skip to main |
skip to sidebar
From
Brownstoner:
A pre-Civil War house with a remarkably well preserved exterior (a former Building of the Day) at 133 Carlton Avenue in Wallabout is being marketed as a development site for $5,200,000, along with two neighboring lots that include another small wood frame house and a convenience store. The house at 133 Carlton Avenue, once used as a church, is a wood frame Greek Revival house built in the 1840s. In his 2005 Wallabout Cultural Resource Survey, architectural historian Andrew Dolkart called this house the “most interesting house on the block.”
From the
NY Post:
A historic gas station in Queens has been in business for so long that when it first opened, the only mustangs and broncos it serviced had stirrups, not seatbelts.
Farrington Service Station in College Point opened in 1868 — just three years after the Civil War ended. And while other gas stations have come and gone, remarkably, Farrington’s has been owned by the same family on the same street corner for 145 years.
“My father and my grandfather before him always said, ‘Never sell your luck,’ ” said John Farrington, 56, who co-owns the station at 15th Avenue and 126th Street with his brother, Michael.
“That gas station has been our luck in this family for five generations. We would never get rid of it.”
The station has undergone numerous face-lifts as it’s gone from servicing horses to fueling automobiles — first with Sinclair Oil, then BP and, finally, with Gulf.
From
CBS 2:
Today, the 478-acre expanse of greenery and statuary covering [Green-Wood] cemetery’s rolling hills is believed to be the final resting place of about 8,000 Civil War veterans.
A team of volunteers and Green-Wood staff has spent nearly a decade trying to identify all those graves. When the project began in September 2002, cemetery officials figured they had, at most, 500 veterans of the nation’s bloodiest war buried here.
Using the cemetery’s own burial records, plus government, military and privately owned documents available online, Green-Wood’s project has identified the graves of about 4,600 Civil War veterans. Green-Wood historian Jeffrey Richman estimates 3,000 to 4,000 more are scattered among the cemetery’s more than 560,000 total interments.
The Civil War dead buried at Green-Wood include unknown privates and famous officers, buglers and Medal of Honor recipients, Yankees from Maine to Iowa, fathers, sons and brothers, and even 75 Confederates, including two generals. None of the original gravestones for the Confederates gave any indication they had fought for the South, an intentional omission being rectified by the installation of new granite markers provided by Veterans Affairs.
Some of the gravestones and other markers at the previously known burial plots indicate that a person was a Civil War veteran, but most don’t bear information or an insignia that would tip off researchers, Richman said. Some of the grave markers are so worn the inscriptions can’t be read, while others are overgrown by grass or have sunken below ground level. Many of the veterans lie in unmarked graves, and it’s only by checking the cemetery’s detailed maps that individual burial plots can be located.
Part of the project includes placing new granite markers at the graves, marked and unmarked, of 2,000 of the Civil War veterans. So far, about 1,300 of the VA markers have been installed.
From the
NY Times:
It was anything but civil. On Jan. 7, 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood exhorted New York’s Board of Aldermen to declare the city’s independence from Albany and from Washington — a bold stroke of self-preservation that he maintained “would have the whole and united support of the Southern States.”
Two years later, the federal government diverted Union troops fresh from the Gettysburg battlefield to quell bloody draft riots in Manhattan, a defensive military maneuver that might have allowed Robert E. Lee to escape and prolonged the war.
If that is all New Yorkers remember about the Civil War, it is no wonder that the State Legislature balked at authorizing an official sesquicentennial commemoration.
“The Union does not win the war without New York,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian at Columbia University who edited the Encyclopedia of New York City.
Yet earlier this year, the State Senate failed even to authorize a sesquicentennial commission, much less appropriate any money to support commemorations, exhibitions, retrospectives or any other events around the state to mark the start of the Civil War 150 years ago.
From the
NY Post:
The state Parks Department had been hard at work preserving some 2,000 flags and standards carried into battle by New York military units -- most of them dating to the Civil War.
Nearly 500 flags, battered by decades of neglect, have already been meticulously conserved and made fit for display -- at a cost of only $100,000 a year.
Now, faced with budget cuts, the department is scrapping the program.
The standards are vital markers of New York's critical role at places like Gettysburg and Antietam. And New York has so many of them only because of its outsized contribution to the Union cause.
That needs remembering.
Save the battle flags -- now.
