Another Death in the Family at the Battle of Plymouth

This map from Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-65 shows Plymouth in April 1864. Our house, built around 1870, is indicated by the orange and red triangle near the center of the map.

Years after the Civil War ended in 1865, author George Nowitzky visited Plymouth – where my wife and I live – as part of the research he was doing for a book. What he saw astonished him.

“There is no town or city in the United States that shows more scars of war than Plymouth, N.C.,” he wrote in 1888. “Every few steps within the business portion brought me to excavations and low stone walls which but too plainly show that they were formerly cellars and foundations to buildings that have passed into smoke, ashes and history.”

Plymouth’s location in northeastern North Carolina on the Roanoke River near the Albemarle Sound offered an important strategic advantage to whoever held it. So Union and Confederate armies battled to control the town throughout the war. And any town that must repeatedly endure being the object of contention between two hostile armies is going to be left in shambles.

Union troops occupied Plymouth in early 1862. Control of the town went back and forth until late 1864. It’s been said that at the end of the war, there were only 11 buildings in the town that had not been destroyed or heavily damaged. All that remained, Nowitzky wrote, were “nothing but ghostly looking brick chimneys and stone foundations which could not burn.”

Reminders and scars of the war are still visible. Former Union soldiers returned to Plymouth after the war to repair Grace Episcopal Church over at the corner of Madison and Water streets a few blocks from our house. But I’m told that there are a few holes made by cannonballs in some of the lumber in the interior of its steeple.

Less than a block down Washington Street from our home is a house with plainly visible bullet holes around one window, reminders of fierce street fighting that happened here on December 10, 1862 when Confederate raiders attacked Union troops and set fire to houses on Columbia Street, now Main Street.

Confederate forces regained control of the town during the Battle of Plymouth, fought April 17-20, 1864. On April 18, the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle chased Union gunboats down the Roanoke River and then shelled Union troops in the town.

Our house sits on ground that was occupied in April 1864 by Fort Williams, a Union fort. It’s possible that the shot that killed Moses Dry 150 years ago today was fired from this fort. Moses was the brother of my great-great grandfather, Allison Dry and the uncle of my great-grandfather, William C. Dry, and his brothers, Thomas Dry and Daniel Dry.

Moses was 45 years old when he enlisted in the Confederate Army in May 1863. His comrades-in-arms in the 8^th North Carolina Infantry bore surnames that are common today in telephone books back home in Stanly, Cabarrus and Rowan counties – Barringer, Blackwelder, Culp, Earnhart, Eudy, Fisher, Goodman, Honeycutt, Isenhour, Lowder, Misenheimer, Ridenhour, Ritchie, and Safrit, among others.

Moses may have met his end when his unit made a spirited but foolish and futile charge on the morning of April 20 to try to oust the defenders from Fort Williams, by then the last Union stronghold in Plymouth.

“The men charged up to the edge of the surrounding ditch, only to find that it could not be crossed,” wrote John W. Graham, a former Confederate officer who fought in the battle and contributed to a history of North Carolina troops that was published in 1901. “There was but one of two courses to take, to-wit: either to fall back or to surrender. The regiment chose the former. When the retreat began, the enemy poured a fearful volley into the ranks, killing and wounding many of the men. This charge was reckless and unnecessary. It was made under the flush of victory, and not by order of the commanding general.”

Fort Williams surrendered after being pounded by Confederate artillery. The Battle of Plymouth was over, and the town was back in Confederate hands – for a few months.

Union military strategists were determined to retake the town, but with the Albemarle anchored on the Plymouth waterfront, that was impossible. In October 1864, a young Union Navy officer named William Cushing led a daring nighttime raid in a small wooden steamboat and sank the Albemarle.

With the ironclad sitting on the bottom of the Roanoke, Union forces attacked and drove Confederates out of town. Part of the town caught fire when a Confederate ammunition storehouse exploded during the battle.

Back on the family farm in Cabarrus County, about 240 miles inland from Plymouth, the news of Moses Dry’s death was another crushing blow to his brother, Allison Dry.

Allison’s brother Henry, who enlisted in the Confederate Army in May 1863 at the age of 40, died of typhoid only three months later in Charleston, South Carolina. His oldest son William was taken prisoner at the Battle of Bristoe Station in October 1863 and confined in a hellhole of a Union prisoner-of-war camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. And his son Thomas, who was captured during the first day’s fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, had been imprisoned at the same POW camp as William, where he died of smallpox in January 1864.

