Today we had to wake up bright and early to be on the bus by 7:30 AM. Today, our first stop was the Petersburg Museum. At the museum we split up into smaller groups and we had to find our favorite artifact in the museum and sketch it. After we went to the Petersburg museum, we then went to see The Crater and the mine. This was a very important part of our America history. We were all surprised with how sturdy the tunnel still was, but how small The Crater was compared to what we were expecting. If Mr. Habel hadn’t warned us, everybody would have thought that the painting of a civil war soldier at the end of the tunnel was a ghost. All of us were also astonished by how close each side’s (Union and Confederate) picket lines were to each other.
We then drove to Pamplin Park and had a really good lunch. We had fried chicken, barbequed pork and cornbread. Then we went on a guided tour through Pamplin Park. We saw the original trenches of the Siege of Petersburg which were really amazing. We learned about a man named Captain Gould who was the first man of the Union lines to run over the Confederate trenches. You might think he would be killed like that but he survived and won the Medal of Honor. We then saw rebuilt trenches of what they would have looked like when the siege was going on and that was also very interesting. We saw a rebuilt plantation house and slave house and watched a video about slavery with opinions of people in the 1800’s. We then went inside and went through an exhibit called Duty called me here which was about civil war soldiers. You picked a soldier, Union or Confederate, and heard their story on an audio tour while you looked through an exhibit. When you went to one part of the exhibit you felt like you were in an actual battle.
We then spent the night in Williamsburg, Virginia and some of us went swimming. -- Christina Haser and Raina Dwinell