store for milk shakes and sodas. He had the outing charged to his mother, who had left him with relatives while she was living in New Orleans. Capote apparently had quite a reputation for sass, though one would hope that young Lee, daughter of respected lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee (inspiration for Atticus Finch), was better behaved. When they weren’t playing in the streets or hanging out at the soda fountain, the children of Lee’s generation had one other great pastime: reading. I couldn’t write this better than Lee, who wrote a rare letter on the subject to Oprah in 2006:

“My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic; and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime…Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often – movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock.”[2]

Personally, I love this image.

Moses Ezekiel: Forgotten Master Artist

Moses Jacob Ezekiel (October 28, 1844 – March 27, 1917)

Virginians should know his name. His works grace the lawns and corners of universities, Arlington National Cemetery, and numerous museums. Between 1879 and 1884, he created eleven statues of artists, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Dyke, and others that first filled the niches of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the District of Columbia, but now stand in the Statuary Vista of the Norfolk, Virginia Botanical Garden. His Bust of Thomas Jefferson (1888) graces our United States Capitol building and his Jefferson Monument (1901) is at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Ezekiel should be better known for his amazing sculpture entitled Virginia Mourning Her Dead (1903) which dominates the small cemetery at Virginia Military Institute. Every year, at the foot of this statue, roll call is conducted for the brave cadets who fought—and those who died—at the Battle of New Market. Moses Ezekiel was one of those cadets.

A Corner in Montparnasses

For the reader, the delight of a walk in any direction in central Paris is coming upon a street, a building plaque, or a café that notes its association with a writer. A walk in Montparnasses is a reminder of American writers in the 1920s who often met in the cafés there. Since the 1400s when Francois Villon, considered the first author in Paris, wrote “The Ballad of the Hanged Men” while in his jail cell—he was convicted of murder—Paris attracted disaffected and unconventional artists from around the world who wanted space to exercise intellectual freedom. Before 1900 writers came from America, many of which are chronicled in David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. Woody Allen’s movie, Midnight in Paris, imagines a contemporary aspiring American novelist, Gil Pender, time-traveling to the 1920s. In the 1920s, American writers who came to Pairs often met at cafés in Montparnasses.

At the beginning of the 20th century to escape the tourists and the mafia, artists from Montmartre on the right bank began to migrate to Montparnasses on the left bank. The opening of a metro line in 1910 between Montmartre and Montparnasses hastened the departure of many artists from the right bank, but also kept the connection between the two artists’ enclaves.

In the 17th century, Montparnasses, named for the home of the god of poetry, Apollo, was a ruble heap that attracted university poets. The following two centuries the area was ignored by most artists. Chateaubriand and Balzac, who because of their financial woes, did choose to live in this cheap neighborhood. Today, Rodin’s Balzac overlooks the intersection of Blvd. du Montparnasses, Blvd. Raspail, and Rue Delambre in Montparnasses. The intersection is known as Place Pablo Picasso and can be accessed from the No. 4 metro line at the Vavin station (named for Alexi Vavin, 1792-1865, a statesman who opposed the coup of Napoleon III). Here in the heart of artistic Montparnasses several eateries dominate the corners. At these cafés, writers met, wrote, and explored ideas and tourists swarmed to get a glimpse of them in the 1920s.

Le Dôme

The oldest café and restaurant at this location opened in 1898. Le Dôme, when facing northeast toward the Montparnasses Tower, is on the left. From the beginning, this café attracted bohemian artists and models and until WWI, German and northern Europeans. After WWI, Americans came attracted to Paris because it was cheap, liquor was available, and its lack of priggishness. Le Dôme’s huge terrassa, now mostly glassed-in, became the “home” for American writers, artists, and journalists. The regulars, writers many of whom already had achieved some success, were terrible snobs. An often repeated encounter at Le Dôme happened one night where Sinclair Lewis, then "a hugely successful author of Main Street and Babbitt, was overheard boasting about one of his books on the terrace, [when] someone at a table shouted, 'Sit down, you’re just a best seller.'" One of the habitués was American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, best known as publisher of Hemingways’s first book in 1923, Ten Stories and Ten Poems.