Allison would receive more terrible news in June 1864.

Sources for this essay included Ironclads and Columbiads: The Civil War in North Carolina, by William R. Trotter; Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-65, edited by Walter Clark; and Norfolk: The Marine Metropolis of Virginia and the Sound and River Cities of North Carolina, by George Nowitzky.

The Grim Christmas of 1863

This cartoon by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's Weekly on December 26, 1863, was perhaps the earliest depiction of now-classic Christmas images.

The warm, cozy images we associate with Christmas likely began in December 1863, when Harper’s Weekly published three elaborate drawings by cartoonist Thomas Nast. The two-page spread, a sort of Christmas triptych, included now-familiar, sentimental images – a bearded Santa Claus with a huge sack of gifts, a soldier on leave being welcomed home with a small Christmas tree in the background, and children playing with toys on Christmas morning.

But Christmas 1863 was quite different for many Americans than Nast’s feel-good images portrayed. Family members were missing from firesides and Christmas celebrations across the divided nation as the start of a third year of bloody civil war approached.

My great-great-grandfather Allison Dry and his family faced such a cheerless Christmas on their farm in Cabarrus County, North Carolina 150 years ago. Two of Allison’s sons – Thomas and my great-grandfather, William – would endure the brutally cold winter of 1863-64 in a Union prisoner-of-war camp in Maryland, living in tents with only a blanket and an occasional few sticks of firewood to keep them warm.

Allison did not own slaves. But his family had nevertheless become deeply invested in this war that had erupted because of slavery. Besides Thomas and William, Allison had another son as well as brothers, cousins, and nephews serving in the Confederate Army. And as Christmas 1863 approached, the awful reality of the American Civil War had come home to his doorstep.

Thomas, a member of the 5^th North Carolina Infantry, had been taken prisoner on July 1, 1863 during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. A month later, Allison learned that his brother, Henry Dry, who was serving in the Confederate Army in Charleston, South Carolina, had died of typhoid. Then came the news that William, serving in the 52^nd North Carolina Infantry, had been captured on October 14 at the Battle of Bristoe Station in Virginia.

Allison’s son Daniel was serving with the 8^th North Carolina Infantry. In December 1863, Daniel’s unit was sent north from the relative safety of Raleigh to the frontline battlefields near the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

From Gettysburg, Thomas was sent to Fort Delaware, a massive pile of bricks on an island in the Delaware River about 45 miles downriver from Philadelphia. The fort, completed in 1859, was intended to protect Philadelphia from enemy warships. But in 1863 it was being used as a prison for captured Confederate soldiers.

The conditions Thomas encountered at Fort Delaware were far from comfortable, but they could be endured. “Things here are not quite as bad as I expected to find them,” Henry Berkeley, a captured Confederate soldier from Virginia, wrote in a letter home in the late summer of 1863. “They are, however, bad, hopeless and gloomy enough without any exaggeration.”

For the first couple years of the war, the Union and Confederate governments operated POW camps as temporary holding pens. Prisoners were detained until they could be “exchanged” for prisoners from the other side.

But that relatively civilized system fell apart because Union leaders became reluctant to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government, and because Confederate military officials refused to exchange captured black Union soldiers. So POW camps in the North and South became steadily more crowded. And the crowded conditions steadily increased the death toll among prisoners in both Union and Confederate camps.

On July 20, 1863, Union military officials decided to establish a POW camp at the tip of a peninsula in Maryland where the Potomac River joins the Chesapeake Bay. It was called Point Lookout. The federal government had already built a large military hospital to treat Union soldiers near the tip of the peninsula, and the POW camp was built just to the north of the hospital.

The exposed location of the camp made it very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. General Gilman Marston, a political appointee who had represented New Hampshire in the U.S. House of Representatives before the war, was put in charge of the camp.

Like all POW camps on both sides in the Civil War, it would become a hellhole.

On August 15, Marston notified his superiors in Washington, D.C. that he was ready to receive 1,000 prisoners. Union officers responded by sending 1,300 Confederates to Point Lookout.

