Preserved Mass. Civil War diary commemorates a ‘glorious fourth’ on July 4, 1863

From masslive.com

Preserved Massachusetts Civil War diary commemorates a ‘glorious fourth’ on July 4, 1863

WORCESTER — Walking into Mark Farrell’s home on Gibb Street is like walking into an antique museum.

Inside the cabinets near the kitchen are rows of dolls dressed in frilly clothes. Several glass cats sit on the kitchen bar, staring at the living room walls adorned with pictures of people from the 19th century.

Most, if not all, of the antiques are owned by Farrell’s wife, but the 71-year-old Worcester native has his own historical piece — one that is directly tied to his family.

Farrell owns one of several copies of a diary featuring the manuscripts of his great-grandfather, Civil War sergeant Henry W. Tisdale of Massachusetts.

A member of the 35th regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Tisdale participated in several campaigns, including in Vicksburg — the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi river.

The original diary was made by Farrell’s grandmother, who copied the transcripts Tisdale wrote during the Civil War. Seven copies of the original diary were subsequently made, with one eventually being given to Farrell by his mother.

Though the diary is currently locked in a safe, members of the public can view its contents online at civilwardiary.net, a website Farrell has overseen since the early 2000s.

Farrell said that people wanted him to publish the diary in book form and make a profit but he refused — saying his great-grandfather wouldn’t approve.

“He would roll over in his grave, if I did something like that,” he said. “I can put this thing online.”

Mark Farrell of Worcester holds up a picture of his great-grandfather, Civil War Sergeant Henry W. Tisdale.(Adam Bass/MassLive.com)

Who was Henry W. Tisdale?

Born in Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1837, Tisdale was the son of a woodcutter and the oldest of seven children. Raised between Walpole and West Dedham, which today is known as Westwood, Tisdale’s first job was as an apprentice at a trading business, according to Farrell.

By 1862, Tisdale turned 25 years old. At the time, President Abraham Lincoln sought 300,000 volunteers in the area for the ongoing Civil War. Tisdale would enlist in the effort, becoming the first person from Dedham to sign the roster for Company I of the 35th Regiment for the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

“Soon after the President’s call for the 300,000 volunteers felt it my duty to be one of them, feel it as much a Christian as a political duty, and feel that every citizen ought to feel it so,” Tisdale wrote. “And certainly have never felt more peace of mind as flowing from a sense of duty done, as in this matter of enlistment into the service of our country.”

After spending nearly a month in training camp, Tisdale left Massachusetts for the front in August of 1862. The man from West Dedham found himself in Maryland and Virginia. Tisdale was very religious and faithful, according to Farrell. His writings mention the importance of living a Christian life and he attended Bible classes.

He also detested slavery, saying it was a system that brutalizes humanity.

On Sept. 14, 1862, Tisdale was shot and wounded in the thigh at Fox’s Gap during the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland. He then missed participating in the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the war.

By February, 1863, Tisdale was healed and returned to the front. He took part in more campaigns, including the Siege of Vicksburg.

“The news had come to us at noon that Vicksburg had surrendered with General Pemberton, 27,000 prisoners, 280 guns with small arms and it is difficult to describe the joy with which the news was received in the camp,” Tisdale wrote on July 4, the day Vicksburg fell. “We had counted upon nothing of note to occur by which we might celebrate the day, but with such news it could scarcely be otherwise than a ‘glorious Fourth.’”

On July 12, near Jackson, Mississippi, Tisdale was giving instructions to a sergeant from a Rhode Island regiment when a bullet passed through the sergeant and killed him.

The bullet, however, struck Tisdale’s rifle, sparing him.

“Looking at my gun I saw that the middle band was partially broken and the woodwork close to it dented upon the barrel, thus showing that the bullet after passing through his body had struck the gun and by it was glanced aside,” he wrote. “Thus has God again preserved me in the day of battle.”

On May 24, 1864, Tisdale was captured after the Battle of North Anna River. He was held at several confederate prisons, such as Libby Prison in Richmond and Andersonville Prison in Georgia.

While in Andersonville, Tisdale oversaw 90 other men, obtaining rations, roll call, and taking the sick to the hospital.

On March 3, 1865, Tisdale was returned to the Union in a prisoner exchange and was discharged on June 13. In 1868, Tisdale married Abbie Frances Cheney. The two wound up living in Boston and had seven children. Tisdale never spoke about his experiences during the war in his later years, according to Farrell.

In May 1922, Tisdale died at the age of 85. He is buried in Norwood.

