Battle Scarred Relics.

Forests that resounded with the noise of shell and shot during the war.

Dalton, Ga., Feb. 19- Twenty-five years, nearly, have passed since the last shot was fired in the American civil war, and one would think that the local marks of the great struggle would now be effaced. But it was too mighty a contest for its scars to be rapidly healed and in almost every section of the south the traveler may yet see the signs of the storm. The contrast between the signs of past war and present peace are in some cases amusing in many saddening and in all curious and romantic. In the densest thickets of northwestern Georgia and the adjacent sections of Tennessee and Alabama the hunter, with difficulty forcing his way through a forest, will come suddenly upon heavy earthworks; the natural wear of the elements has been prevented by matted roots and vines, and on the red earth embankments, where brave men once struggled, trees a foot in diameter are growing.

In many places the redoubts were constructed in old fields, since given over to a “second growth” of pines and scrub oaks, and there the forest bears no signs of war-it has grown in long peace. One will often pass within a rod of a large redoubt and not see it. But many of the hardest battles of the war were fought in a wilderness; the trees were pared to stumps by the rain of shot and shell. In the so called “Wilderness” of eastern Virginia, where 200,000 brave men fought through that dreadful week of May, 1864, such scenes were common. At one point where the fire of 40,000 Federal soldiers ranged in a semicircle, was concentrated upon a small angle of the confederate lines, trees two feet thick were literally shot to splinters. In the battle of Malvern Hill the Confederates made five desperate charges upon a point not more than a quarter of a mile long- charges repelled by the five of 25-600 Federal infantry and eighty cannon. The soldiers on both sides naturally drew into the shelter of the thirty scattered trees, and on the Confederate side of those trees the ground was literally covered with the dead. Every tree was shattered and men who searched the ground carefully a week later declared they could not find a shrub an inch thick which had not been struck.

But in no part of the south are the signs of war so ominous as in northwestern Georgia. From Dalton almost to Marietta one may walk through the old woods, two or three miles from Atlanta and western mad on either side, and for miles at a time never be out of sight of scarred trunks. Hundreds of tons of old shot and shell have been exhumed and carried away, and still the supply is ample. A regular industry has grown up among the negroes of hunting trees with peculiar shot wounds to be shipped as curiosities; and the supply of that article is so nearly exhausted that buyers are getting suspicious and hunt that some of the specimens are “manufactured” to suit the market. One, however, who will study the effects of a cannon ball on a tree need not be deceived.

source: The Ledger.
_location: Warren, Pennsylvania _
notes: The article continues but becomes to illegible to read