Aldace F. Walker, “The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley, 1864” (Burlington, VT: The Free Press Association, 1869).
*Note in our March newsletter we promised that 2019 would be devoted to highlighting important works related to the Shenandoah Valley’s Civil War- era story published in the conflict’s immediate aftermath.
Aldace Walker and the veterans of the 11th Vermont Infantry first glimpsed the Shenandoah Valley on July 18, 1864, from atop Snickers Gap. Impressed with the Valley, Walker wrote that on that day “for the first time [we] overlooked a country with the topography of which we afterwards became entirely familiar: that beautiful Valley, the garden of Virginia.” For the next four months, first as part of Union General Horatio Wright’s army that pursued General Jubal Early’s Confederates into the Shenandoah Valley after Early’s push to Washington, D.C.’s outskirts, and then as part of General Philip H. Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah, the 11th Vermont fought in the Shenandoah and helped reverse Union fortunes in the region.
