Day 14 - Chickamauga and Chattanooga
Since Day 13 of our trip was spent entirely on the road driving from Virginia through Tennessee to Chattanooga there are no photos and little to tell other than that unfortunately the beautiful weather we had experienced since leaving Gettysburg a week earlier disappeared in the downpour that ushered in another bout of unseasonable cold weather. When we rose the following morning is was again hovering around freezing and we saw a few snowflakes in the morning on our way to Chickamauga. As we were leaving the Visitor Center, the sky was clearing but the wind was still cold and the day uncomfortable.
Chickamauga Visitor Center
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Outside the huge auditorium where the NPS film describing the campaign and battle is shown there is what is said to be this sole surviving example of a nineteenth century artillery battery wagon, restored and painted to represent the one of the
Chicago Board of Trade Battery, a unit organized and paid for by a Chicago business consortium.
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The museum gallery is dominated by the large portrait above of Confederate General James Longstreet, donated to the park by his widow.
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Forgive my blurry photo above of the diorama depicting the battle.
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One of the museum's treasures is the personal Spencer Rifle belonging to Colonel John Wilder, commander of the Illinois brigade of Federal mounted infantry known as the
Lightning Brigade. Wilder was postwar a mayor of Chattanooga and ramrod for the creation of the very first National Battlefield Park here at Chickamauga-Chattanooga.
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Another rare cavalry or artillery item is this traveling field forge, necessary for any unit with a large component of horses.
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The interior of an officer's tent displayed above; personal weapons and an assortment of belt plates below.
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The Claud E. Fuller Gun Collection
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The Fuller collection or United States firearms ranks as one of the best in the country. Included are multiple examples of all regulation military shoulder arms along with many rare and seldom-seen variants. They occupy multiple cases like the few pictured here and date from the beginning of firearms through at least the Second World War, although the thrust of the collection is the development of arms in the eras of the flintlock and percussion systems.
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Shoulder arms of the Civil War are especially well-represented from the products of the National Armories at Harper's Ferry and Springfield to their contract versions and European imports such as those from Britain like the Enfields, Austrian Lorenz's, and other countries as well. below however are my favorites, those produced by the Confederacy at Richmond and Fayetteville, N. C., using captured machinery from the armory at Harper's Ferry.
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