The Pennsylvania border county of York and its people stood smack in the middle of things - where South met North - in the American Civil War. That war roiled York County from its tip near the capital of Harrisburg to its 40-mile base at the Mason-Dixon Line. Union soldiers moved to the South after seasoning and staging on county soil. Train cars dripping with blood carried many wounded and diseased soldiers back to a mammoth U.S. military hospital on York parkland. Thousands of York County residents donned blue uniforms, and untold scores died. The war marched onto county soil in those terrible days before the Battle of Gettysburg. The four-day Confederate visit drained money, food, supplies, and horseflesh. Soldiers in blue and gray died in fighting at Hanover and Wrightsville. Gettysburg came next, and county residents gathered food and supplies to treat the wounds of battle, a short 30 miles away. Authors Scott MIngus and Jim McClure present more than 300 different stories of York during the war, including soldiers' memoirs, newspaper accounts, civilian letters and diaries, and other primary sources.
Jim McClure and I share a mutual interest in chronicling the memories of the Civil War here in York County, Pennsylvania. Jim, then the editor of the local newspaper, and I asked the public to send us copies of diaries, letters, journals, memoirs, and photographs from their ancestors fron the war years (1861-1865). We then assembled excerpts from these submissions into chronological order, added background context, and crafted a pair of now out-of-print books. In November 2020, we published a revised, updated single volume with many new additional stories and photo
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