In the decades immediately following the Civil War, a massive national movement sought to permanently mark and sacralize the disparate landscapes where American blood had been shed. The memorialization phase for Buffington Island gained significant momentum in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as aging veterans sought to institutionalize their legacy. After the battle, the landscape had largely reverted to agricultural farmland and remained as such for nearly seventy years until 1929. That...

John H. Morgan's brother-in-law Basil Duke mentioned in his history of Morgan's cavalry that the command consisted of 2,460 men when they set out on the Indiana-Ohio Raid in late June or early July (depending on one's point of view about where the raid actually started). The accepted number of Confederates present at Buffington Island is 1,820 men (The Battle of Buffington Island Self-Guided Driving Tour brochure). Capturing accurate unit strengths, particularly when determining Confederate...

Most accounts one reads about John H. Morgan's Indiana-Ohio Raid will mention that Morgan's command included four artillery pieces - two 3-inch Parrott rifles (also known as 10-pounder Parrotts) and a pair of 12-pounder howitzers, However, the 3-inch version of the Parrott was not manufactured until later in the war and the pair that Morgan had, captured from the Thirteenth Indiana Battery at the Battle of Hartsville, were actually earlier model 2.9-inch Parrotts. By the time Morgan reached...