Visit Over 2,500 Sites Constituting Vermont’s Civil War Effort

For Immediate Release

 
VERMONT, June 11, 2013 -- A gallows was erected in 1864 on Vermont's statehouse lawn in Montpelier for one purpose only -- to hang Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.
 
So committed was this tiny state (today hovering around 650,000 people) to outlawing and ending slavery that few towns escaped sending and often sacrificing their men and boys to the Civil War. In fact, Vermont ignored the nation's fugitive slave law requiring that escaped slaves be returned to their owners, instead helping them cross from Vermont to Canada where the law didn't apply.
 
During the bloodshed, how the folks at home survived without their men folk as reports of casualties rolled 500 miles north is the subject of historian Howard Coffin's new book, Something Abides: Discovering the Civil War in Today's Vermont (Countryman Press Hardcover; May 6, 2013; $35).
 
The concept of history -- especially of conflicts -- as a handle for travel isn't new.
 
"This is big industry in America in those places where wars happened," notes Coffin, citing, among others, Virginia for the Civil War, Montana for Custer's Last Stand, and, for the Revolutionary War, Fort Ticonderoga in New York and Concord and Lexington, MA.
 
What hasn't been grasped until now, however, is the depth and breadth of the Civil War's impact on Vermont. Each of Vermont's 251 towns contributes at least one piece to Vermont's Civil War patchwork. Coffin has uncovered over 2,500 sites associated with the Civil War. A few of these examples include white clapboard and faded brick houses and public concerns echoing anti-slavery orations and serving as part of the underground railroad; commemorative marble on village greens; a cave where a man hid for four years to avoid the draft; a factory (American Precision Museum, Windsor) whose machinery produced 1.5 million weapons for the Union Army.
 
As with any worthy regional guidebook, and especially one that is themed, as is Coffin's, readers can select towns alphabetically by county (region) and guide themselves through stories that constitute this richly textured history. A plus for travelers who want to put these stories into context is the fact that Vermont's landscape and towns look pretty much now the way they did in the 1860s.
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson said of the book: "Nothing like Something Abides exists for any other state. It offers a cornucopia of riches for history tourists." 
 
A seventh generation Vermonter with six ancestors who served in Vermont regiments, Coffin traveled 150,000 miles around this 10,000-square-mile state over six years to compile the anecdotes in time for the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg. He is the author of four books on the Civil War, including Nine Months to Gettysburg and The Battered Stars. He is scheduled to speak at the Gettysburg visitors’ center on June 30 during the 150^th anniversary commemoration of the battle.

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