Union Camp at Nashville Print, ca. 1863
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GUEST:
This belonged to my husband's family. It's been, as you can tell, kept in attics and basements and closets for several generations, handed down from generation to generation. It was sent back from Nashville, Tennessee, by my husband's great-great-grandfather, William Law Kinthorne, who was a volunteer with the Illinois regiment, and he was stationed in Tennessee, sent this back before he was shipped out to Kennesaw Mountain, and that was where he was killed, in the Battle at Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia.
APPRAISER:
Wow-- this is a wonderful camp scene. I've seen many, many camp scenes from the Civil War. This one actually exists on three levels. Most of them just show the camp, but this has a series. In the foreground, you have these wonderful vignettes of the kinds of people that were in the camps. You have officers, soldiers. Here's a woman who was probably a freed slave who was working in the camp, making a living as a laundress, and some of these men might have been identified just by the fact of what they were doing. For instance, here's a barber working, and often a barber would have doubled as not only to cut hair, but to pull teeth and things like that. And you have these wonderful little vignettes of the various troops. Here's a very sad scene, digging a grave. So it's a poignant piece that shows the individual men. Well, there's a second level that gets into the camp itself and the outline of the camp and the way the military men organize things, and you have tents for the soldiers, but back here, little cabins for the officers. But then the third thing-- and very few of these camp scenes have this-- there's a wonderful city view, and here's Nashville, Tennessee, in the background. Now, I particularly like seeing the state capitol of Tennessee, which is still there. Uh, it was designed, and the architect was William Strickland, who was from my own town of Philadelphia, so, you know, this is delightful for me. And with the Cumberland River, you have, troop transports, you have ironclads and so on, and you look at the Cumberland River today, and you say, "How could they get these ships in there?" But they were there, and this is really a great piece on the Civil War. I've seen thousands of Civil War prints, read hundreds of Civil War books. I've never seen this print before. Uh, you've never had it appraised or anything?
GUEST:
We've never had it appraised, have no idea.
APPRAISER:
Well, this one is badly stained, and it's missing a little section here and everything, but even with that, if I would consider just as is, a fair market value of this would be about $900.
GUEST:
Oh, my goodness. Much more...much more than a dollar.
APPRAISER:
Oh, yes, right, yeah. And if I had it cleaned and everything, I'd say, you know, $1,800 would be a fair price because it's Illinois history, it's Tennessee history, and it's a wonderful thing.
GUEST:
Oh, thank you.
Appraisal Details
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