• What to know if you go

William Schemmel/Special (ENLARGE)

Letters by Confederate soldier Eli Pinson Landers (shown) live on in the book 'Weep Not for Me, Dear Mother' and in a museum exhibit.

William Schemmel/Special (ENLARGE)

Cannon firing demonstrations help bring Civil War history roaring to life at Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, 30 miles south of Richmond.

Petersburg, Va. — Eli Pinson Landers would be astonished to learn that Civil War letters he wrote to his mother in Gwinnett County would be rescued — a century later — from an Atlanta trash pile and put on display.

The letters were published in a book that would make him one of the 13 "Soldier Comrades," an interactive exhibit at the Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, 30 miles south of Richmond.

The 21-year-old farmer, the grandson of a Baptist minister, enrolled in the 16th Georgia Infantry in August 1861 and went north to fight with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. One of the first of his letters to his mother was jovial: "Dear Mother, if I never see old Gwinnett again, tell Miss Cody I'm glad to be out of her cotton patch."

After seeing battle for the first time, he wrote: "I get sort of ticklish when the bullets whistle around my head." After an especially bloody battle, his humor apparently dissolved into an open-eyed realization of war's real horrors: "I have saw the wounded hauled off in four-horse wagons, just throwed in like hogs, some with their legs off, some with their arms off, in terrible condition ... ."

While dying of typhoid after the Battle of Chickamauga, near Chattanooga, in l863, he urged, "Dear Mother, weep not for me."

Landers' letters likely were passed through his survivors and descendants, until finally in the mid-l960s the last recipient threw them out on the street as trash. A passer-by picked them up, read them and kept them with her when she moved to North Carolina, where she gave them to a neighbor interested in history. They were stored in a closet until the 1980s, when they were given to author Elizabeth Whitley Roberson, who published them in her book, "Weep Not for Me, Dear Mother."

Origins of Pamplin park

In the late l980s, researchers for Pamplin Historical Park became aware of the book and extracted quotes from Landers' letters for the park's National Museum of the Civil War Soldier. Landers is one of 13 Union and Confederate soldiers whom visitors follow through the museum, from enlistment to the end of their military service, on MP3 players.

"Soldier Comrades" is one of more than a dozen interactive experiences at the park, which includes two museums with films and hands-on exhibits, an antebellum plantation, slave quarters, a military encampment and original fortifications, musket demonstrations, and cannon firings.

The park was created in the mid-1990s, when a Civil War battlefield preservation group headed by Robert B. Pamplin Sr., a native Virginian and former CEO of Georgia-Pacific Corp., and his son, Dr. Robert Pamplin Jr., purchased 422 acres of the Petersburg Battlefield threatened by commercial development. The land belonged to the Pamplins' ancestors before the war.

Their purchase included 3/4 of a mile of trenches and earthworks built by Robert E. Lee's Confederate troops during the siege of Petersburg from June 1864 to April 2, 1865. When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Union army broke the siege, a domino effect was set off. Petersburg, Richmond's major supply center, was occupied, followed a few days later by the Confederate capital's surrender. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox on April 9, effectively ending the war.

More war-related tours

Pamplin guides, in period dress, take visitors through the former siege lines and lead interpretive tours on the life of plantation owners, African-American slaves and grunt soldiers on both sides. Kids and parents who want to immerse themselves more deeply can sign up for Civil War Adventure Camp, during which they wear Union and Confederate uniforms, camp on original battlefields, eat Civil War hardtack, drill and fire muskets.

Most Pamplin visitors do a driving tour of the neighboring 2,700-acre Petersburg National Battlefield. One of the must-see stops is "the Crater," the remains of a 511-foot-long tunnel Union troops dug under Confederate lines. As the National Park Service guide says wryly: "The operation was a success, but the patient died." The Federals blew up 4 tons of gunpowder, but when their troops rushed into the crater the explosion created, 4,000 were killed by the regrouped Confederates on the crater's rim. Confederates lost less than 300. The episode was one of the opening scenes in the novel and film "Cold Mountain."

In Richmond, the focus of the new American Civil War Center at the Historic Tredegar Iron Works is "In the Cause of Liberty," an exhibit with hundreds of artifacts, four short films and hands-on exhibits that trace the Civil War's causes back to Revolutionary times. Visitors are invited to vote on their opinion of the causes. The exhibit also looks at the consequences of the war and the role African-Americans have played in wars dating back before the Revolution.

The American Civil War Center is part of the Richmond National Battlefield Park, housed in parts of original brick buildings of the Tredegar Iron Works, which produced most of the Confederacy's cannon, heavy artillery and armor for ironclad ships.

In the NPS Visitor Center, large-scale photos show Richmond's ruins after it fell to Union forces. Like Atlanta in l864, most of the devastation was caused by retreating Confederates. Recorded voices, taken from diaries and letters, relate citizens' experiences during the siege.

A fact from the White House of the Confederacy in downtown Richmond: After Jefferson Davis' death, his widow, Varina, went to New York City, where she became a literary critic and columnist for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper syndicate.

IF YOU GO

Getting there

Driving: Richmond is about 525 miles north of downtown Atlanta.

Flying: Expect to pay about $175 round-trip airfare from Atlanta to Richmond.

Where to stay

The Omni Richmond Hotel, 100 S. 12th St., 804-344-7000, www.omnihotels.com, is in the center of the city, near historic landmarks and the Shockoe Slip dining and entertainment district. Rates from about $200.

Information

Pamplin Historical Park, 6125 Boydton Plank Road, Petersburg, VA 23803; 1-877-726-7546, www.pamplinpark.org. Open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Adult admission to all facilities except Civil War Adventure Camp, $13.50; age 62 and over, $12; ages 6-11, $7.50; 5 and under, no charge.

Petersburg National Battlefield, 1539 Hickory Hill Road, Petersburg, VA 23803. 804-732-3531, www.nps.gov/pete, admission $5 per car.

American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, 500 Tredegar St., Richmond, VA 23219. 804-780-1865, www.tredegar.org. Open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Adults, $8; students and seniors, $6; ages 7-12, $2. On the same site, the Civil War Visitor Center at Richmond National Battlefield Park, 804-226-1981, www.nps.gov/rich. Open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Free admission.

White House of the Confederacy, 12th and Clay streets, Richmond, VA 23220, 804-649-1861, www.moc.org. The White House and adjacent Museum of the Confederacy are open daily except Wednesday. Admission to both, adults $11; seniors $10; students $6.

Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, 401 N. Third St., Richmond, VA 23219, 804-782-2777, www.visit.richmond.com.