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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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Description of Subject Matter: On this ridge overlooking the Chickahominy River, General Lee, President Davis, and many other prominent Confederate officers gathered to await the start of the operations that came to be called the Seven Days Campaign. They expected "Stonewall" Jackson's 20,000-man army to get behind the Union position near Mechanicsville, to force the Federal Fifth Corps out of its defenses. General A. P. Hill would then clear the river crossings, allowing the bulk of Lee's army to unite with Jackson and threaten the Richmond and York River Railroad, then in use as the main Union supply line.
Unanticipated obstacles delayed Jackson, and late on the afternoon of June 26, 1862, Hill forced a crossing two miles upriver from here and captured Mechanicsville. Hill's success allowed Lee to transfer the troops assembled here at Chickahominy Bluff over to the northern bank of the river. Shortly before sunset, fragments of the Confederate army launched attacks just east of Mechanicsville at the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, two miles from here.
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June 26, 1862:
"We expect to be in Richmond in a fortnight," writes a young officer in the 7th Maine.
With Federal troops close enough to set their watches by Richmond's church bells, General Robert E. Lee orders his men to strengthen the city's defensive earthworks. Lee is gambling. While a small force holds these entrenchments, Lee intends to use most of his army to spring a counterattack.
Across the Chickahominy River, near Mechanicsville, begins the second in the series of battles known as the Seven Days.
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.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs) directly related to this one:
[Display ALL photos on one page]:
2012_VA_Bluffs: VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs (7 photos from 2012)
2008_VA_Bluffs: VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs (8 photos from 2008)
2005_VA_Bluffs: VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs (4 photos from 2005)
1999_VA_Bluffs: VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs (3 photos from 1999)
1998_VA_Bluffs: VA -- Seven Days Campaign -- Chickahominy Bluffs (6 photos from 1998)
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera.
From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on).
In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year.
In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded.
Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints.
The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted.
Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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