<p>I’m applying as a transfer student, and my major will be U.S. history. </p>
<p>Essay Topic D: Major-specific essay (required second essay for architecture and art majors) Personal interaction with objects, images and spaces can be so powerful as to change the way one thinks about particular issues or topics. For your intended area of study (architecture, art history, design, studio art, visual art studies/art education), describe an experience where instruction in that area or your personal interaction with an object, image or space effected this type of change in your thinking. What did you do to act upon your new thinking and what have you done to prepare yourself for further study in this area?</p>
<p>This is an optional essay, and I realize it doesn’t pertain to an art object (unless 19th century furniture can be deemed art). </p>
<p>It may also fall under Essay Topic E. Choose an issue of importance to you—the issue could be personal, school related, local, political, or international in scope—and write an essay in which you explain the significance of that issue to yourself, your family, your community, or your generation.</p>
<p>My essay:</p>
<pre><code> With wonderment I stared at the oak drop-leaf table behind the museum glass. It was the type of table you’d see in any Adams County, Pennsylvania home, or any other 19th century home, for that matter. But this one was like no other; this table was one of a kind: centered squarely in the leaf was a half-inch bullet hole, and the sharpshooter who improvised the McCreary’s family table as a barricade was killed kneeling behind it. It was the summer of 1971, and I was ten years-old during my first visit to the Gettysburg National Museum.
Albertus McCreary was fifteen years-old, not much older than I, during the battle of Gettysburg. It was in his Uncle Samuel’s home, a short distance away on Lefever Street, where this Confederate soldier met his demise. Albert reminisced about his experiences in a July 1909 article for McClure’s magazine. Recalled were stories of nearly being taken prisoner because he wandered the streets of Confederate occupied Gettysburg wearing a Union soldier’s cap, reselling spent lead bullets back to the Union army for $0.13 a pound, and being within 10 feet of President Abraham Lincoln when he delivered the Gettysburg Address.
The streets, yards and homes of Gettysburg were strewn with dead of both sides after the battle, but near McCreary’s home along the southern edge of town Confederates abounded. In one small house young McCreary found a young dead Southern soldier lying on a bed. Tempted to take the medal pinned to his chest as a souvenir he declined, because it may have led to the soldier’s identification. How the soldier killed behind the drop-leaf table was identified as Corporal William H. Poole of the 9th Louisiana Infantry, was never explained by the museum’s caption.
William H. Poole, a Mississippi native, was a nineteen year-old carpenter when he enlisted in the “Brush Valley Guards” (Company H, 9th LA Infantry). On the morning of July 3, 1863, Poole entered the rear of the McCreary home, climbed to the second story balcony, pushed the table against a window opening to the south, knelt behind, and using it as a gun rest fired at Union soldiers on Cemetery Hill in the distance. They fired back. A bullet pierced the oak table and struck Poole in the chest, killing him. Ironically, the only Gettysburg civilian fatality during the battle was stuck by a bullet fired from this vicinity. It penetrated two wooden doors before killing her instantly. Like Corporal Poole, “Jennie” Wade too was only 20 years old. Sixty-three year-old Samuel McCreary and a neighbor wrapped Poole’s body in a blanket and buried it, carefully marking the grave.
In the late 1980s books authored by Gregory A. Coco, William Frassanito, Harry W. Pfanz and Timothy H. Smith invigorated new interest in Gettysburg. They focused on intimate, rather than macroscopic, studies of the battle and its’ participants. The battle and aftermath was skillfully dissected in volumes written about individuals and their heroic actions, rather than a month-long military campaign, generals and a famous charge. Common soldiers like Corporal William H. Poole, and civilians Albertus and Samuel McCreary, and “Jennie” Wade emerged from the darkness of Gettysburg literature. Their books raised my interest in the Civil War to a fever pitch. Later, I got to know Greg, Tim and “Frass” personally, and contributed to a few of their subsequent works. The subsequent electronic age furthered my interest because of the ease and speed with which obscure information could be discovered.
Ancestry.com, American Civil War Research Database and online newspaper websites have been a windfall for modern researchers. They place a family’s genealogy at our fingertips with the click of a mouse, or enable us to locate a forgotten century old interview within milliseconds. They can also help us correct mistakes. The text accompanying the Poole table states, “After the war Poole’s parents came to Gettysburg, were directed to their son’s grave and had the remains removed to Louisiana.” This is wrong. Poole’s father died a year before his son, and his mother never remarried.
The Brush Valley Cemetery, the most logical final resting place of Corporal Poole, no longer exists. Tombstones, abundant as recently as the 1950s, have either been removed or sunken into the ground. The McCreary home, known for its telltale bullet-riddled fences, was demolished in the 1950s by the Gettysburg School Board to make way for the entrance to the new middle school. The Gettysburg National Museum was razed several years ago, and its charming, but antiquated, “Electric Map” placed in storage. A new multimillion dollar multimedia visitors’ center has taken its place. And, due to a more diverse interpretation of the Civil War, and limited display space, the Poole table is no longer on public display.
In November of 2013 I marched in the annual Remembrance Day Parade in Gettysburg. Ironically, its route began on Lefever Street, near the site where Samuel McCreary’s house once stood. The parade wound its’ way down Baltimore Street, retracing the steps taken by President Abraham Lincoln on his way to deliver the Gettysburg Address not far from Cemetery Hill. Our procession terminated near Long Lane, the initial resting place of Corporal Poole.
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<p>We may never know how Poole’s body was identified. A captured comrade may have recognized him. A letter on his person may have been addressed to Poole, or he may have kept a diary. Perhaps his name and regiment was scratched on his musket or piece of equipment. Or a medal engraved with his name pinned to his breast wasn’t taken as a memento. The method is a moot point. He was rescued him from obscurity. It’s the preservation of his story, and others like him, that matters to us today.<br>
After more than four decades Albertus McCreary’s childhood recollections of the battle of Gettysburg were still firmly etched in his mind. My remembrance of that August day at the Gettysburg National Museum from my boyhood is just as vivid. After more than forty years I can still easily recall that solitary bullet hole and the splintered wood around it. That experience taught me about the fragility of life, and the need to preserve history whether it is with pen and paper, computer software, or the photographs in our minds that last a lifetime.</p>
<p>:D </p>