Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: The Second Battle of Winchester by Scott Mingus. Cost is $6 per person and $2 from EVERY registration will be donated to Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation. The talk will be recorded and sent to participants to view about a week after the live talk.

Synopsis

In the summer of 1863, as Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia began pushing north toward Pennsylvania, only one significant force stood in the way -- Union Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy’s division of the Eighth Army Corps in the vicinity of Winchester and Berryville. Milroy stubbornly defied repeated instructions to withdraw to safety, believing the enemy action to be merely a cavalry raid or feint. His controversial decision put his outnumbered, largely inexperienced men on a path to disaster. Milroy lost half his force and routed ingloriously from the battlefield. Many Union soldiers who fought at Second Winchester, however, believed their three-day resistance delayed the Rebels from entering Pennsylvania long enough to buy time for the Army of the Potomac to arrive and defeat Lee at Gettysburg.

Biography

Scott Mingus is a retired scientist and executive in the global pulp & paper industry. The Ohio native graduated from the Paper Science & Engineering program at Miami University. He was part of the research team that developed the first commercially successful self-adhesive U.S. postage stamps and he was a pioneer in bar code labels. He has written 28 Civil War and Underground Railroad books and numerous articles for Gettysburg Magazine and other historical journals. He has appeared on C-SPAN, C-SPAN3, PCN, and other TV networks. Mingus writes a blog on the Civil War history of York County, PA, where he lives (www.yorkblog.com/cannonball). He also has written six scenario books for miniature wargaming. A great-great-grandfather was a 15-year-old soldier in the 51st Ohio in the Western Theater, and a great-grandfather was in the 183rd Ohio during the 1865 Carolinas Campaign. Other family members fought at Antietam and Gettysburg in the 7th West Virginia of the Army of the Potomac.