The 31st Pennsylvania Infantry (2nd Pennsylvania Reserve) Monument at Gettysburg is located south of Gettysburg on the eastern edge of the Wheatfield on Ayres Avenue. It was not dedicated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania until 1890 and thus it was not pictured in the 1889 article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The picture of […]
Thomas William Hoffman was born in Berrysburg, Dauphin County, on 21 July 1839, the son of Amos A. Hoffman (1809-1897) and Amanda [Harper] Hoffman (1815-1897). Through the paternal line, he was a direct descendant of Johann Peter Hoffman (1709-1797) and his son, John Nicholas Hoffman (1749-1814), pioneer settlers of the Lykens Valley. Thomas served two […]
The 15 July 2014, is the 150th Anniversary of the Great Shohola Train Wreck. A series of posts presented here on this blog over the past several months described some of the known facts and controversies regarding that disaster and also gave some personal information about some of the persons who were involved. Much new […]
After the bodies of the Union guard who died at Shohola were re-interred at Elmira, New York, at the Woodlawn National Cemetery, a monument was erected with a plaque that named the 17 men who are buried there in a common grave. Previously on this blog, research was presented on two of those men, Adam […]
One of the great ironies of the Great Shohola Train Wreck is that one of the Union guards who was killed, Lyman Wetherby, was from the same region of Pennsylvania where the coal train originated – the coal train that collided with the prisoner train resulting in Lyman’s death. The northern part of the anthracite […]
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