When the first prisoners arrived, it turned out that the Point Lookout commander had exaggerated the readiness of the camp. The 15-foot-high wooden fence to contain the prisoners had not been completed. So Union soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles guarded the Confederates. A few tried to escape. They were shot and killed.

By late September, nearly 4,000 Confederate soldiers were imprisoned at Point Lookout. On October 7, with fall’s chill in the air, Marston sent a recommendation to Washington suggesting that a wooden barracks be built to house the prisoners.

But the request was denied. Instead, with winter approaching, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered 10,000 tents sent to Point Lookout.

A week later, William Dry was captured at Bristoe Station and sent to Washington, D.C., where he was held in a building that had served as a temporary capitol after British troops burned the city in 1814.

While William was being held in Washington, his brother Thomas was transferred from Fort Delaware to Point Lookout on October 18. By now, the population of the 40-acre camp had more than doubled to almost 9,000. And the new prisoners brought a problem that would be exacerbated by overcrowding.

During the fall of 1863, smallpox killed 860 Confederate soldiers at Fort Delaware. Marston complained that every group of prisoners sent to Point Lookout from Fort Delaware included men suffering from the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. It is an illness that thrives in crowded conditions. By late October 1863, Point Lookout was becoming more crowded by the day.

On October 27, 1863, William and other prisoners in the old capitol building in Washington were herded aboard a train. Their destination was Point Lookout, where they would become part of the shivering, ragged horde being held behind the high walls near the tip of the chilly peninsula.

There’s no record of whether William knew that his younger brother was already at Point Lookout. But it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t eventually find each other.

In November, Dr. W.F. Swalm, a medical officer with the 14^th Brooklyn Regiment, was sent to inspect the prisoners at Point Lookout. Swalm was an odd choice to make the inspection.

During the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, Swalm and another Union medical officer had been captured by the Confederates and sent to Richmond as prisoners of war. But rather than being confined, they were allowed to move freely about the city. They became minor celebrities in the Confederate capital, where they were entertained in the homes of the city’s gentry. They responded to their captors’ hospitality by loudly denouncing President Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause and vowed that when they were exchanged, they would settle their affairs up North and move back to “Dixie’s Land” as permanent residents.

Perhaps their comments were sincere. Or maybe they realized that their harsh criticism of Lincoln and the Union war effort earned them extraordinary privileges in the capital city of their enemy. Whatever their motivations, their comments became public record when they were published in the Richmond Dispatch, and later in the New York Times.

Eventually Swalm and the other doctor were exchanged, and in May 1862, while testifying before the House Committee on the Conduct of the War, the doctors accused Confederate soldiers of “inhuman acts” and “terrible monstrosities.”

When Swalm inspected the prisoners at Point Lookout in November 1863, he reported that the hospital for sick prisoners consisted of 18 unheated tents, and noted that the weather was turning very cold. The winter of 1863-64 would be one of the coldest on record.

Swalm also noted that the sick men were in a “filthy” condition, and that the entire POW camp was similarly dirty. The prisoners were ragged and did not have warm clothing. Three men had to share one blanket in the tents.

The cold was brutal on the thinly clad prisoners. “In winter when a high tide would flood the whole surface of the ground, freezing as it flooded, the suffering of the half-clad wretches, accustomed to a southern climate, may be imagined,” Anthony M. Keiley a former prisoner at Point Lookout, wrote in a memoir after the war. “. . . So severe was the cold that even the well-clad sentinels had to be relieved every thirty minutes, instead of every two hours, as is the army rule.”

The conditions at the camp appalled Frederick Knapp of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He suggested that the Commission send food and clothing to the Confederate prisoners. “I know that they are our enemies, and bitter ones, and what we give them they will use against us, but now they are within our power and are suffering,” he said in a report to the Commission.

But General Marston, the commander of the Point Lookout POW camp, had little sympathy for his Confederate prisoners. And Swalm’s earlier, well-publicized comments in Richmond gave Marston a convenient excuse to dispute the accuracy of Swalm’s report on conditions in his camp. After all, how could anyone trust the word of a man who had denounced his country and commander-in-chief in the heart of enemy territory?

In a December 4 letter, Marston denied that the conditions described by Swalm existed and said the prisoners’ woes were largely their own fault. “That they are a dirty, lousy set is true enough, but having afforded them every facility for cleanliness the duty of the Government in this regard  ... is accomplished,” he wrote.

