Pennsylvania State Archives: Civil War Muster Rolls

View Pennsylvania State Archives in a larger map

Visit our Tour Destination: Pennsylvania page to see the entire tour of the state’s Save America’s Treasures sites.

Project Conservator Lindsay Bergen pieces together
the Muster Out Roll of Co. K of the 71st Regiment.
Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives.

Pennsylvania State Archives:

Pennsylvania Civil War Muster Rolls

North Third and Forster Streets

Harrisburg, PA

Website:  Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission: Civil War Records at the Pennsylvania State Archives

The Pennsylvania State Archives

The Treasure:  A wealth of important historical information is preserved on the Pennsylvania Civil War Muster Out Rolls, which record key details on approximately 362,000 soldiers from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who served in the Civil War.

Accessibility:  Information on how to research the Civil War documents at the Pennsylvania State Archives is available at the web page Civil War Records at the Pennsylvania State Archives. The Civil War Muster Rolls are being scanned by Ancestry.com and are anticipated to be accessible online by late summer 2013.

Archivist Rich Saylor in the archives
tower stack area with the 135 cartons
of Muster Out Rolls before treatment.
Photo courtesy of the
Pennsylvania State Archives.

Background:  As the Civil War came to a close in 1865, the Pennsylvania Adjutant General’s Office confronted a flood of paper from the field. The Adjutant General’s Office had responsibility for much of the paperwork of war, covering Muster In Rolls (documenting the entry of soldiers into service), Alphabetical Rolls, Lists of Deserters, and Muster Out Rolls (documenting the status of soldiers at the completion of their service). These were the state’s databases, prepared and organized by hand. Many of the Muster Out Rolls date from the war’s end, as companies moved through the business of disbanding.

Ultimately, the Pennsylvania Adjutant General’s Office collected over 2,500 muster-out rolls, recording the exit status of approximately 362,000 soldiers. Only New York State contributed more Union soldiers to the war effort than Pennsylvania. A number of Pennsylvanians became prominent leaders in the cause. Noted generals from Pennsylvania include George Meade, George B. McClellan, Winfred Scott Hancock, John Fulton Reynolds, John F. Hartranft, and John W. Geary. But the Muster Out Rolls are egalitarian—they studiously document the status of the legendary Civil War heroes alongside the common soldiers and even the deserters.

A typical muster roll, before treatment:  Note the damage
on the folds that were mended with pressure-sensitive tapes.
Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives.

As the companies disbanded, the field clerks gathered the information, including the status of company members who were missing or dead. The Adjutant General’s Office provided the oversize forms—unfolding to more than three feet in width and two feet in height. Under the pre-printed masthead, the officers and clerks would fill in the information on the ruled lines. The status of dozens of soldiers could be recorded on each document. Notes provide tantalizing information, now deeply valued by today’s historians and genealogists:  “prisoner at Andersonville,” “wounded at Chancellorsville,” “recovering in hospital,” “deserted,” “lost,” or “died at Antietam.”

For the first half-century of their existence, the Muster Out Rolls were valued primarily for very practical reasons, such as verifying pensions and veteran’s claims. Subsequently, historians and genealogists continued the high level of demand. Time after time, the documents were unfolded then refolded, becoming blemished with dirt and grime. Losses started to occur along the weakening folds. Well-meaning office workers applied highly acidic pressure-sensitive tapes to hold the sheets together. Historians and genealogists loved the accurate and color detail in the documents, but the paper itself was literally falling apart.

Conservator Joan Irving at the Conservation Center for
Art and Historic Artifacts with State Archivist David Haury
and an artillery regiment Muster Out Roll.
Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives.

Notes from the Editor:  With funding from Save America’s Treasures and the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Pennsylvania Muster Out Rolls have received state-of-the-art treatment and rehousing. More than 1,000 of the documents—the ones judged to be in the worst condition—came for treatment to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) where I work. For more than five years, our conservators and technicians had the privilege to work on this monumental project.

The treatment required surface cleaning, washing, mending, flattening, lining, and encapsulating. All the old acidic mending tapes had to be removed, sometimes loosening fragments of paper that had to be refitted into the document like in a jigsaw puzzle. In 2009, CCAHA Book Technician Valeria Kremser (now Book Conservation Technician at the University of Pennsylvania) produced an informative short video, The Pennsylvania Civil War Muster Roll Project. The time-lapse section offers a nice insight into the challenging work of piecing the documents back together. Multiply this one treatment by more than a thousand and you’ll have some idea of the scope of this work.

