Mission: Protect WBTS history

Via Tim

 Re-enactors of the 5th North Carolina man the Croatan line near Catfish Lake Road. 

Saturday was the 153rd anniversary of the Battle of New Bern, when Confederate soldiers and militia, some poorly trained and armed with little more than squirrel guns and shotguns, were overwhelmed by larger Union forces just a couple of miles outside the city. New Bern fell to Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside and his force of soldiers and gunboats, and for the remainder of the Civil War, New Bern was a Yankee-occupied town.

The New Bern Battlefield Park by the Taberna community has preserved the west wing of that battlefield, a series of well-preserved entrenchments defended by the 26th North Carolina Regiment on that bloody day. A number of activities are scheduled to take place there in commemoration of the fight.

But the park is only a small fraction of important Civil War military sites in Craven County.

“Craven County has more trenches and blockhouses than any other county in the state,” according to Tim Norman, a James City resident who has been carefully studying them. That’s because, to defend their hard-won stronghold, Union forces built numerous entrenchments, blockhouses and forts around the city. As the base of operations, numerous raids were also conducted from the city, especially in the directions of Kinston, Goldsboro and Little Washington.

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