Tour Stop 33: Locating the Famous Civil War Photos of Atlanta

so chris makowski of emerging civil war for the american battlefield trust we're standing on the campus of georgia tech in downtown atlanta glad to have you with us we've got a really really cool treat for you today i'm going to bring on everyone's favorite battlefield guy gary adelin in just a second to talk about his very favorite thing photography but the special part about this is he's going to reveal some brand new information research that he's been working hard on and you get to see it first gary come on in and give us the treats okay well the first treat is that just read the comments on youtube i am not everybody's favorite battlefield guide let me assure you um one more thing so that's chris white behind the camera and the reason we're set up here on the campus is because i think many of you know that a lot of the atlanta battlefield and its resources are simply gone paved over by this modern large thriving city but you can still see traces even here on the georgia tech campus and i want to direct your attention to that building behind me where you can see a sort of fort shaped slope coming down from it you can in other words see that that building the way that it's built on to a hill okay you can see that that's a hill and the good thing is we have lots of good maps so we know that that is a place called fort x sometimes called fort hood a little bit later now what i really want to show you is that if you go right to that slope there and then come off in this direction you'd be seeing this one of the most famous photos of the civil war was taken from fort x and we're going to stop in a second we'll make sure we give you a good view of this was taken from fort x looking toward the ponder house and this ponder house i'm going to show you the location right now was right beyond these trees here along the tree line drive we're going to keep walking and get closer to it okay the ponder house of course is featured in multiple photographs sometimes close sometimes farther away and you can just see it it's often used to show the reality of war the way war came to people's doorsteps and whatnot and here was george barnard taking an immense series of photos around here and that's what i want to reveal a little bit about today but before i do let's learn a little bit about the line of force why were the confederates here why are union soldiers photographed in them to talk about some of this let me bring up charlie crawford he's president emeritus of the georgia battlefields association and one time we spent two and a half hours doing what we're trying to do in 10 minutes so no pressure charlie i don't get two and a half hours you do not sir all right the confederacy atlanta was not considered to be under threat early in the war but the thing that changed their mind was when abel strait led that raid across northern alabama headed for the industrial facilities of rome georgia he was swarted by bedford forest in may of 1863. that's when the city fathers of atlanta said we really need to build some defenses around the city and they commissioned l.p grant who is a railroad builder originally from maine but his cast is a lot with the south and he came up with a series of forts around the city this is from the atlas to accompany the official record this was drawn before the atlantic campaign ever began because in late 1863 it was when grant designed the defenses of the city gary mentioned we're at ford x and that's right here now you notice ford x was not originally included in the line this was the original defense line when the u.s army approached though the realization became clear that with the artillery that the u.s army had they would be able to shell the center of the city if this was the extent of the defense line so in the wake of the battle of peachtree creek they quickly built fortifications to connect uv w x y and z with fort k which was the pinnacle of the defense line so that's why we're here at ford x thanks so much charlie so you know we could make this painful for you i've got about 40 photos connected that were taken north and west and a little bit southeast of atlanta we're just going to focus on a handful of these but let me show a little bit more about this map again and i'm saying this to encourage you all to do your own photo research you never know what you might end up with this is 4k that charlie just mentioned that's on peachtree street and were we to go i don't know a mile off straight ahead or so we would end up at 4k and then you see zy which is i don't know not 300 yards off to your left front there and then of course we have fort x which is right behind the camera we already showed you that now the reason i'm particular in showing these letters is that i had no idea where any of these sports were i didn't know that they were lettered i didn't know anything about them i just started looking at photos like these when i started looking at the photo i said okay i'm looking at the side of this this ponder house that much i knew i knew i was looking at the front over there i knew that there was all this chavo de free and fortifications in front of it and i started to notice other things in the background under magnification i could see a little white house and you know what i could see that little white house in other photos as well and i started to realize other photos that were taken from fort hood i oh sorry ford x i also realized that we had other photos this probably being the most famous one of the ponder house now this is clearly the back you can see this artillery shell hole as in the other shots so we know that this is the side right up ahead that was facing us here so we know that you would have to go across the street over there and record it from the other side and this is virtual reality 19th century style when you start to get an idea of where photos were taken of a certain area you can start to re-picture the terrain and that's just what i'm trying to do today in any case there is an extensive series of photos taken inside fort x looking off in various directions okay it's a big fortification and there are literally photos looking that way that way that way and this way and they form almost a panorama as you go along you can see it another thing you can do is look from fort uh k and actually zoom in and see the ponder house at a distance so we could see all four sides of the ponder house as well so we can start to form a complete photo tour along this line i didn't know where any of these things were until i started meeting with charlie and a couple others at the atlanta history center so here's a photo that was taken in uh fort axe super cool stuff you may have seen it before you can see these are union soldiers inside this confederate fort obviously the union photographer didn't arrive until the union soldiers came in here there are several other photos just like this one and the photographer also then mounted a position here and took photos off in the other direction on the in other words off to chris white's right here what i want to focus in on is a lot of people look at him but i started looking at this little tattered wood shed you can see in the distance i'm going to show you a blow-up of that now because um i thought it looked familiar to me when i zoomed in and these prints aren't as good as the real thing thank you charlie i started seeing okay there's a wood shed it looks like there's like a front of the shed missing here and i swear i see an earthwork here okay and i said that looks familiar omg that looks like this in reverse okay so i could clearly see the front of that building there i can see the earthwork and when i compared it to the photo i just showed you i