Union officers prevented Swalm’s report from being released. Still, either a copy of the report or a description of its contents found its way to Dr. Montrose Pallen, a Mississippi physician who was involved in Confederate intrigues in Montreal, Quebec.

Pallen sent a letter to Union Major General E.A. Hitchcock describing the conditions. “Many of the prisoners are without the necessary clothing even to hide their nakedness, and during the late cold weather several absolutely froze to death at Point Lookout, where they are living in tents, and more than half of the 9,000 and more confined there have not even a single blanket for covering or bedding and sleep on the bare ground,” he wrote.

But Union officers seemed determined to keep the prisoners at Point Lookout in enforced misery.
The prisoners weren’t allowed to receive a new article of clothing without giving up a similar article of clothing, Kieley wrote in his memoir. “(S)o literally was this rule enforced that prisoners who came in barefooted were compelled to beg or buy a wornout pair of shoes for exchange before they were allowed to receive a pair sent to them by a friend.”

And when the Union Army added black soldiers to its ranks, the African-American troops replaced white guards at Point Lookout. The black guards, many of them former slaves, often took great delight in tormenting their former masters.

And the food, what there was of it, was terrible. “For my part, I never saw any one get enough of anything to eat at Point Lookout except of the soup, one spoonful of which was too much for ordinary digestion,” Kieley wrote.

By Christmas 1863, the smallpox problem had become so severe at Point Lookout that officials had set up a separate hospital about a quarter-mile from the main compound for prisoners suffering from the disease. The prisoners admitted to the hospital were cared for by Catholic nuns belonging to the Sisters of Charity from Emittsburg, Maryland.

The nuns, in their unusually wide and tall white cornettes and black habits, added an air of dignified solemnity to the wretched conditions in the camp.

The late-December weather became so bitterly cold that five prisoners froze to death on New Year’s Eve 1863. “We all suffered a great deal with the cold and hunger,” Sergeant Bartlett Malone, a member of the 6^th North Carolina Infantry, wrote in his diary. “Two of our men caught a rat and cooked it and ate it.”

That same night, Thomas Dry was admitted to the smallpox hospital. He died on January 29, 1864. Somehow, his older brother William would survive another year at Point Lookout until POW exchanges finally resumed. He was exchanged in February 1865. Still, there would be more bad news -- much more -- for Allison Dry and his family before 1864 ended.

Sources consulted for this story included Point Lookout Prison Camp For Confederates, by Edwin W. Beitzell; Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, by Lonnie R. Speer; exhibits at Point Lookout State Park in Scotland, Maryland, and documents from the National Archives.

Pickett's Charge: Smoking Shoes And Body Parts

The North Carolina monument at Cemetery Ridge in the Gettysburg
National Military Park, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

It’s been reported that the duel between Confederate and Union artillery at the Battle of Gettysburg 150 years ago today was so loud it could be heard in Pittsburgh, 140 miles to the west.

The firing ceased around 2:45 p.m. on July 3, 1863, and after such an awful noise, the silence was decidedly eerie. A few minutes later, Confederate soldiers emerged from trees on Seminary Ridge and, with remarkable military precision, formed in long straight lines. Then, at a rapid, steady walk, they moved down Seminary Ridge and started a mile-long trek across a shallow valley to Cemetery Ridge.

About 12,000 Confederate soldiers were involved in this military maneuver that will forever be known as “Pickett’s Charge.” The name comes from General George Pickett, who was ordered to push about 4,000 Union troops off Cemetery Ridge. Historians have pointed out that the attempt to take Cemetery Ridge should be referred to as the Pickett-Trimble-Pettigrew Charge because the men who took part in the famous assault were from North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia, and most were led by generals other than Pickett.

But Pickett, a native of Virginia, benefitted from the presence of many newspaper reporters from his own state who wrote their stories with a decided slant in favor of their native son.

If the assault had succeeded, it could have broken the Union Army of the Potomac and given the Confederacy such an advantage that it might have been able to dictate peace terms to President Abraham Lincoln and end the American Civil War with a victory for an economic system that relied on human bondage.

Even some of the men who were going to try to kill the Confederates were impressed by the way their enemy arrayed himself. “Beautiful, gloriously beautiful, did that vast array appear in the lovely little valley,” a New York soldier wrote in a letter after the battle.

