Lost in the Photostream

Some days – and they tend to be cloudy Mondays – it’s a wonder I accomplish anything truly productive. Today, for reasons that are too boring to explain, I ended up at the State Historical Society of Iowa’s website and discovered that the organization has shared some of its photo collections on Flicker.

I was hoping to find an album devoted to vintage Iowa bands – no such luck. Instead, I found an album of Civil War photos, and I got lost in history for a while, scrolling through the 50 photos and reading their descriptions. A couple of them could almost belong in my great-great grandfather Jasper Riggs’ photo album – if he ever had such an album.

As a member of the 45th Illinois Infantry, Jasper served alongside Iowa soldiers in the battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg – so some of the places in the photos would have looked familiar to him, and even if he didn’t know the Iowa men in the pictures, they probably would have looked like people he knew from Illinois (just as I can look through Steve’s high school yearbooks and see people who remind me – because of their ’80s hairstyles or glasses – of people from my high school class).

One photo that jumped out at me was this one of the courthouse in Vicksburg, Miss.:

• Old Courthouse Vicksburg, 1863

It looked much different when we visited it two years ago this month (I wrote several blog posts about that experience, including this one, Vicksburg in the Key). According to the accompanying description, Major Henry Clay McArthur of the 15th Iowa Infantry and 17th U.S. Army Corps said of the photo: “You can see where one of our shells tore part of one of the columns partly off in the upper part.”

Here’s how the courthouse looked to us, 147 years later:

Old Courthouse, Vicksburg, Miss., October 2010

This next photo, taken Nov. 23, 1906 by J.C. Donnell, shows members of the Iowa Monument Commission in front of the Iowa State Monument at Shiloh:

• Iowa State Monument, Shiloh

Jasper’s son, my great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs, was present at this occasion, as a member of the Iowa 51st Regimental Band that accompanied the commission members on the monument dedication trip to Vicksburg, Andersonville, Chattanooga and Shiloh.

A close-up view of the Iowa State Memorial, Shiloh National Military Park, 2010

I like this next photo because it depicts the wives of the Grand Army of the Republic members in Grant, Iowa, about 15 years after the war ended:

Wives of Iowa veterans

The photo makes me think of my great-great grandmother, Rebecca, who married Jasper during the war, while he was on leave. I know quite a bit about his experience during the war, but next to nothing about hers. The movements and accomplishments of all the regiments are well documented, thanks to military history records. But the accomplishments of the women who stayed behind? There’s no database to search for that information.

This last photo is probably my favorite, because I love dogs and because I wasn’t expecting to see it in the collection:

Regimental Dog

This dog served as the mascot for the 23rd Iowa Infantry during the Civil War. The dog’s name isn’t given; the photo was taken around 1880 in Des Moines. What was the dog’s story? At what point did it join the war, and how did its presence boost soldiers’ morale? The photo offers no further answers; it just leaves me with questions.

My afternoon of website wanderings left me with several questions, but it also left me with something unexpected – the feeling that I had been productive, after all. Like a lonely person visiting a dog shelter, I didn’t know what I was looking for until it found me: I found a topic for my blog, and the motivation to write.