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General News: When Johnny Came Marching Home
March 21, 2013
CORNWALL, NY – On Wednesday, March 27th, the public is invited to Cornwall Public Library to hear Historian Mel Johnson, Historic Site Assistant at Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site in Newburgh, give a presentation entitled When Johnny Came Marching Home: Cornwall’s Civil War Veterans in Blue and Grey. The program will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the library’s community room.
Many a great and powerful person came through the terrifying ordeal of the War of the Rebellion, known to us as the American Civil War. Many more average people shared their experience, but with a far lesser celebrity. Some of those people came from a small farming, fishing and transportation hub called Cornwall, New York. Most of these fairly ordinary citizens resumed peacetime occupations after the war and knew only a local notoriety of having been “in the war”, which was eroded by the grit of time until scant memories remained in the community memory bank. Historian Mel Johnson of Cornwall-on-Hudson will help to refresh that community memory bank with a talk on the Cornwall Civil War veterans from both the Union and the Confederate (yes, we had some of them) sides.
MEL JOHNSON has been serving the public as librarian/archivist/curator for 35 years. He is a retired officer of the 124th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry (the Orange Blossoms) and a longtime practitioner of local history. He is a descendant of the “Father of Cornwall”, Col. Patrick MacGregorie who arrived at the mouth of the Murderers’ Creek in 1686 and died (KIA) during the Leisler Rebellion of 1691. Mel has also served as Parish Historian for St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cornwall, and was a founding member (1959) of the Nature Museum in the Hudson Highlands. He is also a Past Chair of the West Point Chapter, Company of Military Historians, and a staff member of the Joffrey Ballet while they were amassing their historic repertoire of choreographies by Leonide Massine, Sir Frederick Ashton, and Kurt Jooss.
Mel’s lecture is the eighth event in Cornwall Public Library’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Lecture Series. The program is sponsored by Cornwall Public Library Foundation. Registration is not required. Contact the library with any questions, at 534-8282.
395 Hudson Street
Cornwall, NY 12518
Phone 845-534-8282
Fax 845-534-3827
cornwallpubliclibrary.org
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