Above:  Before treatment image of a folded Muster Roll.
Below:  After treatment image of the same Muster Roll, now unfolded.
Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives.

Other Recommended Sites:  In the Pennsylvania State Capitol complex in Harrisburg, you can visit the Pennsylvania State Archives and the neighboring State Museum of Pennsylvania, and then take a guided tour of the historic State Capitol Building itself.

The Pennsylvania State Archives.
Photo courtesy of the
Pennsylvania State Archives.

Tour America's History Itinerary

Tuesday:  Gettysburg National Military Park

© 2013 Lee Price

Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center

View Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center in a larger map

Visit our Tour Destination: Pennsylvania page to see the entire tour of the state’s Save America’s Treasures sites.

The museum area at the Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and
Cultural Center showing the archival-quality cabinets, featuring Bulgarian-style
embellishments, built by renowned Japanese woodworking artist Tadao Arimoto.
Photo courtesy of the BMNECC.

Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center

West Eighth Avenue

West Homestead, PA

Website:  Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center

The Treasure:  A large collection of artifacts illuminates the fascinating culture that Bulgarian and Macedonian immigrants brought with them as they settled into a new life in America.  

Accessibility:  The Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center is open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10 to 1, Saturdays from 9 to noon, and other hours by appointment.  There’s a busy schedule of special events most months.  Check the calendar for what’s going on.

Background:  First, some basic geography: Roughly the size of Virginia, Bulgaria is located is southeastern Europe, bordering the Black Sea to the east, Romania to the north, Greece and Turkey to the south, and Serbia and Macedonia to the west. Considerably smaller, Macedonia is approximately the size of Vermont and is an entirely landlocked country, surrounded by Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. From 1944 until its independence in 1991, Macedonia was the southernmost republic within Yugoslavia. Nestled on the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria and Macedonia have maintained a rich cultural heritage in the face of frequent foreign occupations.

BMNECC Chairwoman Emerita Patricia
Penka French standing in front of the
78-year-old Bulgarian Cultural Center. The
building's facade was refurbished in 2005
thanks to a grant from the Pittsburgh
History and Landmarks Foundation.
Photo courtesy of the BMNECC.

In the early years of the 20th century, many Bulgarians and Macedonians left their homelands to find new opportunities in America. It was a time of relative freedom in both countries—between the time of the Turkish Ottoman rule that ended in 1878 and the rise of the Iron Curtain after World War II, but economic conditions prompted many to try their luck abroad. They came to the American heartland looking for steady work, responding to the demand for labor in the factories and mines.

The thriving steel mills of Pittsburgh attracted many immigrants. The new arrivals brought their culture and customs with them, adapting as best they could to their new home. In 1930, a group of citizens founded the Bulgaro-Macedonian Beneficial Association in West Homestead, located southeast of Pittsburgh, across the Monongahela River. Like many immigrant organizations, the Association was formed to help immigrant families succeed in the new American environment.

Fifty years later, with the decline of the steel industry in 1980s, the Association began to look for a way to stay relevant. In 1995, they officially dissolved the original organization and founded a new one—the Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center. The new focus was on celebrating and preserving a unique immigrant culture with strong ties to its Balkan homelands.

At the Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center, you’ll find music, dance, and a Soup Sega! kitchen that specializes in ethnic Bulgarian specialties. The Save America’s Treasures grant contributed to the retrofitting of a new exhibit space where the historic artifacts—textiles and costumes, artwork, icons, photographs, films, audio recordings, musical instruments, jewelry, and metal work—could be displayed in attractive archival-quality cabinets. Looking outward for new ways to share their heritage, the Cultural Center has recently led initiatives such as Opera from Bulgaria—an Audio Encyclopedia Project, providing access to a rich tradition of Bulgarian opera and opera singers for the benefit of classical music fans and researchers.

Other Recommended Sites:  The main museum of the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area is located in the neighboring borough of Homestead. Here you can learn about the steel business that once supported so many of the immigrant families.

Thanks to the Save America's Treasures grant, the BMNECC was able
to create a full-service technology center, as well as support for the
cleaning, repairing, and rehousing over 200 historic films in their collection.
Photo courtesy of the BMNECC.