Author Shelby Foote described what happened after Union soldiers got over the dazzling display of martial precision moving toward them at the rate of 90 steps per minute. The thousands of Union soldiers on Cemetery Ridge “settled down to the task of transforming those well-dressed gray lines into something far from beautiful,” Foote wrote.

Among the 12,000 soldiers making that deadly march was my great-grandfather, William Crooks Dry, a private in the 52nd North Carolina Infantry.

It took the Confederates about 15 minutes to go the first half-mile of the journey. Union cannons were firing at them the entire time, tearing gaps in the precise lines. But the Confederates still impressed their opponents. “The enemy advanced magnificently, unshaken by the shot and shell which tore through his ranks,” said General Henry Hunt, commander of the Union artillery.

My great-grandfather’s unit, the 52nd North Carolina, was commanded by Colonel James K. Marshall. After leading his men about halfway to their objective, Marshall turned to another officer and said, “We do not know which of us will be next to fall.”

After more than 20 minutes, the Confederates were nearing the crest of Cemetery Ridge. By now, thick smoke from the black powder being used in the weapons fired by both sides had created a fog

Thousands of Confederates already were dead or dying, but the survivors pushed on to the low rock wall that protected their opponents. As the 52nd approached the wall, Marshall was urging his men on. Then suddenly, two bullets struck him in the forehead.

At about the same time, a Union artillery commander screamed at his men to fire their cannons point-blank at the North Carolina troops.

Later, the commander wrote in his diary that after the smoke had cleared from the blast, the only thing remaining of the North Carolina troops was “smoking shoes.”

For a few moments, it looked like Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s gamble had succeeded. A few Confederates managed to cross the stone wall that protected the Union troops. But so many Confederates had been killed that they did not have the numbers to push Union troops off the hill. The attack was broken, and dispirited Confederate troops retreated back across the valley to Seminary Ridge.

Fewer than half the Confederates survived the charge. My great-grandfather was among the survivors.

The following day, July 4, Lee’s broken army left Gettysburg in a driving rain, moving south toward Maryland. The Union artillery commander who had fired point-blank at North Carolina troops described the ground in front of his guns as being “black, greasy, and full of body parts.”

Sources for this post included The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote; research by Gettysburg battlefield guide Gary Kross; and Wikipedia.

Marching Into History

The activities of Civil War soldiers often were announced by drum rolls. So maybe a drummer pounding the call for “Assembly” 150 years ago today sent my great-grandfather, William Crooks Dry, and hundreds of other Confederate soldiers in the 52^nd North Carolina Infantry scrambling into formation.

In his 1882 Civil War memoir Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life, Carlton McCarthy described the flood of questions that popped into soldiers’ minds when they were ordered to assemble to begin a march. “Orders to move?” McCarthy wrote. “Where? When? What for? – are the eager questions of the men as they begin their preparations to march. Generally, nobody can answer, and the journey is commenced in utter ignorance of where it is to end.”

By the summer of 1863, William had recovered from a wound he’d received at the Battle of Goldsboro Bridge six months earlier and returned to duty with the 52^nd. The unit had been moving since early April, when they boarded a train in Kinston, North Carolina that took them to Taylorsville, Virginia. The 52^nd moved again in early June, this time to take up positions on the banks of the Rappahannock River a few miles downstream from Fredericksburg.

On June 10, the 52^nd was ordered to a nearby train station where they were to board a train to Hanover Junction, north of Richmond, to relieve a unit under the command of General John Corse.

But that turned out to be one of those “hurry up and wait” orders that have annoyed soldiers since the beginning of time. After sitting for hours waiting for the troop train, the 52^nd’s orders to Hanover Junction were rescinded. The unit under General Corse would remain in place. The 52^nd’s commanders received new orders to report to General James Johnston Pettigrew, and by nightfall they were back in their camp on the Rappahannock.

The train that never arrived would change the lives of the men in the 52^nd.

While the 52^nd had been traveling from North Carolina and encamping on the Rappahannock, General Robert E. Lee had been dodging attempts by the Confederate government to detach some troops from his Army of Northern Virginia to be sent west, where Union General Ulysses Grant was threatening the vital Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Lee also had been asking for more men, but he wasn’t telling Confederate leaders in Richmond why he wanted those extra troops. He was quietly formulating a plan, and that plan did not involve keeping his army sitting in encampments in and around Fredericksburg.

