Creative History

  “ On the night of February 9th, as soon as it was sufficiently dark, the exodus from the prison commenced…” -from The Memoirs of Captain Morton Tower (1870) Originally built as a series of three tobacco warehouses and located on the banks of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, in February of 1864 Libby Prison was home to nearly 2,000 Union Prisoners of War, mostly officers. The Libby warehouses, named for Luther and George Libby who had leased the buildings prior to the Civil War and attempted to convert them into a grocery business and ship supply storage facility, were requisitioned by the Confederate government at the start of the war in 1861 and made into military hospitals. However, by the middle of 1862 after the North’s punitive and disastrous invasion of the south called the Peninsular Campaign, due to the unforeseen influx of prisoners, the South converted the Libby military hospital into a Prisoner of War camp set aside specifically for Union officers whom the Conf

  As the sun rises on May 6, 1896 it burns away the early morning fog that is hovering above the Potomac River just outside our nation’s capital.  Sixty-one year old Samuel Pierpont Langley nervously paces on the deck of a specially designed houseboat and waits for the experiment that he’s spent ten years attempting to perfect to both literally, and figuratively, take flight. Standing by Langley’s side is his longtime friend, and renowned inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.  Also, standing on the banks of the river and ready to observe this momentous occasion is then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and future President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. The oddly shaped boat floats slowly down river just off the shore of small Chopawamsic Island off the coast of nearby Quantico, Virginia.  The boat, also designed by Samuel P. Langley has two decks, not unlike an awkwardly shaped two-tiered barge, and jutting over the side of the houseboat is a long wooden plan

  The nascent United States is nearly dead only a few years after it was first born--dead, not on the battlefield, but rather economically.  On the homefront, arable land is being destroyed left and right as the British and Continental armies fight back and forth across New England and the mid-Atlantic states.  The American dollar, created by Congress just after the Declaration of Independence was ratified, continues to plummet in value thanks in large part to a relentless campaign of British counterfeiting and a rate of inflation that by the end of the 1770’s increases at the staggering rate of 47% each month! This rate of hyperinflation has given rise to the commonplace term, “As worthless as a Continental,” in reference to the Continental dollar, a phrase that is used by both patriot and loyalist alike, to denote anything, be it literal or intrinsic, that is perceived as having no value whatsoever. And worst of all foodstuffs and basic necessities are becoming both more and more sca