One of One_ Civil War Artifact

Hey everyone, Chris White and I'm here in Mississippi and we're in the bowels of the Museum of History here in Jackson and we're in the Museum Division in their archives down here in the State Archives. This is a really cool place to be and we're going to put their entire description below me in a lower third because I can't remember everything everyone's telling me from behind the camera so we're just going to make it a little bit easier and put that down below me but what we're going to do is actually take a little walk around here and just check out some of the cool things that they have because you have to understand a museum only has x amount of space to tell a story in so whenever you come in and the public comes into a museum you're going to experience just a very very small fraction of in fact what they have in their collection. I think they told me here they have more than 25,000 artifacts just in the museum division alone that's not including what's over in the archives section which is all the papers, diaries, things you would think of over there so when you come into the museum you can't just put everything on display and you want to tell a story and we're specifically telling the story of Mississippi history here in Jackson so you know we're going to come down here we're going to point out a few cool things we're just going to take a quick chance to explore but they have a lot of Civil War history here in Mississippi as of course we know we're here following the Vicksburg campaign Jackson is the state capital it's burned in May of 1863 as part of that campaign but there are other actions that took place as well and Chris I'm gonna have you come over here a little bit and just point out that we have in some of these drawers these are special drawers just to take care of all of their artifacts that they have here that are not on display you'll see shelves you'll see things behind glass in drawers various states that are all conserved and in a safe place that could be locked up and secured so that future generations can enjoy these items but can see down here we have items from Champion Hill we have a shell fragment from what was a case shot and it was fired probably a 12 pounder that was fired at one point and that's a big piece of shrapnel over here which was not found at Champion Hill but you can see where the fuse would go down into with this this shell because you think about an artillery shell it'd be a round ball filled with gunpowder sometimes you'd have smaller balls inside of there and whenever it explodes it would throw shrapnel and pieces of iron out towards you also we'll see up here just other various portions of we have grape shot we have canister we have other items including bullets that are tucked in behind here ignore our brass shells over here but back here on this second row Chris might be able to point out a couple of our bullets that were picked up from the Champion Hill battlefield it looks like at least one of them was a dropped bullet one of them may have been fired but it looks like one may have been pulled out of a of a gun it looks like there might have been a worm that pulled this one out this one looks like it's a dropped bullet here this one's a little bit crushed it could have been a dropped or it could have been a fired bullet but these are some of the ones that have been picked up at Champion Hill it's a battle that took place in the middle of the Vicksburg campaign and the members of the American Battlefield Trust have done a lot of work out there to help preserve that property which is still owned by the Champion family who own the property at the same time of the American Civil War so when Ulysses S. Grant crosses south of Vicksburg at a place called Bruinsburg he's going to move north towards Port Gibson then he's going to go off towards the north northeast towards Jackson where he'll come here and then turn back and do battle at places like Champion Hill and Big Black River and then move on towards Vicksburg so these are just some of the items that you would see here other folks might be noticing some some other shells these are not from the Civil War era but this is a part of their military collection here in the curatorial collection so just keep in mind these shells up here are not going to be used in the American Civil War but these are some shell art that you would see from from different places and drops and things so as we walk through over this area you might see as Chris walks around behind me you'll see just how large this area is we're going to take a walk down this way but you can see we have furniture in here we have doll collections we've got baskets we've got chairs we've got a little bit of everything up here and we have spinning wheels yarn winders which my parents house are just full of they love collecting those books so when you think about a museum collection you know it might not just be battle flags that we've shown off it might not just be uniforms you're going to have everyday life this is telling the story of the people of Mississippi and it's not all about war it's some you know it's about peace it's about civil rights it's about a lot of different things but we're focused here on the American Civil War today and this right here is a artifact that came from the Vicksburg area this is an 11-inch Dahlgren shell that would have been pulled up probably out of the river or out of the bluffs not sure where it was found but we do know that it was found in the Vicksburg area and it's in a great shape and it's a gives you an idea of just how large one of these shells would be this one you can see where the fuse would have went down inside of it which would have meant that this thing coming at you going through the air would actually probably been on fire and it's smoking and they talk about this during the time where the Union fleet is running the guns on April 16th and on April 22nd on April 16th 1863 David Dixon Porter's fleet will go down past Vicksburg and it takes them