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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
PETERB_030823_01_STITCH.JPG: A panoramic view of the remnants of the Crater
PETERB_030823_14.JPG: These are reconstructed earth works. Even without people shooting at you, they still look formidable, don't they?
PETERB_030823_30.JPG: The marker says "In memory of the valorous service of regiments and companies of the U.S. Colored Troops Army of the James and Army of the Potomac, Siege of Petersburg 1864-65"
PETERB_030823_37.JPG: This is the entrance of the tunnel that the Pennsylvania troops dug to place to explosives under the Confederate lines. In 2000 or so, a homeless person's body was found inside and they had to redo things a bit.
PETERB_030823_55.JPG: You can see where, over time, the earth has sagged in over a bit of the length of the tunnel. Note that the outcropping of vegetation that you see is about 1/6 of the length of the tunnel.
PETERB_030823_57.JPG: Ventilation Shaft
"Regular Army wiseacres said it was not feasible – that I could not carry the ventilation that distance without digging a hole to the surface… But I have succeeded."
-- Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants, 48th Pennsylvania July 23, 1864
The most serious problem that faced Lt. Col. Pleasants was getting fresh air to the men working in the tunnel. He came up with a solution commonly used in the Pennsylvania coal mines.
One hundred feet into the mine, Pleasants's men dug a vertical ventilation shaft – the remains of which are in front of you. They then placed an airtight canvas door across the mine opening and ran a wooden duct the length of the mine to the forward end of the chamber. The fire that burned continuously at the ventilation shaft drew stale air out of the mine; fresh air was drawn through the duct to the men working at the head of the tunnel.
PETERB_030823_66.JPG: Mahone
To the memory of William Mahone Major General C.S.A. A distinguished Confederate commander, whose valor and strategy at the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864 won for himself and his gallant brigade undying fame. A citizen of Petersburg, Virginia, born Dec. 1, 1826, died Oct. 6, 1895.
PETERB_030823_71.JPG: These monuments are on the Confederate side of the line, honoring the troops who recovered from the explosion in time to counterattack.
PETERB_030823_77.JPG: The Crater's in front of you. It doesn't photograph well, does it?
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Siege of Petersburg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign was a series of battles around Petersburg, Virginia, fought from June 15, 1864, to March 25, 1865, during the American Civil War. Although it is more popularly known as the Siege of Petersburg, it was not a classic military siege, in which a city is usually fully surrounded and all supply lines are cut off. It was ten months of trench warfare in which Union forces commanded by Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assaulted Petersburg unsuccessfully and then constructed trench lines that eventually extended over 30 miles around the eastern and southern outskirts of the city. Petersburg was crucial to the supply of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's army and the Confederate capital of Richmond.
Lee finally yielded to the overwhelming pressure—the point at which supply lines were finally cut and a true siege would have begun—and abandoned both cities in April 1865, leading to his retreat and surrender in the Appomattox Campaign. The Siege of Petersburg foreshadowed the trench warfare that would be common in World War I, earning it a prominent position in military history. It also featured the largest concentration of African American troops employed in the war, who suffered heavy casualties at such engagements as the Battle of the Crater and Chaffin's Farm.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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2003 photos: Equipment this year: I decided my Epson digital camera wasn't quite enough for what I wanted. Since I already had Compact Flash chips for it, I had to find another camera which used CF chips. That brought me to buy the Fujifilm S602 Zoom in March 2003. A great digital camera, I used it exclusively for an entire year.
Trips this year: Three-week trip this year out west, mostly in Utah.
Number of photos taken this year: 68,000.
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