Passing over the river...

Someone mentioned to me last night that we lost Michael W. Taylor a few weeks ago. Taylor, a lawyer who was living in Chapel Hill, was the author of To Drive the Enemy from Southern Soil: The Letters of Col. Francis Marion Parker and the History of the 30th Regiment North Carolina Troops (1998) and The Cry is War, War, War: The Civil War Correspondence of Lts. Burwell Thomas Cotton and George Job Huntley, 34th North Carolina Troops (1994). I don't recall having ever met Taylor, but we did correspond a few times.  You can see a short obit here.

I also learned a few weeks back that Dr. John G. Barrett passed away earlier this year. For some reason, I thought he was long gone. Barrett, whom I never met, penned the classic or standard study of North Carolina and the war, entitled The Civil War in North Carolina  (1963), along with North Carolina as a Civil War Battleground (1987), and with Buck Years, North Carolina Civil War Documentary (1980).  You can see a tribute here by one of his former students.

Barrett was obliviously the first modern scholar when it comes to North Carolina and the War, and many of us who pick up the pen today to continue the struggle of chronicling North Carolina's history rely heavily upon his work for background information.