An ULTRARARE Gettysburg Civil War Collection (w/ Lincoln Artifacts) | History Traveler Episode 149

[Music] all right well in uh the the last episode uh we were here at the gettysburg museum of history which i'm going to say is probably one of the most impressive private collections i've ever seen in my life way too much to pack into one episode so so the last episode was a walk through in this one we are going to be looking at some of the most unique amazing relics of the civil war that i think you can find anywhere [Music] i'm gonna highlight a few of the really important gettysburg battlefield relics we have at the gettysburg museum of history i'm also going to give a brief history of the reason why there are relics from the get-go right after the battle people started coming to gettysburg to see the battlegrounds and there was debris from the battle strewn everywhere and people started taking souvenirs home they wanted a piece of the battle to show to their friends their family so they started taking items and the first thing that they started taking were weapons you know with all the casualties that the battle would get is where there were weapons everywhere and the provost marshal actually had to restrict that because people were it'd be like if there'd be a battle today there'd be you know m4 or you know and you know modern weapons all over the place and people were taking them but people wanted a little piece of the battle and so people started picking items up locals started selling them to tourists and the first organization that really started selling relics was a place called the danner museum and they had a cigar shop there and they had this is an original photograph it's a stereo view showing what they were selling and one of the favorite items of the time were artillery shells you know artillery explosive artillery was new technology people were fascinated by it so they would empty the gunpowder out of the shells and we had a few terrible accidents where locals were unloading shells without skill and had some accidents here but they started selling them and they would have the danner museum would have these bases with the location so this is an artillery shell parrot shell that was found at lee's headquarters and it was sold through the danner museum and most of the danner museum the the characteristic of that that those items is white paint so these headquarters and a lot of times they used a numbering system you can see some of the items in this photo do have little numbers on there and so uh this next piece is a is a piece of wood and there's a bullet in the wood and it has number 34 and that's a danner number and so then they started marketing other souvenirs this is a piece of wood that started out something like this with a bullet in it and they made gavels and they painted on here gettysburg 1863 and they started marketing functional relics something that you can use over here we have a few other items from the dander museum and there's also other companies there's a guy named edward woodward that made some items in john good and they made these desk sets so they would take items from the battle such as bullets shelf rags and other buttons whatever and they made ink wells and and desk sets out of them and since we're in this case now here's another just regular artifact it's a bullet struck canteen from the danner museum again it has the number 17 on it and it's from the peach orchard so the danner museum edward woodward these were some of the first what we would call relic dealers who would sell these items to taurus and now they're some of the most sought after and collectible items around if you ever find one of these because they're they made thousands of them if you ever find one at an antique place uh email us info gettysburgmuseumahistory.com we will buy it from you because we're very interested in these they're the first ever gettysburg relics [Music] now here is something that is kind of dark but absolutely worth mentioning you can kind of see there uh is a confederate bayonet and you can see the it has been fashioned into a giant hook um well that is a body hook that the soldiers would use to drag the dead into the shallow burial trenches my goodness one of the things we look for in early gettysburg relics are ink tags some people call them granny tags some people call them museum tags so a lot of the older pieces will have old tags now here we have a civil war union forge cap that was found on the battlefield and it has a tag saying who it was worn by this is from general lee's headquarters collection that was at one time a big museum like this that had lots of artifacts and they sold most of those items a few years ago and we were fortunate enough to get this piece and another way relics got out um besides taurus picking them up uh were some of the soldiers and some of the men that fought would actually bring items back as souvenirs this was the lock plate from general mead's headquarters and it was given to it was taken by one of meade's aides and um you know they put an old tag on there to document that it was a souvenir saying i was there you know so i want to show you this this is a really neat rifle one of the problems with black gun powder the old technology was it would it would corrode and it would build up and they would have misfires and in in a heated combat situation if your gun misfires what are you going to do well you'll pick up a rifle for or a musket from a casualty you don't have time to clean it or mess with it when you're in a hot fight so this is what we theorized happened to this gun this is from the battle of gettysburg and um soldier must have picked up a rifle or in this case a musket picked it up and it was already loaded and he reloaded it again and and this is the result when when you have an obstruction and and you have too much powder in there it blows up okay and this musket was actually in the jenny wade museum again the jenny wade house is not like it is today in in the early 20th century it was a museum just like this there was a whole lot of small museums like this all over town general lee's headquarters jenny wade house a whole bunch of them and they had relics in there and then this this also ended up in the charlie weaver museum another museum that is now gone you know so many museums have come and gone here but this is and now it's here so it's been in three museums and it's been continuously on display since the early 20th century that's just a neat piece this is a grouping that came