Civil War history still breathes down the years

The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park commissioned Coffin to develop a walking tour of the town’s Civil War history. While other national parks interpret important Civil War battlefields, Woodstock’s tour was the first to deal with life on the home front. Over the summer, National Park Service rangers lead the two-hour, two-mile walk. The tour draws on letters and other accounts Coffin discovered during his research to impart a personal touch, much as filmmaker Ken Burns used such materials in his Civil War documentary. Just before this season started, we joined Coffin for a preview.

The tour commences at a grassy pasture at the Billings Farm & Museum adjacent to the National Historical Park. In 1862 it was the site of Camp Dike, where 250 soldiers trained for a nine-month tour of duty, and a large oval depression still marks the encampment. Many of the recruits were sharpshooters, and Coffin hypothesizes that they practiced their marksmanship a few hundred yards away where an embankment could serve as a backstop for bullets.

The modern scene is a bucolic idyll of big-eyed Jersey cows grazing in thick green grass. But in 1862, the pasture was a bustling place as soldiers and civilians alike anticipated the deployment of Vermont troops. Newspaper records show that 1,500 people came out to celebrate religious services one Sunday afternoon. The aim of the walking tour is to evoke that era, lost to living memory.

The time feels closer on the stroll into town across the Elm Street Bridge. Although the covered bridge of Civil War days no longer stands, the town looks much as it did in the 1860s. Most of the handsome houses, as well as mercantile buildings along Central Street, predate the Civil War.