[ARC5] BC-611 Production numbers...now AMA

[David Stinson]

On 2/18/2021 8:28 AM, MARK DORNEY via ARC5 wrote:
> Depends on the soil the item was buried in. Some soils preserve things better than others.
>
> Mark D.
Very true.

Back in the 1980s, my older brother and I would
relic-hunt the near-forgotten battlefields of
the ACW Red River Campaign- a Yankee "cotton-
stealing expedition" and attempt to capture
North Texas that ended badly for them,
when our badly-outnumbered boys gave them
a bloody nose in Mansfield and
Pleasant Hill, LA., which sent the blue coats
scatting all the way back to New Orleans.

At the location where the headlong Union rout ended
for the night, "Chapman's Orchard" on a hill-top,
was the dug-in location of the
47th Pennsylvania Infantry.  In 1982,
the rifle pits were still evident.   The ground in that
area was very rich in Iron ore- much of it had been
mined.  There, on the edge of one of the rifle pits,
I found my first Springfield .58 bayonet.  It was in
excellent condition for a dug artifact, which can
be attributed to the heavy concentration of iron
ore there.

Before anyone starts-
Chapman's has now been
utterly destroyed by coal strip-mining, without
so much as a planted rose bush to mark the place.
I'm told they found
a grave with half a dozen blue boys in it, their
remains taken and given a decent military burial,
but no respect was paid to the remaining
land where the Battle of Sabine Crossroads
ended and so many died.

All that beautiful piece of land, which was the
center and eastern flank of the contending
armies, the old wagon road, the rifle pits,
the water source the Union
failed to hold- all are gone and the artifacts
they  contained are lost forever, with only we
few to mourn them.  I propose that, were it
not for us "awful relic hunters," nothing would
have been preserved at all.

GL OM ES 73 DE Dave AB5S



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