Confederate Train & the Medal of Honor | History Traveler Episode 94

my gosh have you ever seen a kentucky fried chicken like the one that they have in marietta georgia look at this thing it even has a moving beak and a rolling eye i can't even believe what i'm seeing right now [Music] all right well we have been making our way through the south in august and man i'll tell you what there has been more sweat lost on this trip than on any other trip i've ever been on in my life i think so we're going to take today and hit a few museums get in out of the heat it's uh approaching midday now and where we are at this moment is the southern museum of the civil war and locomotive history and uh i know for a fact that this museum has a pretty large artifact that ties in with some other episodes that we've had on this channel all right we just got our tickets and entered into the museum here and this is of course focusing on the role of the railroads in the civil war so a big part of the union and confederate strategy was capturing and protecting different rail lines so we're going to kind of explore around and see what they have and as always we have our rule that if we see a gun we have to film it and man these are some beautiful models of different civil war long arms wow one thing that i really appreciate about this museum already is is they're trying to highlight the experience of all different groups of people in the civil war so the the experience of slaves here this one is looking at the experience of civilians and it has some different artifacts here like this wax holder interesting cast iron kettle some games okay yeah so so i can i can really appreciate what they're what they're doing here now here's something kind of interesting that i've really never thought about or considered here around marietta there was a big industry called the glover machine works and these are items out of their pattern shop and this is this was pretty fascinating to me so if you've ever wondered how did they make those big giant railroad parts well they would create a pattern out of wood so they'd make like a replica of the locomotive parts out of wood and then they would press it into a sand mold and uh then pour the the metal casting in for the parts and uh really took a lot of ingenuity to do this um because i mean you know the the iron shrinks uh whenever it cools so yeah the fact that people figured out how to do this pretty impressive here they're showing how all these different parts are cast and it's it's too much for me to explain in just one video you really need to come here for yourself and check it out really really interesting well this is no doubt going to be the inflammatory part of the video but we might as well get it over with one of the big debates going on right now uh and really has for a few years now is the presence of confederate statues in public places uh well i'm not we're not gonna i'm not gonna you know give an opinion one way or the other i'm just showing things as they are here's a statue of john bell hood um i think this one was in the state capital rotunda of georgia for a while and then was at stone mountain's confederate hall before being donated to the museum here and then they also have one of general robert e lee on his horse traveler and then another confederate general right here um of joseph johnston so anyway i'm sure that everybody has has their own opinions on the presence of statues some see it as uh you know a marker of history others see it as a racist symbol uh and then they talk about that here you know they they look at both perspectives [Music] okay i'm going to amend my previous statement i am going to offer an opinion here canceling the dukes of hazard yeah that that one i think went a little bit too far okay so we're now moving into the next exhibit and uh this one is showing how a steam locomotive would have looked like in the process of assembly now i read that from the time of an order until time of completion you're looking at about one to five months to put one of these engines together depending on the size this looks like maybe a little bit smaller one so this probably would have been pretty quick but man look at all of the parts and pieces that had to go together that's pretty impressive okay we're moving into a different section of the museum now and and this is the the primary reason why i wanted to come here that's because of andrew's raiders so in one of my previous videos i think it was titled the grave of desmond doss i go to the chattanooga national cemetery and buried there are the first recipients of the medal of honor and the reason that they were awarded that that high honor was because a group of them hang on let me find him led by this man right here james andrews uh organized this raid in short where they went deep into confederate territory this was in the spring of 1862 they hijacked a train called the general and then brought it back up towards chattanooga to you know like disrupt the communications between atlanta and chattanooga tear up rail lines all kinds of different things like that and they have pictures and the stories of each one of andrew's raiders on display here so really really cool to uh to see this uh james andrews and seven or eight others uh were you know sentenced to execution uh as soon as they were captured um they they hijacked the train right here around marietta and um didn't quite make it to chattanooga but some of them were executed some of them escaped others were exchanged for other prisoners but uh yeah this whole section of the museum here is dedicated to the raiders [Music] they have a little diorama here showing the lacy hotel this is where the general was hijacked on april 12 1862 by andrews raiders the hotel is no longer there but the rail line that the general was on is still there now this map is showing kind of the route of what would become known as the great locomotive chase so big shanty which is now kennesaw or the marietta area is where it started and they talk about what happened at each stage along the way they had another train called the texas that was chasing them down they go through tunnel hill and made it all the way up to ringgold so they made it almost to the tennessee line and then they they ran out of wood and water of course it was running on steam power um had to bail out and then and then got captured all right we're going to see if covet has messed this up supposedly this is supposed to make a train show up on these tracks and i'm not seeing anything never mind i think there is a train it's just not moving this is why andrew's raiders got captured all right we're going through the chittoogida chirogida chirogueta mountain tunnel just like the the raiders did with the general and then looky here there is the general that is the actual train that andrews raiders hijacked in the spring of 1862. that is so cool that they have this here i've moved over to the other side of the engine now just to take a look at it from this angle it's a little bit bigger than i expected it to be but man oh man how awesome is it to be able to see the object that was at the center of the very first medals of honor being awarded wow here's a look at the general from above that andrews raiders would have been riding on whenever they were heading up from big shanty towards chattanooga you can kind of see a little bit more of the detail and inner workings of the steam engine here [Music] this is so cool [Music] my gosh look at this this right here is the actual medal of honor that was awarded to one of andrew's raiders uh this is william knights william knight was the engineer for the raid so his presence was vital for its success he was captured and ended up escaping from his prison in atlanta they have three of these medals of honor here at the museum but they kind of rotate them in and out and this is the one that's on display right now holy smokes how cool is it to be able to see one of the first medals of honor ever to be awarded that is amazing all right well that was legitimately cool uh to have been able to go and visit the graves of andrews himself and some of his raiders in one of the prior videos and then to be able to come here and see the general itself and see one of the medals of honor that was awarded to the raiders very very cool experience uh there there's a ton of great things in this museum so much that i didn't cover because there's just way too much uh so if you're ever in marietta man come to this place it it really really is worth it and they have air conditioning so that was nice too all right as for now we're off to the next place you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 33,987

Rating: 4.965991 out of 5

Keywords: history, history underground, history traveler, travel, georgia, civil war, civil war history, union, confederacy, confederate, atlanta campaign, freed slave, marietta, medal of honor, great locomotive chase, andrews raiders, andrew's raiders

Id: PL5QtS_HC5A

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020