Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 20, 1995 TAG: 9510200040
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROB KAISER THE NEWS & ADVANCE
DATELINE: LYNCH STATION (AP) LENGTH: Medium
Reading letters her great-grandfather wrote during the Civil War put Temple Powell in a parallel world.
Powell lives in the house where Charles A. Douglas lived. While Douglas was a soldier, his letters were delivered to Powell's address. Douglas is buried here - in the family cemetery.
``It's like living another life,'' Powell said.
And true to real life, a lot of the content isn't so spectacular, she said.
In his letters, Douglas describes the weather, asks family members to send him food and tobacco and offers advice on how to run the family plantation. He often details events on the picket line.
``One of the things that is interesting is how they interacted with the Yankees,'' Powell said.
A letter from Douglas dated November 20, 1864, reads: ``The yankees would stand on the hill ... and hold up and shake whatever they wished to trade, first giving a sign by whistling or something else, then if our fellows would answer it they would come running down and ours go running down the hill, meeting at the old logs and there effecting their trade ... They will trade most any thing for tobacco.''
Douglas was a member of the Confederate Army - the 11th Virginia Infantry - stationed at Drewry's Bluff, about eight miles south of Richmond.
Before reading the letters, Powell didn't know much about her great-grandfather. By the time she had enough sense to ask about him, the people who knew him were gone, she said.
Then she found the letters.
``There has been some fighting in the last day or two near Petrbg. We could distinctly hear the roar of the musketry in that vicinity on yesterday evening. It was most incessant for some time ... I wouldn't be surprised if the spring campaign opens pretty early ... It is indeed sad and heart rending to have to look forward to nothing but war bloody terrible war with all its untold and inconceivable horrors and cruelties,'' reads a letter of Feb. 7, 1865.
In 1975, Powell was cleaning the attic of what had been the plantation's office, which is next to her house. She discovered about 150 letters in a moth-eaten leather purse.
All of them were folded, some still in their envelopes. Her sons filed the letters - written from October 1864 to March 1865 - in manila envelopes.
Powell read some of the letters soon after the discovery, but most sat in the folders for nearly 20 years.
About a year ago, she and two of Douglas' other great-grandchildren who also live near Altavista - Lil Andrew and Margaret Burton - took an interest in the letters.
``I would go up to Temple's,'' Andrew said, ``and we'd sit on the back porch and she was reading one month and I was reading another month and we were commenting back and forth.''
Powell points to the way her great-grandfather made suggestions about what to do on the plantation. He didn't issue orders. ``This is a family characteristic - trusting the other person to have as much as sense as you do,'' she said.
Powell also noted how often Douglas, a Methodist, mentioned preachers and sermons and God's will.
``In some of these [letters] he almost comes off as a religious fanatic,'' she said. ``He really took to the religious revival. I think it really saved his sanity.''
The letter, from Oct. 24, 1864, says: ``I heard a very excellent sermon yesterday from a presbyterian minister, though I was too poorly to enjoy anything. While there is a great deal of wickedness among the soldiers, I rejoice to believe there is a good deal of piety also.''
Douglas was captured in March 1865. He eventually returned home, but died in 1869 of tuberculosis, which he had contracted in prison camp.
by CNB