right from the family this guy's name was cornelius j smith of the famous pennsylvania bucktails and uh here's a picture of him here and the bucktails were the famous unit that fought at gettysburg who wore a deer's tail on their hat and this is his items the rifle would not have been used at the battle of gettysburg because that unit didn't start getting this type of rifle till later but one of the neat things about this is he uses an actual confederate cartridge box and he made a core badge which is the fifth core which is that maltese cross on there and he put it on there and it's it's a true confederate um cartridge box and it's very unusual for union guys to use confederate accouterments because they're inferior you see confederates using a lot of union stuff you don't see a lot of union guys using confederate stuff so it's a really neat item again i came right from the family they they they donated it here so we're happy to have that piece and he was wounded at the battle of gettysburg we pulled his pension records and an artillery shell blew up next to him and blew his ear out you know so he had hearing loss and he claimed that on his pension wow so here's one of the gettysburg battlefield anomalies this is two bullets that hit in midair and um they say that's one in a million uh but we actually have two of them there's another one there and so uh the one here has an old ink tag like i talked about before and it was originally in the rose and steel museum and the rose and steel collection later became what's now at the gettysburg national military parks visitor center run by the gettysburg foundation but mr rosenstiel the original owner gave this to a battlefield guide and the reason why it's so worn and it looks gray instead of the normal white patina that we see on a bullet was the story was up until the 1960s or 70s a battle the battlefield guide who owned that carried it in his pocket and he would show it to his tours oh wow so this is just completely fascinating to me this is an old war log that is just absolutely chewed up with bullets from the civil war and uh we're in gettysburg and if you've ever watched the movie gettysburg or read the book killer angels well you know the story of joshua chamberlain in the 20th maine we'll look at this they actually have the headquarters desk of the 20th main here this would have been used uh by ames who who proceeded chamberlain and then chamberlain himself uh and then his successor a guy by the name of spear and there's some provenance here it might be a little bit hard to see on camera but there's some writing there that talks about it and it's right here in the gettysburg museum of history [Music] this is a fascinating artifact it's actually a museum within a museum because this is a john good relic box and i talked earlier about danner and edward woodward and also there was another guy named john good who made some of the death sets but they also made shadow boxes and this would be something that they would give or sell to a gar hall or a veterans hall and every piece in there is labeled and it's all from different areas of the battlefield this is the biggest and probably one of the only surviving john good relic boxes and it's actually made from some parts from an old danner museum box because it has the white paint so he recycled some pieces there john good made most of his material later than the danner museum this is more like uh turn of the century and has his card right there but there's stuff from all over the battlefield including two uh hats that are pretty moth eaten but it's just an amazing piece and the box itself is actually made with witness wood from the battle and they have little tags here and it says where it's from reynolds woods and culps hill so each panel was made from a wood from a different area the battlefield it's just a really neat piece and i want to go down to this this is um called in one of the best gettysburg artifact books perhaps the ultimate gettysburg relic um it's a cartridge box plate so it would have gone on this right here they would have a us plate on their cartridge box and it stopped a confederate bullet and it's smashed in and um it actually made the cover of this book this book is considered the bible of gettysburg battlefield relics and uh the author describes it as the ultimate battlefield rally it was found on little round top and uh again a lot of these are out there most of them are fake but this one's 100 real it's a phenomenal relic now in an earlier episode i was at the jenny wade house and after that episode uh went up on youtube i had several several people asking me what happened to the letters of jenny wade well i just found them well here are some of the letters that were exchanged between jenny wade and jack skelly and then here you can also see some some photos of jenny wade again if you're unfamiliar with that story you can go back and look at the episode one particular one that i wanted to point out was was this one here if i can get it focused you'll notice that there is a part of the letter that has been cut out and there was a handwritten note that was included that says letters destroyed just boy and girl chatter of no interest to prying and critical eyes of others so yeah there must have been some some romantic words exchanged between jenny and uh jack skelly but that is absolutely incredible [Music] so the items in this case are the items from the pepper collection this is my ancestors my great great grandfather they the the original pepper farm was near the eisenhower farm that's where they were during the battle and then about 1865 they moved to ziggler's grove and they farmed that area for several decades so most of these items were found in the ziggler's grove area one of the really interesting stories was my great great grandfather was plowing in 1887 and he was near the he would also lease the brian property which is right next door he would lease that on certain years so he was farming that area in front of the uh the 12th new jersey monument and i i made i had a i commissioned an artist to do a drawing of it and he hit a burial trench there and um most of the confederate bodies had been moved by that time but they still found him over the over the years and he found seven skeletons and there are mississippi soldiers so you know we we theorize that's the 11th mississippi because they were right there at the wall and those buttons in the round um case are mississippi state buttons and they have chunks of the uniform on and then those