For right now, I have been thrown off of Spacebook. It seems someone opened an account on Instagram in my name, and they posted content against Spacebook's community standards. So, they took down Starke Miller and Miller Civil War Tours. The appeal system looks like a joke.

WALTER PLACE in HOLLY SPRINGS, MISSISSIPPI Holly Springs was a very wealthy town in North Mississippi. A number of the wealthier men in the town had helped to fund and found the Mississippi Central Rail Road in the late 1850's. It was the last link, in the line of Railroads, between Chicago and New Orleans. Everyone in Holly Springs was so happy to finally have the benefits of being on that rail line: cheaper, faster shipping for their cotton, a second deep seaport, Charleston S. C. for better prices for their cotton, faster travel, they got mail much faster, they got newspapers the next day, they had a second, better telegraph, they even had fresh oysters sent up from the Gulf in barrels of sea water. The thing no one foresaw about the railroad, is that it would bring yankee invasions during the Civil War. It became an invasion route into central Mississippi. It has been written that one mansion owners put a mark on one of his house columns each time the yankees came into the town. By the end of four years of War, he had 60 marks on his column! About one third of the town had been burned, including the Courthouse, about half of the Square, one third of the houses, the railroad shops, the railroad station, and the large ironworks. In 1878 the railroad brought into central Mississippi Yellow Fever. Maybe as high as ten percent of the people of Holly Springs died, including Mr. Harvey Walter, owner of this house, and his two oldest sons. All three died in this house. The railroad was both a blessing, and a curse.

AN EXPLANATION, OF SORTS, FOR OLE MISS'S HOTTY TODDY It was a bit of a nonsense cheer from the 1920's. They were rhyming words. The original words were probably Hoity Toity. It is OUR unique cheer. It is also a greeting from one Ole Miss REBEL to another. If you ever see some Ole Miss person somewhere out in the wild, say Hotty Toddy to them, you will at least get a smile, and maybe a new friend.

THE 1959 and 1979 OLE MISS ANNUALS! HOTTY TODDY!

Nobel

@VaGentryMag Thanks!

It has been written that the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment was the FIRST Southern Regiment to paint a Battle Honor on their Flag. Battle Honors were simply the name of a Battle that they had honorably fought in. In this first case it was Manassas.

@h8bianco He was a Sigma Chi, as was his little brother.

Confederate Veterans of Oxford, Lafayette County, Mississippi. This is their fairly new 1907 Confederate Monument. We do not have a date on this photo, but it has got to be close to 1907. When the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Lafayette County Chapter, placed their Confederate Monument out at the University in 1906, William Faulkner's grandmother had a fit! She had wanted it on the Courthouse lawn, like every other Southern town was doing. She went straight to the Veterans themselves. She stirred them up to the point they raised $3000 dollars in a year and a half, to build this monument, and place it on the Lafayette County Courthouse lawn. That is the Courthouse to the left. That is the Federal building, now City Hall, to the right. Unfortunately, we have no names for any of these Confederate Veterans. Between 1866, and 1890, there were at least SIX different groups who tried to put some sort of Monument up in Oxford or at the University to remember the local dead. They all failed because there was no money in Mississippi. Finally, by 1890, the Delta Gamma girls at the University got a Memorial window placed in the new Library building to the University Greys. It took them 10 years to raise the money. So much for the lie that these monuments were tied to Jim Crow laws in the 1890's. Oxford, and the original Courthouse, and all the Square were burned on August 22, 1864. Union General A. J. Smith had come to Oxford to catch Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest had slipped around Smith, and raided Smith's base at Memphis. Out of pure anger, Smith burned Oxford. I can now document 49 other Mississippi towns that were burned during the War.

This is a poem that my Father brought to me from the Flea Market. I believe it to be modern. It is very well done. CLICK to enlarge and read. Enjoy!