Keeping the legacy alive

Farrell found out about his great-grandfather’s legacy in the 1960s when he and his family visited the house of Tisdale’s daughters for Thanksgiving.

Tisdale’s knapsack, haversack, blanket roll and rifle had all been preserved by his daughters. In fact, Farrell and his brother used to play with the rifle when they were children.

“Something you should never do,” Farrell laughed. “But when you are 8 years old, you have no idea.”

The rifle, along with Tisdale’s other belongings, are now part of the Dedham Historical Society along with one hardbound typed copy of the diary.

In high school, Farrell became a fan of history and mentioned the diary to his teacher.

“I brought it in and he liked it,” Farrell said. “So he did a mimeograph.”

Around 2000, Farrell received a notice from his teacher, who told him that his AP class had digitized the diary. Farrell decided to put the diary online, showing his great-grandfather’s history for the world to see.

Today, Farrell is still overseeing the digital copy of the diary, paying $50 a year to keep the website up. The responses he gets from people reading the diary have been positive, he said.

“Every once in a while, I get an email and they’ll say, ‘Hey Mark, thank for putting it up. I read the whole thing,’” he said.

The history of Farrell’s great-grandfather was inspirational for Farrell. It was part of the reason he taught history at Bay Path Regional Vocational Technical and at Grafton Middle School.

At some point, however, Farrell will have to turn over the duties of keeping the website, and his great-grandfather’s diary alive. As he has no children of his own, Farrell plans to ask his nephew to take up the task.

“I’m gonna leave some money to pay for the web hosting,” said Farrell. “All you gotta do take it over and pay the 50 bucks a year.”

https://www.masslive.com/news/2026/07/preserved-mass-civil-war-diary-commemorates-a-glorious-fourth-on-july-4-1863.html

 

New book explores 19th-century coded diary and its parallels to the present day

From mountainx.com

HISTORY REPEATS: “I think that I imagined that the 19th century was a long, long time ago,” says writer Jeremy B. Jones, in discussing his early mindset while researching his latest book, Cipher. But the more he dug, “the more I realized that the things that show up in the 19th century are still showing up today.” Photo by Thomas Calder

No one word can capture a book, but in the case of Jeremy B. Jones‘ latest work of literary nonfiction, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, happenstance is certainly a prominent component of the story’s origin.

Jones’ introduction to the coded diaries, which were written by his quadruple-great-grandfather William Thomas Prestwood, came about by chance.

In 2014, the Henderson County native was preparing for the publication of his memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His press requested photographs for the book. While searching through his grandmother Betty Jean Prestwood Jones’ home, he discovered a 1979 article from the Asheville Citizen Times with the headline, “Secret Journals Yield Honest Picture of WNC.”

Jones, it turned out, would become the latest in a small but significant group of individuals intrigued by these mysterious pages that documented a span of over 50 years (1808-59). Entries included encrypted accounts of Prestwood’s everyday life — from his capturing of runaway horses to his many sexual conquests — written in a cipher that combined numbers, unusual pictographs and some letters.

One of the diary’s other key guardians was Steven Scott Smith, who in 1975, stumbled upon the collection of writings in a heap of trash outside an abandoned home on the verge of being razed. The odd hieroglyphics were indecipherable, but as Jones writes in the book, “[Smith] knew enough to know that old might mean valuable[.]”

Three years later, through a mutual friend, Smith was connected to Nathaniel Browder, a retired National Security Agency (NSA) cryptanalyst.

“After a hundred and twenty years of the notebooks passing from hand to hand; after three years of Steven Smith carrying them to libraries and archives, Browder sat down with a handful of pages and his magnifying glass and broke the code in half an hour,” Jones writes.

More than 35 years later, standing inside his grandmother’s home in Fruitland,  Jones read through the 1979 newspaper article, which characterized his kin as “an intellectual,” “a naturalist,” “a mathematician” and “a tireless lover.”

Jones’ grandmother smiled. “He was one of ours,” she told her grandson. “My great-great-grandaddy.”

Little did Jones know that over the next decade, a significant portion of his life would be spent researching this relative. And while Prestwood’s unrelenting sexual desires were initially a source of amusement, Jones’ ancestor’s ties to slavery quickly complicated the writer’s understanding of his family history.

“I am a man born in the South, from families settled in the South for hundreds of years,” Jones writes. “Finding slavery in one’s family tree is like finding salt in the ocean. And still, I thought the mountain poverty of my people might have spared me.”

