nothin Curator Channels General at New K of C Museum… | New Haven Independent

Curator Channels General at New K of C Museum Show

Allan Appel Photo

Knights of Columbus museum curator Bethany Sheffer’s great-grandfather, Sheridan Phillip Sheffer, was a World War I veteran. A relative from a generation before him, still unidentified, served in the cavalry under General Philip Sheridan.

That general, who commanded Union cavalry in the Civil War, must have made quite an impression, because Sheridan is now a full-fledged Sheffer family name. Sheridan is Sheffer’s brother’s middle name.

That’s why the exhibition, Answering the Call: Service & Charity in the Civil War, which Sheffer has mounted to mark the sesquicentennial of the war at the Knights of Columbus Museum on State Street, feels like a labor of love as well as a family affair.

The exhibition — a fascinating assemblage of artifacts, replicas, personal letters, period newspaper, swords, uniforms, medical instruments, interactive monitors, and lots of text panels — opened this week and will run through Sept. 20.

Replica of a tent set up for Mass.

Answering the Call” neatly covers the war from Bull Run to Appomattox in three floor-to-ceiling-filled galleries. It gives equal pride of place to the warriors as well as to the war’s angels of mercy. Soldiers like General Sheridan share the spotlight with members of the 22 orders of nursing sisters or nuns who served in the field and convalescent hospitals during the war. Chaplains, all parish priests, also get their due.

We wanted to incorporate the stories of a wide variety of Catholics who may have participated in some way during the war,” Sheffer said.

The exhibition, which documents the Catholic experience on both the Union and Confederate sides, was prompted by the desire to mark the 150th anniversary of the war, and the fact that the first supreme knight” of the Knights of Columbus, James T. Mullen, was a member of the 9th Connecticut Regiment, most but not all of whose members were Irish and Catholic.

Among the founders of The Knights of Columbus in 1882 were war veterans like Mullen, Sheffer said.

The first half of the exhibition, titled Call to Service,” features the 9th Connecticut Regiment, which was organized in New Haven, as well as images of Catholic soldiers and officers like Sheridan and their exploits. Blown up photographs of battle scenes, stiff, formal, pictures of generals posing at planning strategy, and other such settings, including mass on the front lines — largely taken from the rich holdings of the Library of Congress — give an immersive quality to the exhibition.

You transition to the second half of the exhibition, Angels of the Battlefield,” by opening and closing sliding barn doors (pictured) on which you can read about the nursing sisters who served in the Civil War’s hospitals.

Why sliding barn doors? Sheffer said there were so many orders of nuns to be represented, she didn’t have enough discrete wall space. So she improvised, to good effect, much as the battlefield chaplains did when they conducted mass and heard soldiers’ confessions.

Nursing nuns comprised about a third of the nurses in the war, said Sheffer. The others were secular nurses, such as Clara Barton, who went on to found the Red Cross, and female and male volunteers such as poet Walt Whitman.

Nursing nuns did not serve in operating rooms. In that bloody setting, all the nurses were male, Sheffer said.

One of the finest beards in a beard-filled era belonged to chaplain William Corby (bottom right in the photograph). He’s the priest who famously gave general absolution to troops before they went into battle at Gettysburg.

One of my favorite sections is the vitrine containing medical instruments of the kinds the nuns may have used at the time.

A bandage, an invalid feeder, leg brace, collar bone splint, and three bottles of medicinal supplies, one of which is coffee,” Sheffer said.

The items, including a Squibb pannier, are borrowed from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, Sheffer said. She was still waiting for a Confederate uniform, a computer monitor, and a few more small items to arrive.

Sheffer eyes Sheridan, standing at bottom left of facsimile of an Alexander Gardner photo.

In the planning since 2013, Sheffer mentioned that the exhibition felt like her baby.” As the show opens to a wider public and gears up for programs and visits from experts, such as lecturers on hospital conditions or balladeers singing songs and telling tales from the period, Sheffer said the hardest part for her is letting it go.”

Answering the Call: Service & Charity in the Civil War” runs at the Knights of Columbus museum at 1 State St. through Sept. 20. Click here for a list of other programs at the museum as well.

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