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Virtual History
City planning professor recreates the action of Civil War battlefields By Maria Lameiras |
Confederate Pvt. Fleet Johnson fought in many of the Civil War's major battles – Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor – but it was a chance encounter with a famous general that led to his death on an obscure battlefield in Virginia.
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photo by Alan David
Johnson was with the battle-tested 7th North Carolina Infantry unit at Gravel Hill, Va., when the unit attacked a column of Union Cavalry, expecting the unit to fall back, as most cavalry units would not engage in ground fighting. But the commander of this particular cavalry unit was Gen. George Custer. A fierce fighter who expected the same from his men, Custer and his unit counterattacked and drove the Confederate infantry unit back. Johnson was killed in the skirmish at First Deep Bottom.
This arcane bit of Civil War history might have been lost to modern knowledge if not for the persistence of Dr. Bill Drummond, an associate professor of city planning in the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Architecture.
Drummond, his wife Laura and their son Jonathan, now 7, were touring Civil War battlefields in 1996 when they decided to find where Laura's great-great-grandfather, Fleet Johnson, had fallen in battle.
"Well, I have a Ph.D., and my wife has a master's in library and information science, and yet between the two of us, we could not locate where Fleet Johnson had died until we went to the actual park where it happened. There, the person at the desk knew who the Deep Bottom expert was. They pulled that park ranger out of a staff meeting to talk to us," Drummond recalls. "He pulled out his own, hand-drawn map to show us where the spot was."
Drummond was amazed at the combination of tenacity and luck it took to make the discovery, so he pondered how to make it easier for others to trace the paths of their ancestors who fought in the Civil War.
"There is an incredible amount of expertise in the heads of the rangers and historians at these parks, but unless they happen to write a book, that expertise stays in their heads," Drummond says. "... I was interested in finding a way to codify this informal knowledge so it can be passed on from person to person and generation to generation."
So Drummond is now working to preserve battlefields in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military parks using geographic information systems (GIS) to map and codify the battlefields for posting on the Internet. He believes his work could help save Civil War battlefields that are in danger of development.
"GIS will not only make it easier for people to find where their relatives marched and fought and died, but it also may preserve Civil War landscapes by making the connection between people today and what happened there 135 years ago. That connection between past and present makes people want to preserve these areas," he says.
Drummond – whose own great-grandfather, Inslee Deaderick, was a Confederate cavalry trooper who survived the war – was dismayed at the thought that encroaching development might prevent his son from showing his descendants where their ancestors had fought. That is when Drummond's personal interests and professional life juxtaposed, and he began working on GIS software that would accomplish the task.
"Geographic information systems are well-suited to some applications, like mapping parcels and doing environmental analysis," Drummond says. "But they are not particularly well-suited for applications such as showing troop movements in the Battle of Chancellorsville because GIS doesn't deal with changes over time particularly effectively. What I had to do was develop new approaches and GIS methodologies to accommodate some of the unique historical challenges of mapping a battlefield."
After a year of work, Drummond developed prototype systems and aspects of systems for Civil War sites in Georgia at Kennesaw Mountain, Chickamauga, Resaca and Ringgold. That led to his current site work in Virginia, which uses the same technology on an expanded scale, integrating multimedia applications.
Drummond is collecting primary- and secondary-source information in the form of written histories, officers' and soldiers' accounts, and photos from each battle, then linking them to the maps for each battlefield.
"The fascinating thing about the Civil War is that for almost any unit you trace, you will find facts that would add life and color and interest to the maps," Drummond says. "Right now, you can discover these things if you know where and how to look for them and are persistent, but what interests me is thinking that a junior high or elementary school student, using this system, could discover these things as well."
At Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Drummond is compiling a detailed account of the battles that took place there, researching what troops fought and mapping their positions during the battles. Using GIS, Drummond then creates maps that not only show static troop positions, but also recreate a battle by showing troop movements across the landscape over time.
"Once you do the initial database that has troop locations and times, you play it as an animation and compare what you see to what is in the sources. Then you make changes or add additional routes if it is obvious that two units should have been together or should fight," he explains. "You go through several cycles of that before the results seem reasonable and likely."
The work is a blend of traditional GIS applications, planning and history, a combination uniquely suited to Drummond's credentials. He earned his undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, then earned master's degrees in divinity and theology from Duke. After serving as a Presbyterian minister for two years in Pittsboro, N.C., he became interested in city planning after befriending the county planner, who attended his church. Drummond returned to school and earned his doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"I had to read a lot of Civil War historical narratives and primary-source materials, as well as historical methodology on how to reconstruct battles from bits and pieces from letters and officers' after-battle reports," Drummond recalls.
This Geographic Information System image plots Civil War troop movements on the first day of the battles of Chancellorsville, May 1, 1863.
(300-dpi JPEG version - 356k)
The educational potential of the project surpasses any printed material, Drummond says. Using information already available, as well as a roster being developed by the National Park Service of all 4 million Civil War soldiers and their units, it will someday be possible for someone on the Internet to type in the name of a soldier, then jump to a battlefield to see where that unit marched and fought.
"When you do traditional history, there are space limitations, and color maps are incredibly expensive. Through the Internet, however, every piece of primary-source information ultimately will be in the database, and people whose ancestors may have fought in the 12th Virginia Infantry will be able to see where they fought," he explains.
To give the battle maps modern relevance – particularly in an area like
Atlanta, where the battlefields have been wholly developed – Drummond uses
GIS to lay the historical maps over modern parcel, road and topographical maps.
For instance, a map of 1864 Atlanta at Drummond's Civil War mapping
site (http://www.civilwar.gatech.edu) shows where fortifications were located and sieges took place. It also features buttons linked to Civil War era and modern photographs at certain map coordinates.
Several of these photos show areas that are now part of the Tech campus, including a famous photo by George Bernard of a battlefield where the Ivan Allen College now stands, and a Confederate fort on the site of the Tech library.
"In overlaying the fortification map of Atlanta, you can see where the line went from around the Fox Theater to the Tech Tower to library hill to the Habersham Building," Drummond says. "The Union troops went along 10th Street, and in overlaying the map, it looks like there was a Federal fort on the hill on the Turner property on the other side of 10th Street from Alexander Coliseum."
Drummond is also interested in developing a three-dimensional aspect to the maps, including an interactive function that would allow users to go "into" the maps to pan and zoom into and out of the battlefields.
"I have done some 3-D images of Resaca while running the software live, and I've viewed different commercial GIS 3-D packages to get a feel for what it looks like. There might be some nice visuals we could develop," he says.
Drummond's work is being funded jointly by the National Park Service, the Spotsylvania County government and the Georgia Tech Foundation. It will be available through the Internet.
Similar work could be done on battlefields that have already been compromised. "You can do it for lost battlefields like Peachtree Creek or the Battle of Atlanta, where the areas have already been wholly developed," Drummond says. "Ultimately, I think you could image every battlefield. Every battlefield should have one."
Drummond has already begun thinking of practical uses for the type of GIS he has developed.
"I'm thinking about a general area called heritage tourism and how we might design a system that incorporates this material. Its object is to make it as easy as possible for people to discover ancestral information, whether they are in Ohio or Alaska or Indiana or Oregon. We would have links to accommodations in the area to encourage them to see these sites for themselves," he says. "Ultimately it could be an economic development tool, especially for rural communities."
This article is reprinted from the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. Maria Lameiras is assistant editor.
courtesy of Dr. Bill Drummond
For more information, contact Dr. Bill Drummond, College of Architecture, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0155. (Telephone: 404-894-9840) (E-mail: bill.drummond@arch.gatech.edu)
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