items at the very top the cartridge boxes and canteens also came from those graves so back then uh it made the paper there's some newspaper articles about it nobody wanted to deal with it he wanted to try to send them down to richmond where the other confederate bodies were nobody wanted to deal with it so he just reburied him he reburied him at a fence out there until a guy came back the next year it was 1888 it was the 25th anniversary some confederates came back and a guy claimed to be the brother of one of the men that were killed at that area and uh they exhumed the skeletons and he identified his brother because he was shot through the hip and one of the seven skeletons were had a shattered hip bone oh my god and this story was passed down through my family my grandfather told me and he heard it from his grandfather so it's it's um it's a really fascinating story as far as i know some of the skeletons are still out there they were never moved but um fascinating story one of my other favorite stories from the pepper collection is this bayonet right here it's a it's an enfield bayonet and it was found actually on big round top now why was uh the puffers up on big round top well the story is a cow got out it broke a fence and a broken fence and and he trailed it somehow and he was looking for this lost cow and he heard a rustling of the leaves and he looked around and there was a confederate skeleton like or a leg bone that had fallen out of a tree so he looked up and there was a confederate soldier who had taken his cartridge box or his belt or something and strapped himself up there and got killed up there oh my god and his leg fell off at that moment rustled the leaves he went over to see it and he took the bayonet that had also fallen from that tree and stuck it in the ground so he could find it again he went back and got some help and they removed that body as well and he kept that bayonet so i love that story and we have a little tag about the story here the other really interesting story that i i thought was fascinating um when i was a kid we had this uh saddle right here and and when they were still over near the eisenhower farm there was a lot of cavalry activity out there south cavalry field um there was a horse when they came came home and and like most citizens the peppers fled gettysburg because the confederates were taking horses and animals so they grabbed their horses and got out of town they went towards the union line because they didn't want to lose their horses when they came home uh right after the battle they found a wounded horse in their pasture that and they thought they were going to have to you know destroy the animal and everything but they decided to try to nurse it back to health and they did and i went to the uh adams county historical society where the re where the court records or the um tax records are and i researched it and in 1864 taxes they listed an another horse so it like it checked out totally but i believed it anyway because it came right from my family but they kept that that uh saddle so i i just always loved that story as a kid too and there's millions of these stories here my grandfather told me a lot of great stories um you know he worked at the jenny wade museum when he was a kid and some veterans came back but there's a million stories all right here's another incredible item from the battle of gettysburg uh this is the chair that was used by general mead at his headquarters on july 1st 2nd and 3rd of 1863 and you might ask how in the world did this end up in the gettysburg museum of history well the story is pretty cool uh eric's great great grandfather's brother got it from lydia leicester herself whose house the union army used as their headquarters during the battle that is incredible my gosh it just doesn't end uh here are abraham lincoln's opera glasses that were used at ford's theater the night that he was assassinated [Music] this is abraham lincoln's wallet and it's got quite an interesting story it was carried by lincoln all through his presidency and you can see the other side is very very worn out and that was from going in and out of his coat pocket back then men wore wallets in their coat pocket not in their pants pocket and his secretary john hay noticed how worn out it was one time and gave him a brand new wallet for his birthday in february of 1865. and that's the wallet he was killed with the brand new one if you look at the one that the library of congress has he only had that for a couple of months where this is the one he carried all through his presidency has his name a lincoln the a is a little worn off but he purportedly carried this with him during the gettysburg address so this is an amazing artifact that was purportedly in the pocket of president lincoln when he delivered the gettysburg address and it's probably one of the most sacred and interesting and historic items at the gettysburg museum in history it came from robert white who also had a lot of our kennedy items and he had gotten it from another big time collector and you know there's a whole provenance chain of who owned it but john hayes son ended up with the wallet in 1909 he sold it to a big uh wealthy collector and um you know that's the provenance chain but uh john haye had several items of lincoln's and he sold a few items and there's some newspaper articles about some of the items he sold a big hair lock and a couple other things but amazing item and uh you know when robert white passed away his family donated it to the museum so we're very grateful for that item [Music] so as eric was just talking about this is the wallet that abraham lincoln had whenever he wrote and delivered the gettysburg address well guess what else they have here they have a chair from the david wills house from whenever he stayed at gettysburg now we don't know for sure but it's quite probable that he sat in this chair whenever he was putting the finishing touches on one of the most famous speeches of all time and it's all right here [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 106,019

Rating: 4.9695816 out of 5

Keywords: gettysburg, history, gettyburg museum, travel, history traveler, history underground, military collection, gettysburg museum, gettysburg museum of history, historic artifacts, civil war, confederate, jennie wade, george meade, crazy history, battle of gettysburg, pennsylvania bucktails, lincoln, lincoln artifact, abraham lincoln assassination

Id: DK5hmeGScH4

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021