My Brush with Eternity (July/August 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 4)

My Brush with Eternity

AH article image

Authors:

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 4

In 1961, I was elected president of the eighth-grade history club at Beaufort (South Carolina) Junior High. I don’t know why that honor was bestowed upon me, but I served to the best of my ability and, on at least one occasion, considerably beyond it.

Those were the days of the Civil War Centennial, and I had been brought up on a steady diet of that great conflict since my early childhood: We saw it, heard it, breathed it, stumbled over it. Yes, stumbled over it, for, in the 1960s, there was still a fair amount of military hardware lying around. Beaufort County had been the scene of continuous deployments, occupations, feints, and battles, and its fertile soil regularly yielded up cannonballs, minié balls, and tons of shrapnel. But, year by year, the take was getting leaner.

As president of the history club, I took it upon myself to garner and preserve as many of those fast-disappearing artifacts as possible. I marshaled my troops and sallied forth. We explored the serpentine earthworks on nearby Hilton Head, and crawled through the cavernous bowels of Fort Pulaski near Savannah, which was the first command of the young Robert E. Lee. I borrowed a military-surplus mine detector, but gave it back in disgust after spending the better part of an afternoon digging up the rusty remains of a wood-burning kitchen range.

Nowadays, there are signs at historic sites saying, “Take only photographs, leave only footprints,” but we carried away everything we found: minié balls, half a sword, a peck of shell fragments. Finally, we approached the junior high school principal and asked for a place to display our growing collection. He found us a corner of the library, complete with glass-front cases that formerly housed athletic trophies that had been won a generation before. We carefully labeled and laid out our treasures for all to see. The Beaufort Junior High eighth-grade history club museum soon became the talk of the school.

 

The buses in those days were driven by high school seniors, and operated on a somewhat lackadaisical schedule. They drifted in one by one, bringing students from the islands and farms, depositing the earliest in front of the locked doors of the junior high. It was a good time for meaningful conversation with the girls or a quick game of football. Today, educators call this “unsupervised free time,” and, in an age of eighth-grade drug deals, truancy, and mayhem, it is avoided at all costs. But, in 1961, it was not unusual to find a hundred students killing time, waiting for the doors to open.

This was the scene when one of the charter members of the history club got off the Gray’s Hill bus, lugging an artillery round. He attracted immediate attention and was soon surrounded by a clamoring crowd. Another boy asked to hold it, and, in the exchange, it slipped and fell, nose first, to the ground. The girls screamed, and the boys