Earl, Yes, I will be around here during the summer--except possibly for a few days at some point. I think I saw the PBS documentary on the Civil War that you refer to. But that was before I had read Adin Sasser's letter. I will try to see it again, with the letter in hand, as you suggest. The Confederate family you refer to were my great great grandparents, Piety Sasser Humfleet (daughter of the patriarch and sister of Adin and Jesse) and her husband Bill Humfleet. Three of their sons were in the Confederate army, while Bill himself was put in prison on charges of cutting a telegraph wire. He was taken to the Johnson Island prison at Sandusky Ohio. (There was a recent docmentary on the History Channel about Civil War prisons which included a short piece on the horrible conditions there, including stories of men surviving by eating rats). When you travel to the Knox/Laurel area next year I hope you go to Mt. Olivet and visit the Humfleet home place. Our cousin, Lois Warfield and her husband Ralph Warfield--whose house is on the original site--will show you the metal box that includes family papers going back to the early 19th century, including the original copy of a hymn written by a fellow prisoner in honor of Bill Humfleet.) He was finally released (according to my grandmother, pardoned by Abraham Lincoln) but died in January 1865--before getting all the way home--of pneumonia at East Bernstedt in Laurel County. My grandmother had heard that he had to walk all the way (or, according to her account, at least from somewhere near Louisville, which I had mistakenly understood until recently to have been the place of imprisonment). Another sad story in a class with Adin's letter and predicament is the one that was included in materials I recently received from Debbie Mauelshagen about Piety having to take the wagon to East Bernstedt to bring her husband's body home. According to my grandmother, even the body did not get all the way to Mt. Olivet but instead--for reasons that one can only speculate about--was laid to rest at Robinson, just a few miles away. I sometimes halfheartedly fancy myself trying to write a novel about all this. Using my imagination to fill in the parts we don't know, I think I would have Adin writing another letter--this one to President Linconl pleading successfully for his brother-in-law's release. (To my knowledge, nobody has sought the documents that may be available on all this--and which might confirm or contradict some of the legends.) I don't know whether anyone has any explanation of how my great grandfather Arthur Humfleet avoided going to war along with his three brothers. He was born in 1847 and thus would have been about 15 years old in 1862. Many had to go who were even younger than that. I speculate that the recruiters were friends of the family and agreed to let this one boy stay, perhaps after his mother (Piety) begged them (and urged him not to volunteer). At least, those might be good fictional details. According to a different tradition, another one of my great grandfathers, Isaac Taylor, who would have been only about 12 years old at the time, was captured by the Rebels (at his home on Big Richland Creek, the place where I was born and raised) but turned loose at Mt. Olivet, just a few miles away; in my imagination, he was well known by the Humfleets, whose clout with the recruiters was responsible for his release. There are some anecdotes that I heard from my grandmother. One was about the young female relative visiting at Mt. Olivet (I think my grandmother said she was a Waggoner, but I am not sure) who taunted the Union troops passing by by yelling "Hurray for Jeff Davis!" Just recently, I heard another story from our cousin, Chester White (who is full of information about his Humfleet forebears). According to this story, Arthur Humfleet showed the troops where the spring was (he called it a sulfur spring and indicated that it was a considerable distance from the Humfleet place, and thus apparently not the one that my grandmother said she had to go to through the graveyard before daylight each moring). As the story (intended, I suppose, to contain an apocryphal element) goes, the troops "drank it [the spring] dry, and they drank the creek dry too." (Keep in mind that Mt. Olivet was on the Wilderness Road, the main highway though Cumberland Gap. As an afterthought, I am sending copies of this to the Sasser and Humfleet lists. I apologize to the members of the latter group for repeating some material they have already seen, but I might not get around to writing up the other maerial again. Glenn ***************************************** Glenn E. Perry Department of Political Science Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA E-Mail: psperrg@scifac.indstate.edu (812)237-2505 (office) (812)234-5661 (home) ****************************************