Camp Wright, Hulton, Penn.,
Saturday, June 8, 1861.
Dear Sister H.:–
You will see by the date of this that I have left Camp Wilkins and am now at the new camp called Camp Wright. We arrived here to-day. Oh, I tell you we have a splendid place, fifteen miles from Pittsburgh on the south bank of the Alleghany. The barracks of the Erie regiment are sheds seventy-five feet long and twenty feet wide. They stand in a row with an alley ten feet wide between each two. Each shed is divided by a partition running through the middle, making two long rooms ten feet wide. Each company occupies one room in one shed and one in the next shed across the alley.
At the head of the alley are the Captain’s quarters, overlooking his whole company. The railroad runs between the camp and the river and on the other side of the railroad is the parade ground, a beautiful meadow of ninety acres. The barracks are built on a side-hill so that the upper end rests on the ground and the other is some six feet from the ground. The floor descends about seven feet in the seventy-five, making quite a slope. The tables are wide boards hung on hinges to the side of the wall. We are to sleep on the bare floor. We have just the best of spring water and it tastes good after drinking the nasty river water which we had so long in Pittsburgh.
There is a large orchard in camp and a grove of beautiful shade trees. A little brook runs through a shady hollow down on one side, and every one seems delighted at the change from the foul, dirty camp to this beautiful place.
But we are not to stay here long. Colonel McLane received a dispatch from Washington yesterday, saying that we were accepted by the Government, and were to be mustered into the United States service immediately, those who are willing for three years and the others for three months from this time, those who will not enlist for three months to be sent home. I shall not enlist for three years now. I will wait till my three months are up. We are to be uniformed and equipped immediately. We expect to be ordered to Western Virginia or Harper’s Ferry, though, for good reasons, we are not told where we are going.
A large amount of cartridges were sent off from the arsenal Thursday night, and troops are moving south from all directions, showing that something is to be done and that soon, too. Perhaps the war movements will not be so interesting to you, so I will tell you of a visit I paid to a glass factory yesterday. I never was in one before and it was quite a sight to me. A dozen or more great furnaces were filled with boiling glass, and a boy would run up and stick in a long rod, give it a turn and take out a dumpling of the red-hot liquid and hold it over an iron die, when another would cut it off with a pair of shears and bring down a lever on it, pressing it into a mold, and then pull it back and turn out a beautiful salt-cellar or sugar-bowl like yours, or a tumbler, a lamp, a sauce-dish, or whatever the mold happened to be. At another place they were blowing bottles and glass jars, such as they have to hold candy in shop windows. A man takes a hollow rod, runs it in the furnace and brings out a little wad of glass, then blows it a little and it swells out just like a bubble. He then whirls it over his head a few times and blows a little more, rolls it round on an iron plate to make it round, clips it off with a pair of shears, and another man stabs a fork into the bottom of it, and heating it, passes it to another who shapes the neck and mouth. They would make twenty in the time it takes me to tell you how they make one. One of the workmen kindly handed me his pipe and told me to blow a bottle. I did, two or three of them, and blew some glass bubbles, a piece of one of which I send to you. I think you never saw thinner glass, at least I never did.
While I was down to the river yesterday, I saw a curiosity–a tree growing downwards. The roots were in the top of the river bank, and the trunk hung right down and the branches curved upward.