Escape the Ordinary: Superheroes in Comics

This year’s adult summer reading program theme is Escape the Ordinary, and superheroes are coming to Massanutten Regional Library! (Find out more about signing up to read and win prizes here.) The Main branch in downtown Harrisonburg will be featuring Super Screenings of popular, modern superhero movies all summer long. (Click here for times and titles.)

Personally, I’ve always been a big Batman fan. I’m dating myself here, but I grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995). My brother and I must have watched its accompanying full-length movie, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), a dozen times. However, I’ve never been a big comic reader, largely because I’m the kind of person who would want to read every panel from beginning to end, and I find the sheer volume of issues and story arcs of Batman’s last seven decades a bit daunting, to say the least—and that’s just the caped crusader.

The history of the comic industry is as complex as the stories it generates and the characters almost as numerous. From executives to artists and writers, dozens of people may influence every issue published. Entire books about industry giants such as publisher Martin Goodman and artists Stan Lee and Bob Kane, among others, are available in the library’s collection. This brief and general history of superhero comics probably won’t offer anything new for the established fan, but it should provide a sufficient overview for the uninitiated. 

The Golden Age (1938-1954) 

All DC Comics characters and the
distinctive likeness(es) thereof
are Trademarks & Copyright
© 1939 DC Comics, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The comic book as we know it today was born in the late 1930s from two popular forms of the 1920s and ’30s—the funny pages and the pulps. (Pulps were short stories—from westerns and adventures to romances and melodramas—accompanied by illustrations and mass-produced on cheap pulp paper.) The first comic series with exclusively new material, New Fun #1, was published in 1935; Detective Comics #1 (the eponymous “DC” of today’s  DC Comics) was published in March 1937. “Comic books were the perfect entertainment form for the Great Depression audiences: their heroic, larger-than-life characters stirred the demoralized masses, and the very format of the magazines themselves—usually sixty-four pages of original material for a mere dime—was a bargain during those times of economic hardship” (Misiroglu 3).

The dawn of today’s superhero coincided closely with the genesis of the comic book. The widely accepted definition of a superhero is “a heroic character with an altruistic mission, who possesses superpowers, wears a defining costume, and functions in the ‘real world’ in his or her alter ego” (Misiroglu 2). Arguably the first superhero according to this definition, Superman debuted in June 1938 in Action Comics #1. He was a natural successor to 1930s heroes of pulp, radio, and other mediums, including Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Phantom, the Spider, and Zorro. With the Nazi threat looming in Europe, Americans were in need of a hero, and the appearance of the red and blue-clad Superman was well-timed. By 1941, “he was on the radio, syndicated across the funny pages of every major US newspaper, and selling stamps, greeting cards, coloring books, bubble gum, board games, and war bonds” (Morrison 11).

All DC Comics characters and
the distinctive likeness(es) thereof
are Trademarks & Copyright
© 1939 DC Comics, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Batman followed closely on Superman’s heels in Detective Comics #27 of May 1939. He was created as a hero of the night in direct contrast to Superman, with visual inspiration coming from many film and literary sources, including da Vinci’s ornithopter sketches. Both Superman and Batman, then published under the imprint of National Comics, were cornerstones for the future DC Comics. One of many shell companies started specifically to latch onto the hero fad, Timely Comics publishing Marvel Comics in October 1939. The Human Torch and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner were the first residents of the future Marvel Universe. Hero after hero emerged in this Golden Age of comics. In the 1940s, there “was a superhero or villain for every profession, every class, every walk of life,” from lawyers to military men to scientists to taxi drivers to doctors to flower shop proprietors (Morrison 48). (I must interject that, as far as I know, there were no librarian heroes until Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, came out of the cave in 1967!)

Women in Blue and Gray

Women in Blue and Gray: Female Soldiers of the Civil War

Loreta Janeta Velázquez aka Henry T. Buford, CSA

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a story on NPR about the Marine training program to test women’s ability for combat duty. Next week, April 9 will mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. Naturally, from these two tidbits I got to thinking about the history of female combatants. From Boudica to Tomoe Gozen to Sgt. Kelly Brown (one of the Marines in combat training), there have been many visible woman warriors through time. However, others had to disguise themselves as men to enlist, such as Continental soldier Deborah Sampson and other Revolutionary War female fighters who contributed to the folkloric figure of Molly Pitcher. For today, I want to focus on the women who disguised themselves in the Blue and the Gray across five Aprils 150 years ago.

