Merry Christmas

Commissary Clerks at Aquia Landing, 1863

Notes from Visit to National Archives, Dec 22, 2010

I am compiling my notes from a visit to the National Archives tonight. I did two pulls today. The first looked at the Provost Marshall records and telegrams from Aquia Landing. The second was for more documents from Record Group 92, the USMRR Operations in Virginia.

I. During the time I am modeling BG Patrick's Brigade served as the Provost Marshall at Aquia Landing. The Provost was quite busy at this time as most of the Army was in winter quarters and no fighting was going on. Most of the messages and letters I reviewed dealt with assigning and changing guard and fatigue (work) details. Without going through all the documents in detail, here are some common themes and nuggets of interesting information.

A. Deserters were using ships at Aquia Landing to escape the Army. The Provost was quite busy with catching, jailing and moving deserters.

B. One or more ships were used as a prison at Aquia Landing.

C. There were several messages from the Quartermaster to the Provost requesting more guards for the wharf and or debating the sufficiency of the guards assigned. The Quartermaster was frequently concerned with theft of government goods.

D. Controlling who could ride the railroads and steam ships was a topic of concern for the Provost and the Quartermaster. One letter from General Hooker, the Commander of the Army, detailed instructions for selling newspapers on the wharf, railroads and ships.

E. Several messages discussed the disposition and strength of troops assigned to guard the railroad stations and bridges. I made copies of two reports that detailed men, fortified works, cannon and other details of the security forces. I even found a small hand drawn map stuck in the messages showing the locations of redoubt defending Aquia landing. The report mentions that at least one gunboat was assigned to cover gaps in artillery coverage over a swampy area.

F.  A document titled, "Instructions for the Guidance of Officers at Aquia" included:

1. How to handle discharged regiments
2. Office on Duty to be present on arrival of boats
3. Keeping the wharf clear
4. Who is allowed on the wharf
5. The roles of the mail agent
6. The officer of the guard to examine all passes to Washington
7. What passes are good
8. Division and brigade passes
9. Those without proper passes
10. Respect to be paid to officers
11. Have a patrol present before each train departs
12. Keep Strict watch on laborers
13. Instructions respecting lights
14. Provost Marshall to have a guard
15. Officers to set an example for men (w/re to appearance and conduct)
16. Prisoners to report for police work (police means to pick up litter, nothing changes in the military!)
17. Privies - the covers basic sanitation rules. Most waste to be dumped in the river at a particular spot.
18. Disposal of offal of sutlers shops, kitchens and restaurants

G.  I found the letter at the right from General Hooker to BG Patrick, Provost Marshall requesting that if possible separate quarters on ships and separate railroad cars be designated for use by officers.  Guards would be assigned to insure that enlisted men did not use these designated facilities.  It also states that  officers only had to show their passes to other commissioned officers. 

H. There was a regular mail ship that ran to Washington. Only certain clerks and persons could ride this ship.

II. Record Group 92 had documents more directly related to the railroad. One of the files had hundreds of letters to Ada Anderson, the USMRR Superintendent. It seems that W.W.Wright Aquia Creek Superintendent, and J.B. Clough, Chief Engineer, wrote a daily letter to Anderson. The subjects were somewhat dry and typically covered administrative subjects, request for supplies, pay, personnel issues and often discussions of chain of command disputes. J.B.Clough had several letters were he discussed the use of oxen. Apparently the oxen were in great demand and he expended a great deal of time tracking and managing the animals.  I only found one letter that mentioned engineering details of the Potomac Creek bridge. It discussed a design change in the arch size that required new and longer iron truss rods.

Several of Clough's letters discussed plans for the bridge over the Rappahannock River, assuming that the Army would continue to move south. Overall I found Clough's handwriting hard to make out. 

The file also contained several letters from Haupt and McCallum to Anderson. Here are examples asking Anderson for summary reports.

Probably the most useful data I saw tonight was contained in the Report of Operations at Alexandria Rail Road Wharf. These monthly reports list a highly detailed day-by-day description of the traffic in and out of the wharf. These reports show that the car ferries to Aquia Landing usually ran down one day and returned the next. The barge and ferry names are listed as well as the road numbers of the cars transported.

There are reports for  most months until the summer of 1865 (there are some gaps). They include traffic to City Point in 1864 and 1865 as well as Wilmington, NC in 1865. They show that car ferries did run from Alexandria to City Point during Grants siege. The sheet at the right is a good example of the type of information contained in these reports.

