Military Telegraph Battery Wagon

With large digital copies of civil war — or other — photographs, it’s sometimes interesting to zoom in on different sections of images to more closely examin what is there.

The next image, cropped from the photo, shows a ghostly image of a man. This, of course, is someone who was moving during the long exposure required for photographs. He pause long enough to appear as an apparation superimposed over the background.

Part of an encampment can be seen on the right in the background, where the shapes of possibly five soldiers can be seen. Two are squatting; one is standing, reading a newspaper, it appears, with another fellow, possibly shirtless, standing next to him. On the left of this cropped image, there appears to be a a fifth soldier bending over at the waist. Parts of at least four tents can be made out as well as stacked arms — with at least five weapons with bayonets. Behind the soldiers on the left, there seems to be a part of the curve of a road.

In the picture below, a telegraph operator sits in the wagon, with a pen or pencil in his hand, writing.

Petersburg, Va. U.S. Military Telegraph battery wagon, Army of the Potomac headquarters

Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, the siege of Petersburg, June 1864-April 1865; MEDIUM: 1 negative : glass, wet collodion; CREATED/PUBLISHED: 1864 June; photographer: David Knox; Civil War photographs, 1861-1865; compiled by Hirst D. Milhollen and Donald H. Mugridge, Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress, 1977. No. 0357; LOC digital image

Other sizes of this image are available on my flickr page for it.