......here's to the Tar Heels from the "old North State"....go get 'em boys!....
...I'm not going over to the battle field this weekend...Sharpsburg is to this day a tiny village and it will be packed to the gills for the 140th commerative....I'll slip over next week when things die down.....and BTW the National Park Service has done a wonderful job in securing easements to halt encroachment....the sweep of the battlefield is the same now as then; so the visitor can get a real feel for the way the ground lies....one of the NPS guides told me that Sharpsburg and Shiloh are the two jewels in the crown of the Civil War battlefields...they're the last two to remain relatively untouched....you don't want to know what's going on over in Virginia....it's that bad.
Good luck to everybody!
Stonewalls
I visited Antietam/Sharpsburg and Gettysburg in 1993; it was part of a memorable summer. Hot, too, just like the summer of 1863, which was a real rose-wilter.
Then the next week I flew out to Burbank, rented a Mustang GT ragtop from an outfit in Beverly Hills, and drove the California coast road from Morro Rock to Crescent City. It was a "great year"!
The National Park Service deserves a lot of praise for what they've done on a shoestring with those great military parks. I've also visited Shiloh, Pea Ridge, the Crater, Chancellorsville/The Wilderness, Fort Oglethorpe, Lookout Mountain, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Manassas/Bull Run. Franklin, Nashville, Perryville, Glorieta, Missionary Ridge, Spottsylvania, Fredericksburg, Malvern Hill, Corinth, and the Peninsular Campaign and Shenandoah Valley battlefields are on my list -- as is Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where Dr. Mudd was imprisoned.