Finally I copied some conductor reports for switching in the station at Washington DC.  Note the shorthand code for showing car type given on the bottom of the sheet. On the back of one of these sheets was a note describing how the train had killed a cow, but did not damage the equipment. I guess Washington, DC has changed quite a bit. I haven't seen too many cows downtown lately.

Freight cars and cabooses on the USMRR at Alexandria

I am preparing for another trip to the National Archives to continue research on the USMRR. In reviewing the documents I collected nearly two years ago I noticed the following chart which lists the types of cars in service on the USMRR Virginia in April 23, 1863. Note that the USMRR had 654 freight cars at its disposal, with 191 at Aquia Creek. The cars at Aquia Creek were comprised of 84 box cars, 106 flat cars and 1 passenger car.  Note that there were no stock cars listed at Aquia Creek.

On June 1st the USMRR reported 88 box cars and 79 flat cars, with no passenger or stock cars at Aquia Creek.  This data will help me size my car fleet.  It will be a shame to not have any stock cars on the layout, so I may freelance that a bit, but note that stock cars comprised only 1 percent of the fleet. I do find it odd that I have a picture showing a conductors car in use as a telegraph hut at Stoneman's Station, but these reports make no mention of conductors cars until September.

In the similar report for September 1863, there is a new class of cars listed, cabooses (see the highlighted section of the report). The word caboose has also been added to the box car roster shown below. These are the only occurrences of the word "caboose" I have so far seen in a civil war era documents . Has anyone else seen this term used in the ACW?

Also note that 16 box cars were used as offices and 2 for hospitals.

Finally, the next three  documents will very important to the freight car builder as they list the road numbers for each type of car in service on the USMRR at the time of the report.  These essentially form a roster of equipment, although the exact types of car are not listed. There are more pages available, but this should help you if you need to accurately number your freight car models. Click for larger images.

Stock Cars

Box Cars

Flat Cars

All of these pages came from the same book of USMRR Car Reports at Alexandria. The list of car numbers were the first pages (you can see the page numbers on the sheets),but were not dated. Presumably before the first quarterly report listed, which was Sept 1862. They could also have been adding car numbers to the roster as the cars came on board. The fact that there are different color inks used to enter the car numbers seems to hint that it was updated as cars came in, but I don't know for sure.

Backdrop at Aquia Landing

I painted the backdrop at Aquia Landing today. Here is a shot showing the backdrop before I add the ships.

This shot below is a closer look at the large dark cloud on the left side behind the future Burnside Wharf area. The dark cloud works in this area for two reasons. First, the room lighting falls off a bit as you approach the frame of the door. So the dark cloud there "explains" why the the lighting is less. Secondly, the door frame acts as a picture frame, cutting off the large cloud and avoiding the extreme expansion of the cloud as the perspective lines diverge.

It would have been much trickier to execute this large cloud if the backdrop continued further to the left. For example, the photo at the right shows a large cloud in the center of the wall where there is no "frame" to set off the cloud. In this case, it is better to paint  flatter clouds and rely on atmospheric perspective to provide depth. Or more simply, just omit the large clouds that extend overhead and paint low clouds along the horizon.

I plan do a post later to explain my theories on perspective in backdrop painting.

Here is a quick and dirty time lapse video showing the backdrop as I painted it.

The wet bar is taking shape. Marty stopped by on Thursday to wait for his son to arrive via Amtrak  at Alexandria Station. So I put him to work building benchwork. He made the usual gripes about how my tools are no good, but we managed to finish the framework to support the water surface at Aquia Landing. After he left I installed the hardboard water surface and the curved fascia pieces at the perimeter. Alicia likes how they came out.  I still need to get a few more pieces of lumber and hardboard before the benchwork is completely done in this section.

With the door to the office closed, the basement looks like river front property :)

What does water look like?

In my earlier effort at simulating water I used dark blue paint covered by several layers of Miniwax Gloss Polyurethane. Now that I am re-executing the water surface, I am wondering if I should use same technique. I like the technique because it is easy to apply, is very forgiving and mistakes can be fixed somewhat easily.

My decision was reaffirmed when I saw Steve Borichevsky's blog, "Shooting My Universe," a blog that I follow. He posted this photo which looked almost exactly like the water surface I achieved with my earlier technique. Compare these two photos, my backdrop and water surface on the left and one of Steve's images on the right.

If you like photos of maritime New England, birds and seascapes, take a look at Steve's blog, "Shooting My Universe."