Perryville, KY Battlefield Hospital Plaster Stabilization
Perryville, KY: 1995
The 1862 Battle of Perryville was a pivotal engagement of the Civil War that left Kentucky out of the Confederacy and ensured Union forces an attack base near the Chattanooga railhead. But the price paid in this battle was a heavy one for both sides as 7500 men died in less than five hours. For the local population of 300 that was left with bullet-riddled houses, the next few weeks would be spent burying many of the dead from the battlefield in makeshift graves and nursing thousands of men from both sides back to health.
In the 1990s, a local man seeking to retain this heritage as part of a national history park asked conservators to spend an unsettling two weeks stabilizing and preserving the plaster of the Bottom house, a two-story log cabin home that had alternately been occupied by the Union and Confederate armies during the most intense fighting of the day. Living in this bullet-ridden house in the middle of a cornfield was eerie even before the archaeologists began uncovering limb pits in the yard. Only then did the conservators begin to realize the irregular brown tideline on the walls and the stained doors used as gurneys that marked the Bottom House as a makeshift field hospital. The project included stabilizing the bullet holes across their trajectory – entering through the exterior log walls at knee height and coming to rest in the log walls of the far side of the house at shoulder height – as well as the soldier's graffiti, written as they lay bleeding on the floors.
Restoration Group owner Tom McDowell and carpenter Mike Mullinix worked together with John Greenwalt Lee using plaster consolidation and repair methods John had worked to streamline with Morgan Phillips during the 1970s.