Donald C. Pfanz

Don Pfanz was a National Park Service historian at Petersburg National Battlefield in 1987 when he wrote a letter that led to creation of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites and the start of the modern Civil War battlefield preservation movement. Horrified by the destruction of the battlefield at Chantilly by rampant development, Pfanz called for an organization “to preserve battlefield land by direct purchase” and other means in a letter to historian Brian Pohanka on April 22, 1987. The letter prompted an organizing effort which that July spawned APCWS, of which Pfanz was a co-founder. Pfanz has authored or co-authored five books on the Civil War. He retired from the Park Service in 2013 as a historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

Program Subject

​1/2 Day Tour – Massaponax Church/Armies March to North Anna/Richard Ewell

Massaponax Church, a simple brick building in the Classical Revial style, was completed in 1859. It was the second church for a congregation founded in 1788. The area around the church changed hands several times during the Civil War, and the building was used by both Union and Confederate armies as a headquarters, as well as a stable and a hospital. General Grant stopped at the church on May 21, 1864, an event captured in a series of photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan. Two photographs show the church and its yard; the other three, taken from the windows of church balcony, show Grant and his officers meeting in the courtyard, on pews dragged outside from the church. Don will also discuss the movement of the armies as they marched toward the North Anna and the life and career of Richard Ewell, the subject of his 1998 biography, Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life.

Graffiti uncovered in the balcony during renovations in 1938 is preserved under plexiglass. An unusual amount of this graffiti is writing, rather than signatures, and includes at least one exchange between Union and Confederate writers.

Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.,

Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Emerging Civil War and the series editor of the award-winning Emerging Civil War Series, published by Savas Beatie. Chris is a writing professor in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, NY, where he also serves as associate dean for undergraduate programs. Chris is also historian-in-residence at Stevenson Ridge, a historic property on the Spotsylvania battlefield in central Virginia. He has worked as a historian for the National Park Service at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he gives tours at four major Civil War battlefields (Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania), as well as at the building where Stonewall Jackson died.

Chris has authored or co-authored nearly two dozen books and edited a half-dozen essay collections on the Civil War, and his articles have appeared in all the major Civil War magazines. Chris serves on the board of directors for the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and on the advisory board of the Civil War Roundtable Congress and the Brunswick (NC) Civil War Roundtable—the largest in the country. He is also a member of the Antietam Institute and the U. S. Grant Homestead Association. In 2023, he was honored with the Houston Civil War Round Table’s Frank Vandiver Award and also selected as the Copie Hill Fellow at the American Battlefield Trust.

Program Subject

​Tour – Battle of Spotsylvania Court House – Including Todd’s Tavern, Spindle Field, Upton’s Assault, Lee’s Last Line, and CVBT-preserved Harris Farm, among others.

Kenneth Noe is a native of Virginia, born in Richmond to a graduate of Mary Washington, and is himself a graduate of Emory and Henry College. He earned master’s degrees in history at both Virginia Tech and the University of Kentucky, and he received his doctorate from the University of Illinois. After teaching at the University of West Georgia for ten years, Dr. Noe taught at Auburn University from 2000 to 2021 before retiring.

​Dr. Noe has received numerous teaching awards. He is the author of eight books, including The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War, published by LSU Press in 2020, a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and the co winner of the Col. Richard W. Ulbrich memorial Book Award. Twice a Pulitzer Prize entrant, Dr. Noe received the 2002 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War History for Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle, and the 1997 Tennessee History Book Award for A Southern Boy in Blue: The Memoirs of Marcus Woodcock, 9th Kentucky Infantry, U.S. His next book, a spin-off of The Howling Storm entitled Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend, will appear early in 2026 from LSU Press.

Program Subject

Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. Noe will retell the history of the conflict with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, with special attention given to the battlefields that the CVBT helps preserve. Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers’ food supply (especially in Virginia), lowered morale, and undercut the Confederate government’s efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noe rethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war.

Brian Steel Wills is the retired Director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era and Professor Emeritus of History at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Ga. Dr. Wills has been a member of the Georgia Civil War Commission and past President of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table. His latest publication, Running the Race: The “Public Face” of Charlton Heston, was published by Savas-Beatie in 2022.

He is also the author of numerous works relating to the American Civil War. Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the American Civil War (Kansas, 2017) and George Henry Thomas: As True as Steel (Kansas, 2012), each received the Richard Barksdale Harwell Award winner as the best book on a Civil War topic for that year presented by the Atlanta Civil War Round Table.

His biography of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, A Battle From the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest (Harper Collins) is currently in reprint as The Confederacy’s Greatest Cavalryman: Nathan Bedford Forrest (Kansas). This work was chosen as both a History Book Club selection and a Book of the Month Club selection.

His other titles include The River was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow (Oklahoma, 2014); Confederate General William Dorsey Pender: The Hope of Glory (Louisiana State University, 2013); Gone with the Glory: The Civil War in Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia, (Virginia, 2001) and an updated edition of the James I. “Bud” Robertson, Jr., Civil War Sites in Virginia (Virginia, 2011).

In 2000, Dr. Wills received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Commonwealth of Virginia, one of eleven recipients from all faculty members at public and private institutions across the state. He has also received the Charles L. Dufour Award from the Civil War Round Table of New Orleans in 2013 and the recipient of the Frank E. Vandiver Award of Merit in 2020 by the Houston Civil War Round Table.

Program Subject

Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the Civil War

Every conflict has a cost to the soldiers engaged in them. Casualties of all kinds have occurred amidst the broad spectrum of battle. Yet, as terrible as these were for those who suffered them or for their loved ones, fatalities associated with noncombat instances were just as harrowing. Thus, it was during the American Civil War that the toll of war exacted on soldiers and civilians included the diverse elements that ranged from disease and weather to accidents and human failures. Train wrecks, boiler explosions, and industrial accidents were among the most likely culprits to grab headlines, but the routine business of riding, marching, fatigue duty, and camp life could spell disaster. Even the innocent activities of bathing could end in catastrophic results. Fights or quarrels among comrades could escalate and turn deadly. Foolish disregard for safety, the heinous acts of murder, the dismal finality of suicide, or the incompetence of those instructed with the health of the men in uniform, all added to the grim tally of war. Survivors understood the terrible price of these sacrifices and lamented the losses that came from such inglorious passages from life to the hereafter.