two and a half hours to go past the guns of Vicksburg and they put on a huge pyrotechnics display and it's going to light up the sky and those rockets bursting in air and things like that they're not using rockets but you would see the fuses going off of these shells you would also see on April 22nd when the confederates see the federals come down the river for a second time that they would fire so many shells that would light up the night one man said that you could read the newspaper by the light of all of the shells going off after midnight on the morning of April 22nd 23rd 1863 so this is one of those artifacts and then as we look over here it looks like we have a printing press over there we have all kinds of different items so whenever you come to a museum keep in mind this isn't just about showing off a few of their items upstairs they have hundreds and sometimes thousands of other artifacts that are down in their curatorial collection and they'll rotate them in and out that's why we make different displays at museums so they can show different stories and show different artifacts so we're going to check out a few more things that are here inside of the curatorial collection stay with us we are closing out our visit here with one of the coolest artifacts i've seen in any museum i know we've been to a lot of museums i know that we always see the coolest the awesomest this that the other thing this could be one of the greatest Mississippi artifacts that i've ever seen and that's not exaggerating this is a shirt a very very stylish shirt that was created by a union soldier named James Davis he's from West Virginia and it's a new state in July of 1863 it had become a state on June 20th 1863 so he's a West Virginian and he's actually here in Jackson Mississippi the state capital after the conclusion of the Vicksburg campaign well much of Jackson was actually burned during the Vicksburg campaign but the old capitol building was not and some of the federal soldiers will go inside of there they'll they'll spend time inside of the building some will be billeted in there and they will go in and as soldiers will do they'll take basically anything that is not nailed down and this particular soldier decided that he wanted to take the drapes and the window coverings from the old capitol and have a shirt and hat made out of it so what you're actually looking at this very stylish shirt is what the window treatments inside of the old capitol building would have looked like so you're getting a glimpse into wartime Jackson Mississippi there would have been a hat with this and this is the shirt that was made probably by an army tailor you can see the high collar on it this high collar will help you from chafing with the wool that would have been around your neck from a wool jacket a frock coat or a sack coat you could see that it's buttoned down from part of the way it looks like it might be bone buttons they can't sell from this angle and you can see that they pretty much took the window treatments and just kind of chopped it up a little bit and then sewed hems into it and they have created this shirt that was finally returned to the state of Mississippi in 1979 so this is actually a window in a time no pun intended since this actually hung on the windows there in the old capitol building but it's great because whenever they want to recreate what the drapery would look like they have this shirt and this hat to do so and that's what they will use after Katrina comes through here in 2005 and hits hits this this area very hard especially up the Mississippi River Valley and they're able to recreate what the drapes look like because this union soldier went in probably thinking that he was being a little bit cheeky grabs these drapes takes it off to a tailor and has a hat and shirt made out of it now there is a recreation of this this shirt and hat on display here in the museum so you can come and check it out but the original is down here in the curatorial collection here in the museum division so this is a one-of-a-kind artifact you're not going to see anywhere else and this is totally mid-civil war Mississippi what an awesome artifact and this massive flag was one of the flags that are captured in Vicksburg, Mississippi this could have but we don't know could have flown atop the courthouse there in Warren County Courthouse which is that iconic courthouse that overlooks Vicksburg and you can tour today but this flag is one of the massive confederate flags that was captured by the members the 83rd Indiana Infantry and it was also captured by some of the sailors from the warship of Vic Thomas who come up into the town so there are a lot of confederate flags in Vicksburg we know that we know that a lot of them are captured by the Federals and they're taken as prizes but you can see that this flag definitely had flown at one point this end of the flag the left my left end of the flag this is the fly end you can see that we have some repairs done here you know could that have been from the flying of the flag where it's going in the breeze or from some of the members of the Vic Thomas or the 83rd Indiana taking a portion of it home as a souvenir that does happen but you can see that this flag definitely had flown somewhere it has some great it's in great condition it has some some great stories to tell us it would have been much more white in the center at the time much more red we would have had the deeper blue in the canton but now this is what it looks like today and this was returned by the state of Indiana during the centennial celebrations of the 1960s to the state of Mississippi this is down here in the curatorial collection this is laid out on a number of tables so just to give you an idea this is a massive flag we would almost consider this a garrison flag that would fly atop a prominent building or point in Vicksburg to show that this was a confederate held town a city today of 23,000 people this is just one of the flags they have down here so check out our other flag video that we have