SITTIN' UP WITH THE DEAD This is what I do most every night. I sit up with the dead. I chase dead Confederates. I play hide and seek with them. I want to find them all, and try to understand them. I sit here in my quiet, dark, home office, some nights with the computer on. Some nights I am reading a book, other nights I am digging through six different books or four files of photo copied material. Some nights everything is spread all over the place, computer on, files all over my desk and stacks of books on the floor, next to my chair. I write their stories because I have to. I find the most amazing, saddest, most ironic, funniest, and most pathetic stories I have ever seen, and I have to tell someone: Jeremiah Gage's sad death at Gettysburg, and the last letter he wrote to his Mamma. Seventeen year old Captain of the University Greys, William B. Lowry. Lewis T, Fant being up on crutches, falling on the pavement at Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, and bleeding to death from a ruptured blood vessel that retracted up into his stump, and the Doctor could not tie it off quickly enough. 110 Ole Miss students and alumni in the Batte of Shiloh, and all their stories. The fact that 99 percent of the Ole Miss student body from the school year of 1860-1861, fought for the Confederacy, 223 out of 225. They did their duty. One Hundred stories of the dead in Oxford's St. Peter's Cemetery. Ole Miss graduate Burton N. Harrison, who was Jefferson Davis's personal secretary. The sad, delayed, 1866 Ole Miss graduation for the Class of 1861 survivors. "Tears were shed all over the house" Four 16 year old boys in the University Greys. The Sad death letter of University Grey, James R. Montgomery. Ole Miss graduate R. E. Wilbourn who got a tourniquet on Stonewall Jackson after he was wounded at Chancellorsville, to at least give Jackson a chance to survive. All the pre War Ole Miss student pranks. The Ole Miss Hospital before and after Shiloh, and its dead buried out behind Tad Smith Coliseum today, 392 of them. Beautiful little College Hill Church (1846) and the cemetery behind it, with 25 Confederate Veterans. All the events that have happened on the Oxford town Square, and its burning in 1864. The "Dead House" on the Ole Miss campus. It was a small, two room magnetic observatory. It served as the morgue for the University Hospital. I have a brick from it on my desk. All the Confederate monuments in Oxford, and on campus, and the women who got then done. God Bless 'em! Nathan Bedford Forrest in Oxford, on the Square, and on the Ole Miss campus. The 432 Lafayette County boys who died in the War. That is 25 percent of all who went to War from this County. The University Greys in Pickett's Charge, 100 percent casualties, in about 30 minutes time. The FIVE Taylor brothers, from Taylor, Mississippi, in the University Greys. The 82 percent of the 58 College Hill boys, killed or wounded in the War. That little community was never the same again. William Faulkner's many connections to the University Greys. And on, and on, and on, until my head swims, and the tears want to come. I know there are a few others spread across Mississippi, and America who do pretty much the same thing. I am not the only crazy person doing this. I don't know if it is a blessing or a curse for us. Here I am sittin' up with the dead again tonight. I should have a good story for y'all tomorrow. I will go back to "my boys" and not bore you with stories about myself. I have never been shot at by yankees, marched 20 miles in a day, slept in the rain or snow, starved, been dehydrated, frozen, burned up, won or lost a Battle, been wounded, watched my friends be maimed, or be killed. All I do is live with it every day and write about it. I have to. This picture is of the candle lighting at Sharpsburg, to remember the dead there. The University Greys had 3 killed, and 16 wounded out of 20 present. That is a 95 percent casualty rate. Good Lord!

LIEUTENANT COLONEL DAVID L. HERRON - KILLED at SHILOH - BURIED at HOME Generally, for Confederates, if you die in the Civil War your family does not get your body back. You are buried in a mass pit on the Battlefield. If you die in a hospital, you generally get a wooden headboard, but within 10 years, certainly 20 years, it rots, is splintered by a falling tree, or a cow or pig or deer knocks it over. Your burial site, or at least your name over your grave, is lost. After the War there was just no money in the South to replace wooden headboards with stone markers, for most of the dead. Shiloh is a bit different. It is the first large Battle in the West, in April of 1862. There were bodies brought back from that Battle. I know of at least six Officers whose bodies are taken home to be buried. At least four of the bodies are put into wagons by the order of their Colonel, and they are taken back 22 miles to the rail head at Corinth. Then they are put on the train, and taken home for burial. One body taken home was by the boy's two uncles, who somehow passed between the lines, and they exhumed their nephew, and they took him home. Two others that I know of had their body's brought home by their slave who went to War with them. Lieutenant Colonel David L. Herron here, was in Blythe's Mississippi Battalion. After Shiloh it became the 44th Mississippi. He was mortally wounded within sight of Shiloh Church, on the first day of Battle, April 6, 1862. His Battalion had just helped to take Waterhouse's Union Battery, between Rea Field and the Shiloh Church. He was hit there and mortally wounded. Herron's faithful servant Spencer Williams got his body on a mule, a horse, or in a wagon, and he took him back to the rail head at Corinth. From there they rode the train back to Coffeeville, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Central Railroad. At least his wife got his body back to bury. God Bless Spencer Williams for his act of humanity.