Stateside, part 1

Despite having previously been to numerous countries on five continents, until a few weeks ago I had never been to the United States, much to my regret. That lack has now been rectified.

I had to attend a meeting in the US Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Centre, a complex of classrooms and accommodation facilities nestling in the woods outside Shepherdstown, a pretty little historic town at the south-east corner of West Virginia, near the Virginia and Maryland borders. Here are some pictures of the town and of the Potomac river, at the point where it flows past the training centre.

The centre is also located near to Harper's Ferry, where John Brown's raid on the armoury in October 1959, with a view to starting a slave uprising, foreshadowed the outbreak of the American Civil War eighteen months later. I didn't have time to see that well-preserved town due to work commitments but I did get to see the battlefield site of Antietam; the battle which, on 17 September 1862, accounted for the biggest number of casualties from a single day in American military history. Lee's Confederate forces fought McLellan's Union forces to a draw but had to leave the field, owing to lack of men, so it is counted as a stragic victory for the Union, which had been losing most battles up until then. The Union forces included an Irish brigade, led by Thomas Francis Meagher, a veteran of an ill-judged uprising in Ireland in 1848 who had subsequently escaped to the US from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1852. He is credited with the design of the current irish flag, based on the French tricolour; he returned from a visit to Paris with the first such flag, made by French women sympathetic to the Irish cause; (however, that first flag had the orange on the left, nearest the pole, as Ivory Coast does now).

The pictures below show the sunken road at the battlefield, where the brigade suffered heavy losses, and Meagher's memorial.