“As far as I can judge there is nothing to be gained by this army remaining quietly on the defensive,” he noted in early June 1863.

Lee knew that the South simply did not have the resources to fight a long war against the North. Their enemy had a huge advantage in supplies and manpower, and could win simply by forcing the Confederacy to use up its scant resources.

In Lee’s mind, the best way to relieve pressure on Confederate armies to the west would be to put pressure on Union forces in the east. And the best way to do that was to take the war to the enemy. So in June 1863, Lee started moving his army northward.

It was a high risk, high reward plan. If he could march boldly onto his enemy’s turf, draw a large Union army into a major battle and decisively defeat that army as he’d done at Chancellorsville, Virginia only a few weeks earlier, it might throw such a fright into Northern civilians that they’d demand peace talks aimed at ending the war.

If another Confederate general had proposed to march into Pennsylvania and dare his enemy to come after him, he might have been called a reckless fool. But Lee’s troops were on a winning streak, so to speak, and he was certain that his men could make his gamble pay off.

“There never were such men in an army before,” he said. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.”

And after watching Virginia be chewed up by two years of war, many of Lee’s men were eager to give their enemy a taste of military carnage. “Let their bones be laid waste – their lands destroyed, their towns laid in ashes, and then they will be disposed to make peace,” said William Blount, a lieutenant in the 47^th North Carolina Infantry.

So on June 14, 1863, as William and thousands of other Confederate soldiers began what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. later described as “one of those dreadful summer marches,” there undoubtedly was much speculation about where they were going. And while William knew that his brother Thomas was in the 5^th North Carolina Infantry, it’s doubtful that he would’ve known that his brother’s unit was part of the same massive troop movement.

None of the men moving northward on those dusty unpaved roads in the heat of that long-ago summer knew their journey would end spectacularly at a quiet little crossroads town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

NOTE: Sources for this essay included Lee Moves North, by Michael A. Palmer; Fifty-Second Regiment, a regimental history by John H. Robinson, Adjutant; Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life, by Carlton McCarthy; and exhibits at the Gettysburg National Military Park museum. The photo of the gatehouse entrance to a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was made by Frank Gutekunst a few weeks after the battle in July 1863. The image is from the website The Gettysburg Compiler.

Looking for Captain Q-Tip

I lived briefly in Richmond, Virginia after I got out of the Army, and I’ve had a deep affection for the city ever since.

It’s got problems – some of them identical to other larger cities, some of them unique to Richmond. But it’s also a colorful, quirky old city with deep history and some fascinating neighborhoods.

I lived in a neighborhood known as The Fan, a residential district that was started soon after the Civil War ended in 1865 and much of Richmond was rebuilt. The neighborhood gets its name from the fact that it’s shaped roughly like the old-fashioned fans that were used in churches on hot days before air conditioning.

Richmond is full of statues, and when I lived there, one of the neighborhood landmarks was a statue of a Civil War soldier that was nicknamed Captain Q-Tip. The statue actually was a memorial to a Confederate artillery company known as the Richmond Howitzers. But you can tell at a glance how Captain Q-Tip got his name. An often-heard phrase when I lived in The Fan was “Meet me at Captain Q-Tip.”

I went looking for the Captain on a recent weekend trip to Richmond with my wife, my mother-in-law Shirley Morrow, and our niece Patty Morrow, who’s a junior at the University of Virginia. But it’s been many years since I was in the old neighborhood, and I couldn’t find the statue. I also discovered that new construction by Virginia Commonwealth University has dramatically changed the landscape of several city blocks in The Fan.


So I started wondering if perhaps Captain Q-Tip had become a victim of VCU’s progress. Finally, I saw a man and a woman that were old enough to have lived in Richmond for a while.

I interrupted their conversation and asked if they knew of a nearby statue of a Civil War soldier holding an artillery swab. They looked puzzled. “We used to call him Captain Q-Tip,” I said.

They smiled. “I’ve never heard it called that, but I can see where the name came from,” the woman said.

Turned out I was less than two blocks from the Captain. Patty shot the above photo of my reunion with my old friend.