Beyond biography 

I met with Jones, a professor of English studies at Western Carolina University, in October, on land his family has owned in Fruitland for over a century. His wife and two children are temporarily living in his now-deceased grandmother’s home, displaced by Tropical Storm Helene.

We toured a portion of the 100-acre property, which is scattered with old barns and other structures. Eventually, we settled on a wooden bench outside the home that belonged to Jones’ great-great-grandparents, Asbury and Clementine Prestwood.

“I think that I imagined that the 19th century was a long, long time ago,” Jones says in discussing his early mindset while researching Cipher. “That allowed me to go into the diaries with a comical intent.”

But the longer he waded through William Thomas Prestwood’s pages, “the more I realized that the things that show up in the 19th century are still showing up today.”

While Prestwood’s journey is at the heart of Cipher, Jones’ book is not a biography by any stretch. His ancestor’s lifetime overlaps with key events in U.S. history, many of which are touched on and contemplated in Jones’ writing.

For example, President James Madison authorized a failed invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, with ideas of expansion and/or securing a bargaining chip with Great Britain. A few decades later, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Jones, who began writing the book during President Donald Trump’s first administration and completed final edits during President Joe Biden’s time in office, says the parallels he initially explored on the page between Trump’s push to build a wall on the southern border and Jackson’s desire to push Indigenous people westward have taken on a new meaning in Trump’s second term.

At the time of our conversation in October, federal agents were still several months away from overwhelming cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis; Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were still alive. But even then, the administration’s push for mass deportations had triggered a number of controversies, including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

“Some of the things that I thought were a little more subtle [during Trump’s first administration] are just louder now in terms of parallels between things that were happening in the 19th century and the [current] Trump administration,” Jones says, looking out onto his family’s property from our location on the bench. Whereas Trump’s initial term focused primarily on preventing entry into the U.S., he notes, his second term is more in line with Jackson’s direct efforts to remove groups of people.

These parallels, however, are not unique to Jackson and Trump. As Jones writes in Cipher, the two men, separated by centuries, are mere instances in a deeper history often characterized by the desire to cling to “a narrow American identity … so obviously desperate and doomed that it made me want to scream and laugh all at once. And yet we carried on, as we’d carried on since we declared our independence: sorting out who belongs and who doesn’t.”

Talking to the dead 

Despite the book’s exploration of heavy and consequential topics — from white privilege to toxic masculinity — there is a joy in reading Jones’ Cipher. Part of this stems from the author’s complex relationship with Prestwood.

Though separated by centuries, Jones nevertheless engages with his ancestor throughout the book, often in letters addressed directly to Prestwood. In one, he writes, “Because I read your pages while knowing much of your future, I know you’ll lose a child next year. I’m sorry, William. It’s an uncomfortable power I have on this side of history.”

A few pages later, Jones reaches the portion of Prestwood’s diaries in which his quadruple-great-grandfather has surpassed Jones’ current age. “He was finally my elder,” the author writes, “experiencing stages of life I’d not yet encountered.”

In other chapters, Jones imagines the future, contemplating his own death and what his life’s story will mean for subsequent generations of his family tree.

“They will unearth me in 2220 and not understand how I could stomach stepping into an airplane that burns up the atmosphere, slowly boiling the planet they’ll inherit,” he writes. “How I drive sixty miles to work, dumping poison into the air they’ll breathe. I will plead with my descendants about how I didn’t know what to do, tell them about how it’s all too big, too systematic, too woven into everything for me to make a change.”

As this passage and others reiterate, Jones is unafraid of applying the same critical eye he casts upon Prestwood to own life choices. By extension, he invites readers to contemplate their own complicity in today’s social, political and cultural issues, all of which will inevitably turn into tomorrow’s history.

Throughout our conversation on that wooden bench in Fruitland, Jones and I return to this reality: That we are here for only a moment. And we have no real say over how the future will judge us.

But as with his book, Jones and I agree there is a certain liberation in knowing so much is out of our control; that the most we can do is strive to live a decent life void of self-serving exploitation.

Near the end of Cipher, Jones recalls a conversation he had with novelist Wendell Berry, who declared to Jones that he didn’t believe in hope.

“We’re living in a cult of the future right now; everyone is panicked about what might happen, about all these hypotheticals and end-time scenarios,” Jones remembers Berry telling him. “They’re paralyzed. But what can you do about that? All most of us can really do is find the problem in front of us and get to work there. Find the need where you live. Hope can go wrong far too easily.”

https://mountainx.com/arts/literature/new-book-explores-19th-century-coded-diary-and-its-parallels-to-the-present-day/