City Point Research Resources
Special Interest Groups
There is also a yahoo group in which the participants have
been doing a lot research and sharing a lot of information. This URL is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Civil_War_RRs/.
Searching the archives, files, photos and links section of
this
group can yield a lot of information.
Official Records
Also some information
can
be found in the official records, including year end reports and a
summary of railroad operations of the entire war. Both
Cornell
University and Ohio State university have online searchable copies.
The URLs are http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html
and http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/records/.
For
information on the Maritime aspects of City Point, also take a look at
the Official Naval Records, also available from the Cornell web site.
The naval division in charge in the area, was the North Atlantic
Blockading Squadron.
Historic Photographs
Both the Library of Congress and National Archives have
online
digitized photographs of City Point taken during the war. The
URLs for the online search engines are http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/
and http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/cwpquery.html.
Be aware that finding useful search criteria can be
challenging
at times and that some images are misidentified in terms of date and
location.
Books
The
City Point story seems like it should be told in detail in a book with
a number high quality photographs reproduced within. Most Civil
War books I've seen have extremely poor reproduction of the originals
Many surviving civil war photos actually have amazing resolution
and contrast. Take a look at the high resolution scans available
for download from the Library of Congress.
The book "Civil War
Railroads & Models" by Edwin P. Alexander has a number of photos of
City Point. Most of these photos are from the National Archives.
Except for the jacket, the images are not of great quality, but are
better than the thumbnails found on the National Archives site.
The text is limited. I was able to borrow this book through
inter-library loan from my local library and have scanned the City
Point relevant pages for future personal reference.
The
book "Civil War Weather in Virginia" by Robert K. Krick is invaluable,
if you are planning on modeling a particular date in Virginia.
Bernard Kempinski has put information about City Point and several
track
plans into his book "Mid-Size Track Plans for Realistic Layouts". It is available from Alkem Scale Models at this link http://www.geocities.com/bkempins/ASMMain/TrackPlanBook.html.
I
have found that other overview histories of Railroading during the
Civil War have limited usefulness, as far as modeling goes, but can
provide some good overall background information.
National Archives
The
ultimate resource would be a trip to the National Archives
itself.
Though I haven't made such a trip Bernard Kempinski has
provided
some tips and information on his blog pages. The URL for his
blog
is http://usmrr.blogspot.com/search/label/Archives.
There is a nice writeup on Civil War resources at this link: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2011/summer/usmrr.html
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