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ASHAEL SUMNER DEAN

 CIVIL WAR LETTERS TO HIS FAMILY

 

 

 

May 24, 1864  Tybee Roads

Miss Annie L. Dean, Foxboro Mass Box 41

 

Dear Sis,

  I have a few minutes left before a mail leaves us for Port Royal and I will write to let you know I am well, although the last two letters will go by the same mail.  Letters which I wrote sometime ago.  The Pay is going up to Port Royal, 18miles, - we having become tired of waiting for the mail.  We have accounts of our having two mails there from the North.  But soon there will not be so much trouble for more people will be at this place and more communication with the "Head" - as we call Port Royal.  Yesterday, I went with the Pay & Mr. Sargent up to Fort Pulaski, distant up the river 2-1/2 miles.  We had a fine ride in our "Ward Room Boat, the main sail flowing full and free", and we were soon there.  We had a good deal of sport going up.  We saw a man walking out to sea.  He looked as though he was going to board our vessel.  The illusion arose from the fact that the Island on which the Fort stands sends down the river in a very long low forked beach or point.  The sand was the color of this water and on the same plane with us.  We could look beyond and see water and therefore he had the appearance of walking out one or two miles over the sea.  He was shooting sandpipers.  We went on the Cockspur Island, a low marshy desolate place.  A plank road leads from the dock to the Fort and you see nothing but oats and rushes and fiddlers. - Thousands of these funny things are on the mud.  They look as irregular as a crab and when they see you they all run for their holes.  Then they peep out and if you come nearer they dodge in again.  We looked over the Fort saw the Rebel guns, looked where it had been perforated with our shot.  Went into a Sutler's Store and there found the Pay & Dr. of the SOUTH CAROLINA  Bought some trifling things and then returned.   Annie, bear in mind that all this while the thermometer was 100 degrees in the shade!

  This day a Regiment of Negro troops have arrived and more are expected and we guess Ironclads will be here before long and there may be some busy times, but we have to guess at all this.  However, the shooting of an alligator 18 feet long and a shark 12 feet near us on the Point of Tybee was no guess work though I did not see either.  The sharks are very numerous and we do not draw in seines of fish without taking in young sharks.  It is said a soldier had his leg taken off last summer by one.  You should be here to pick berries.   Our boys went yesterday morning and got quite 12 quarts of the very nicest of berries.  Besides, the flowers and beach Plums are thick.   The Plums the size of English Walnuts.  Now Annie, I have hastily written you a busy letter and you must reply at a greater length than usual.  You will let V. hear from me.  Give her and the birds very much love from me and also all the others and be assured that I am ever your bald headed Brother.  As mail will leave New York for Port Royal June 8th, 16th, 23rd and July 1 and one from here on the same days.

   {  ONCE AGAIN, NO CLOSING??? }

 

 

 

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