Ethan's Peach Tree - A Civil War Blog

"That night I lay beside the Charles Town Pike and watched until morning the grimey columns come pouring up from the pontoons.  It was a weird uncanny sight and drove sleep from my eyes.  It was something demon-like, a scene from an inferno.  They were silent as ghosts, ruthless and rushing in their speed, ragged, earth-colored, disheveled and devilish.  The shuffle of their badly shod feet on the hard surface of the pike was so rapid as to be continuous like the hiss of a great serpent.  The spectral, ghostly picture will never be erased from my memory."

From the diary of Captain Henry Hastings Ripley, dated September 16, 1862.