could see that tree and that tree and that tree and that tree and by the way this tree right here sits smack dab in the middle of fort x we know it's there so everything started coming together and these by the way there are three or four different photos taken from here great series of photos entitled picket post outside atlanta we know exactly where it is it is right out there about two or three hundred yards chris yeah i just want to ask you gary because one of the things that you helped illuminate for me is that you can look at the detail in photos because of the glass plate technology that allowed to catch a detail that you can't ever catch on a digital camera and so really zooming in like you have has allowed you to really find these really cool connections yes i couldn't agree more so these uh wet these glass plate negatives were depending on what you're talking about 10 to 25 times larger than the 35 millimeter negatives that most of us grew up with here and unlike the 35 millimeter negatives which have a grain and unlike digital photos which have pixels the chemical sheet of the wet plate process allows for not endless but a substantial set of zoom ins or resolution zoom so you can really enlarge these things and see them you take your best digital camera today get 15 feet away from someone and see if you can see their fingerprints and then you'll know that we're talking about something equivalent to the wet plate process indeed 160 years later we're just starting to approach the technology that allows us to approach the wet plate process so i'm so glad you brought that up chris now i'm almost done with what i wanted to do i'm just trying to encourage you to do this with your favorite photos a lot of people say are there any photos of this place i always say go to loc.gov prints and photographs search for your favorite thing and if there's 12 photos of the place you'll like there's a good chance you'll be able to make connections between them because photographers didn't simply unhitch their horses take one photo move somewhere else unhitch their horses pour their plates take one more photo they took them in groups they tended to take multiple photos at the same place here i'm going to show you three more pictures and chris left you some panning here of the tree that's at right in the middle of fort x i showed you this tree already and here's two more photos showing that same tree looking out for x there okay so and we already saw it from the picket post as well you don't need some sort of a special skill to be able to determine that this is the same tree you could simply imagine the branches on both sides you could even take photoshop and reverse the photo and see what that tree would look like in reverse other things like that have helped me to determine not only where for that fort k had photos looking in both directions around peachtree street and toward fort x over here but not only that that they are actually actively chopping parts of trees down during the photo series and you have different units coming into these things so barnard didn't record all these photos in a day these photos were recorded over time after the unit had gotten into atlanta and of course before they moved out for other points or a lot of the city burned so i want to encourage you all to do this go to the library of congress type in atlanta start to download photos of forts and i think you're going to be happy one more thing i want to show you near the end here is that there's another series of photos that has often been attributed to being on peachtree street north of the city i wasn't sure about that until with some friends locally i had showed them that i had lined these two photos up very famous photo on the right here here you have a cannon looking right at it and i believe that cannon barrel is still to this day or now sits in the visitor center at kennesaw mountain battlefield oh okay i got the thumbs up from charlie and let me tell you that's a rarity folks and i i started looking at the distinctive distinctive markings on the sandbags over here and determined that this photo long thought to be north of the city and captioned that way i think by orlando poe during the civil war was in fact the same place no big deal except that in the background of this photo you can see a distinctive building i think it's the medical institution of atlanta or something like that and that you can see that same building looking south and east of atlanta from a panoramic photo taken from a women's seminary female college female institute thank you here's just some of the work i did in comparing those sandbags in order to get them together and i think this is the extent to which i'm going to punish you as i link these together but please know that i've been able to link together some 40 photographs with no knowledge at all of the atlanta fortifications and you could do things like this too i'm not sure if i see chris mikowski sneaking up here but if you do sneak up stand further away because i'm getting pushed back talking about all the defenses is really important because we've just in our previous video talked about the battle of peachtree creek which means william t sherman and his army group are coming into downtown and it's these defenses that we've been talking about and showing you that are the only thing standing in his way also standing in his way a pretty battered john bell hood brand new to command he's suffered a defeat at peachtree creek he's still trying to overcome the learning curve of coming to command he's got a brand new core structure core commanders that he's working with uh with it with uh alexander stewart uh he's got hardy uh and uh of course lauren's gone back to division command and so he's trying to figure out oh and then of course he elevates ben cheatham to take his place at court command two so he was trying to have uh figure out how to handle all these moving pieces and of course i've got to bring my guide who stopped the smith in at this point because he is commanding the georgia militia and uh they are a bedraggled bunch of folks men up to the age of 55 down to the age of 15 and they've got flintlock muskets they've got shotguns and they've got everything from their old granddaddy's attic and that's what the defense of this city is and so as sherman is knocking we've got a very very um troubled confederate defense and these fortifications that we've been talking about to find out what happens we're going to get into those videos at our next few stops gary good thanks so much chris and i think i'm done i appreciate charlie both you giving me the thumbs up and providing me some much needed technical and uh historical expertise thanks to chris for hosting on this thanks to chris for shooting and you all you know i hope that at least a few of you had a head explosion moment when you realize that this is the same structure in two different directions and that i have for eight years now known exactly where this structure is or within you know 50 square 50 square yards or so off in the distance there i hope you had a moment like that i'm waiting to publish it eventually so don't publish it yourself please but feel free to credit the american battlefield trust if you want to talk about it so thank you so much for watching for indulging us in some civil war photography nerdery and thank you for supporting battlefield preservation and education you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 27,657

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, american battlefield trust western theater tour, american battlefield trust georgia tour, civil war georgia, civil war atlanta, civil war photography

Id: KZ-MFQgIrsI

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022