Tour America's History Itinerary

Tuesday:  Civil War Muster Rolls at the Pennsylvania State Archives

© 2013 Lee Price

Atmosphere and Environment XII

View "Atmosphere and Environment XII" by Louise Nevelson in a larger map

Visit our Tour Destination: Pennsylvania page to see the entire tour of the state’s Save America’s Treasures sites.

Atmosphere and Environment XII by Louise Nevelson.
Photo by Joe Mikuliak,
courtesy of the Association for Public Art.

Atmosphere and Environment XII

Philadelphia Museum of Art, West Entrance

Art Museum Drive

Philadelphia, PA

Website:  Association for Public Art: Atmosphere and Environment XII

… and click here for information on the wide variety of Philadelphia’s public art maintained by the Association for Public Art.

The Treasure:  Atmosphere and Environment XII is an 18,000-pound masterpiece of modern sculpture.

Background:  There are two great sculptures in highly visible positions outside the west entrance (that’s the side overlooking the Schuylkill River—not the more iconic side with the Rocky steps) of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As you approach the west museum entrance, Social Consciousness, a 1954 bronze sculpture by Jacob Epstein, is to your left. And to the right is our Save America’s Treasures piece:  Atmosphere and Environment XII by the acclaimed American sculptor, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988).

Deinstallation of Atmosphere and
Environment XII in 2005.
Photo by Joe Mikuliak, courtesy of
the Association for Public Art.

Although labeled XII by Nevelson, this particular sculpture is really the third in a series of four that runs from X through XIII. Each subtly different, the four sculptures were created late in Nevelson’s career, at a time when she was experimenting with monumental size and new materials like Cor-Ten, a recently developed weathering steel. The first, Atmosphere and Environment X, was conceived in 1969 as a commission for Princeton University, followed by XI for Yale University, then XII which was constructed in 1970 and purchased by Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) in 1972, and finally XIII for Scottsdale, Arizona.

“Environments” is a term that Nevelson frequently used to refer to her famous collages. In the 1950s and 1960s, she constructed a wide variety of collages from wood and found objects, creating intricate arrangements and then painting them a solid color—first entirely black, then all white, with a brief “baroque” period of gold.

While the word “Environment” in the Atmosphere and Environment series refered back to her earlier works, “Atmosphere” added something new to Nevelson’s art. “The landscape is the atmosphere that fills the spaces of the steel environment,” she explained. “The two together are the sculpture.” Unlike her earlier collages, this new series of massive outdoor sculptures was created to interact with the changing world around it—in her words, the atmosphere. The large scale of the works may have been partly inspired by her interest in Mayan ruins and theater sets.

Like many modern artists, Nevelson embraced transience with her Atmosphere and Environment series. The atmosphere—the scenery viewed both behind and through the sculpture—would inevitably change over time. The appearance of the steel would change as well, as it developed a distinctive rust patina. But Nevelson would probably not have predicted that the very structure of the sculpture would quickly become threatened by “corrosion jacking,” with the buildup of corrosion materials actually moving the sculpture’s box-shaped elements apart.

"Before treatment" image showing
corrosion jacking on the box elements.
Photo courtesy of the
Association for Public Art.

Funding from Save America’s Treasures, the Getty Foundation, and The Locks Foundation was raised to address the problem of the corrosion jacking. Working with the Association for Public Art, the Conservation Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art developed innovative treatment approaches to restore the disfigured box elements. It was a five-year process, including the challenging deinstallation of the sculpture in 2005, followed by months of detailed restoration work, and climaxing with a rededication service on the Art Museum steps in May 2007.

Objects conservator Sara Creange working on the project.
Photo courtesy of the Association for Public Art.

Other Recommended Sites:  The west entrance side of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a bucolic setting, with a terraced landscape that slopes down to the Schuylkill River and the historic Fairmount Water Works. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently installed the Anne d’Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden on the west grounds, featuring works by Isamu Noguchi, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. Iroquois, a monumental sculpture by Mark di Suvero is located nearby, just around the corner on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Philadelphia can also boast another major work by Louise Nevelson. On the other side of Philadelphia’s Center City, Nevelson’s Bicentennial Dawn is located in the interior of the James A. Byrne Federal Courthouse on 601 Market Street.

Conservators who worked on Atmosphere and
Environment XII at the rededication service in 2007.
Photo by Joe Mikuliak,
courtesy of the Association for Public Art.

Tour America's History Itinerary

Thursday:  Bulgarian Macedonian National Educational and Cultural Center

© 2013 Lee Price