There is still about 6 inches of snow on the ground here and our driveway is pretty much a mess. Our youngest son got on the tractor today after going and buying a scraper blade in Petersburg this morning. He was trying to take out the ridges of ice and snow so that he could get out the driveway in a used car he bought recently. It's a cute Acura and he usually drives a big white Ford F-350 truck (which he really likes), but he was wanting to do some shifting in this new used car and so worked diligently to reshape the surface of our driveway. I went outside to mostly keep an eye on him while on the tractor. Those things scare me badly. I took a snow shovel along to chop ice chunks, etc. I was coming back toward the house and looked down on the ground as I was walking and not that I was looking for anything, but something caught my eye. It looked like a Civil War button. It was a Civil War button. In this one spot near our well pump we often find things like broken pieces of dishes, glass, and metal fragments that come to the surface in the dirt. It's a slight knoll and the soil here is very sandy. With even the lightest rain or snow melting, I guess the soil is moved away and these old pieces of the past come to the top. Sure enough, right up next to the well pump housing there was this very nice Yankee Staff Officer's button. Now, I wouldn't have known exactly what this was, but my husband did. We buy and sell military items for a living and have a web site called www.billybullet.com so these buttons and things are what we are used to seeing. I knew it was a Yankee button, but not exactly which one. My husband did lots of relic hunting back in the day and knows these things like the back of his hand. This is not one of his. This button has obviously been in the ground since probably 1864 or so. A good explanation for it being here is because General Sheridan came to this house during the war and encamped his men here for three days. There were hundreds of tents pitched to the left of the drive mostly and he even had a few guards near the house to protect Mrs. Fleet and her children. So this button was most likely lost by one of these soldiers. They stayed and upon their departure took all but one or two cows of the Fleet's as well as the other livestock, like chickens, etc. Because Mrs. Fleet begged Sheridan to leave her a cow so the children could have milk, he obliged. I will tell you more about that later in another blog, but this button is right out of the ground today, February 13th. I ran in the house with it and showed my husband. We couldn't believe how easily it could have been stepped on or missed or just washed away, but there it was. Like it was just asking for someone to pick it up. I was happy to do that!!!
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