About Me ……
Thank you for visiting my web site. I hope that this site is as informative for you as it was fun for me putting it together.
My name is Brent Reidenbach and I’m originally from a small west-central Ohio town called Delphos. Delphos is a small rural town, pre-dominantly of German ancestry and is located on the remains of the Miami-Erie Canal.
I became interested in history when I was in grade school while living in Van Wert, Ohio. One day, my class and I went to the school library so that each one of us could check out a book and read it. For whatever reason, I walked straight back to the history section of books and began my search. I picked up a book that was written about a man named Robert E. Lee. At the time, I had no idea who he was or what he did to have a book written about him but because he looked cool in his US Army uniform I checked out the book. As I began to read about his achievements in the Mexican War, I became more and more interested in him. While reading, I was also introduced to another man whose fame would be established in the Civil War as well. His name … Hiram Ulysses Grant, however, most people know him as Ulysses Simpson Grant. While I had only just read their names in print, I was getting the feeling that something important would happen to them in the future. As I continued reading, it became evident that both men rose to fame leading men into battle on great and terrible battlefields – against one another. This book had opened a door into a period of American History that has become not only a hobby for me but also a quest to learn all there is to know about the American Civil War.
That was roughly 22-24 years ago when I first read that book and since then I have read many, many more and I have also visited quite a few of those great and terrible battlefields. While learning all there is to know about the Civil War has been a very broad undertaking, I decided that I was going to take my quest for knowledge and make it a bit more personal. When I was a junior in high school I started to dig into my family’s history and I soon discovered that I had a direct link to the Civil War (as many Americans would). My grandmother’s grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, John Wesley Swick, was a Private in the 3rd Ohio Independent Company Sharpshooters – also known as Company K, 66th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. He enlisted on 31 March 1862, re-enlisted as a veteran on 7 April 1864 and was mustered out on 26 April 1865. He participated in every battle, skirmish and campaign his unit engaged in from Corinth, Mississippi to Raleigh, North Carolina. What really intrigued me the most was that while the unit he belonged to was made up mainly of Ohioans, he belonged to a regiment that served under first a Missouri state flag then an Illinois state flag.
After I graduated from high school, I went and visited my father who was living in Virginia. While there, we visited several battlefields in the Fredericksburg and Richmond area. Due to time constraints we were not able to fully explore the battlefields as I would’ve liked so I promptly vowed myself that if/when I ever get the chance I was going to ensure that I visited those battlefields again and learn everything I could about the events leading up to the battle, the battle itself and the leaders that fought those battles. In January 2002, my dreams were realized when I was re-assigned from Heidelberg, Germany to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I was now only 35 miles, as the crow flies, from Fredericksburg. I immediately set out to accomplish those goals that I promised myself.
Which brings me to today and the motivation behind this web site. This web was created by combining several goals of mine. The first was to increase my knowledge about the battles in the Civil War. The second was to increase my knowledge about the contributions and the impact that Ohio’s citizen-soldier’s played in these battles. The third was to bring those to two goals together and provide an opportunity for people who couldn’t visit these hallowed grounds to visit these battlefields and see where Ohio’s sons fought, died and were wounded.