Frances Clayton
aka Jack Williams, U.S.A.

Women served both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. How did they hide in plain sight? By cutting their hair, binding their breasts, and putting on loose uniforms, they disappeared into the ranks. If they didn’t shave, they were likely taken as young teenage boys lying about their age, a problem that was often overlooked due to desperation for soldiers to fill the lines. They were able to hide their bodies more easily than they could in the modern military—the army’s medical examinations didn’t require clothing removal, soldiers rarely changed clothes or bathed, and filthy latrines were avoided in favor of private visits to the woods. As for their menses, which could give the soldier away easily, the physical stress of army life was likely to lead to amenorrhea. While enduring the stress of hiding their true identities, women also fought the same battles, suffered the same injuries and illnesses, performed the same duties, and struggled through the same hardships as their male counterparts.

It seems that most women were discovered eventually, often due to wounds or illness and hospital stays. Other women were discovered through their actions, dressing in a feminine manner or possessing an “unmanly” laugh. Practicing manly behavior and habits was vital to the success of their subterfuges. When Minnesota private Frances Clayton was discovered and discharged, the newspaper reported, “While in the army, the better to conceal her sex, she learned to drink, smoke, chew and swear with the best, or worst, of the soldiers” (Hall 28). As one would expect, physical attributes, such as small hands or fair skin, also exposed the deception. In some cases, simply being recognized by an acquaintance could end the ruse. One of my favorite exposé tales involves Sarah Bradbury and Ella Reno, who got drunk on applejack brandy, fell into a river, and were exposed by their rescuers!

Early Architecture and History in the Valley

2014 Deyerle Lecture Series

Early Architecture and History in the Valley

                On Thursday, October 2, at 7:00 pm, the Massanutten Regional Library will host the first of our lectures of the 14th annual Deyerle series, sponsored by the family of the late Dr. Henry P. Deyerle. The focus of the series is the Heritage of the Shenandoah Valley. The topic for 2014 is Architecture and History of houses in Rockingham County prior to the Civil War.

      The first lecture is an overview of architectural and construction characteristics common to Valley houses built between 1750 and 1850.  Ann Terrell Baker will be the speaker.  Ms. Baker is the author of Old Houses in Rockingham County Revisited, 1750-1850 (2000).  She will present a pictorial history on some of the houses discussed in the book.  Terrell’s book is an updated and expanded version of the volume published in 1970 by her father, Isaac Long “Jimmy” Terrell, titled Old Houses in Rockingham County, 1750-1850.  Both books are available at the Library.

While architectural style is subjected to “fads,” architectural interpretation is largely dependent on means, materials, and manpower at the location of construction.    One unique style does define early architecture in Rockingham County.  The styles found in the County were those brought by German settlers from Pennsylvania, English settlers from the Tidewater, and Scotch-Irish who traveled up the Valley.   Architectural styles of the early pioneers were remarkably similar wherever one went along the seaboard.  In this research no architect has been associated with or identified in Rockingham County during the period 1750-1850; however, a study of the houses reveals common architectural patterns.  (Note:  Scans of floor plans and some information are from Isaac Terrell’s book.)

Pioneer House

The basic and often first house of a settler was patterned in the pioneer style, which consisted, at a minimum, of one room with one fireplace.  Some structures had a pitched roof

making space under the eaves for storage or sleeping areas, which was reached by a ladder or by a circular staircase in a corner of the room.  An ell might be added at the rear of this room for storage.  If a fireplace was built in this addition, it was also used for cooking.  A house located on a slope could be dug-out for an additional room, and if a spring was there, it could be used as a fort against the Indians.  Construction materials were those at hand – stones and logs.  Though logs were used prior to 1750, what we think of as traditional chinked-log construction was introduced into the Valley by the Scotch-Irish in the mid-1700s.  As a pioneer prospered the original small houses were often added-on to with larger, grander extensions.