I don't exactly know where Dwight's intense study of the Civil War started. As a boy of 8 or 9, he received civil war figures for Christmas. It seemed like he acquired hundreds of them. He would line them up in huge ranks on the den floor. At 14 or so my parents sent him to Masanutten Military Academy. I was a cadet at Virginia Tech. We met a couple of times with the family and we actually wore our uniforms and compared how we shined our brass buttons. He had some fun getting into the drill team and related as how, at a big dance, they marched around in the hall with bayonets fixed and accidentally got tangled in the lovely bunting that had been hung from the ceiling. The overall experience at the academy wasn't the best for him, but it did give him an experience of tasting and feeling the Civil War in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dwight moved from the DC area to live around his parents in Christiansburg. I think that it must have been at this time that his interest in the CIvil War blossomed. I visited about once a year and he took me of a tour of just about every single battlefield in Virgina! As the years past he developed a GREAT reverence for that struggle. He GROKKED the whole thing.
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I don't exactly know where Dwight's intense study of the Civil War started. As a boy of 8 or 9, he received civil war figures for Christmas. It seemed like he acquired hundreds of them. He would line them up in huge ranks on the den floor. At 14 or so my parents sent him to Masanutten Military Academy. I was a cadet at Virginia Tech. We met a couple of times with the family and we actually wore our uniforms and compared how we shined our brass buttons. He had some fun getting into the drill team and related as how, at a big dance, they marched around in the hall with bayonets fixed and accidentally got tangled in the lovely bunting that had been hung from the ceiling. The overall experience at the academy wasn't the best for him, but it did give him an experience of tasting and feeling the Civil War in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dwight moved from the DC area to live around his parents in Christiansburg. I think that it must have been at this time that his interest in the CIvil War blossomed. I visited about once a year and he took me of a tour of just about every single battlefield in Virgina! As the years past he developed a GREAT reverence for that struggle. He GROKKED the whole thing.
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