James Pollard Civil War Ephemera
APPRAISER:
You brought in a pile of stuff here that relates to one of your ancestors. What can you tell me about this?
GUEST:
Well, this guy's name was James Pollard. He was with the New York volunteers under Colonel Sorrel during the Civil War. They were engineers, and he was also a battle line sketch artist and traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard, from Pennsylvania down to Florida.
APPRAISER:
How long was he in the war?
GUEST:
I think he saw the most part of the war. He was discharged at one point, and then he reenlisted and went back in and was in there another two, three years.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, so he was in almost the entire Civil War then.
GUEST:
Yeah, pretty much.
APPRAISER:
I find this collection really fascinating. There are 16 letters written home to his family, and then there are how many drawings?
GUEST:
Uh... 53.
APPRAISER:
53 drawings, and not... not all of them look like this. There are some pencil sketches and then some inks and some ones that have been hand-colored. The Civil War is the first war where the majority of combatants on both sides were literate, and you see Civil War letters sometimes are embellished by a soldier with drawings of camps or scenes in his camp life. But this guy, you can tell that he started off as a sketch artist, and then he got better and more precise as he went along in his career in the military. And I did a little bit of checking. He was actually promoted in 1864 to the title of artificer-- a-r-t-i-f-i-c-e-r. Individual Civil War drawings and individual art of Civil War soldiers can range in value from a few hundred to several thousand. We've got 53 drawings here of varying quality, plus the letters, plus we've got pictures of him, plus you've got his discharge papers. It's a great group of stuff. I think there's probably $10,000 to $15,000 on the low side here. It's a great collection, and I'm glad to see you're protecting them in these acid-free sleeves. If there were more battlefield scenes and that sort of thing, it would be worth a lot more.
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