 |
| LeRoy Wiley Gresham 1847-1865 |
At age 8, he followed other youths on their way home from school into a burned out structure, and boys being boys, began investigating what remained. The brick chimney began to collapse, and he bore the brunt of it. His left leg was caught and severely crushed. And from that point onward, he pinned his medical troubles on that one accident.
In one respect, he might have been correct. But what would take his life at the tender age of 17 was not what he thought... and is but one of the threads that weaves throughout the remarkable set of daily journals that he kept beginning at age 12 in 1860 and ending shortly before his death in 1865.
The first thing that drew me to LeRoy's journals was that they were primary sources, and as a teacher of high school history, I have always taught my students that primary sources, regardless of their unique limitations, are the closest thing to being part of a major historical event. These journals are unique, and although I have read many Civil War journals, memoirs, letters, official papers, and the like, they were all written by adults. This set of journals, however, was the work of a young teenager in the South, and my initial reading led me to ask my friend, Ted Savas, of Savas-Beatie publishing if he had seen this source before.
He hadn't. Nor had he seen anything else like it.
