It’s the hot summer of 1864. You’re a private in the Confederate Army. You’ve been captured by the Union Army and you’re being held at Point Lookout, the North’s biggest and southern-most prisoner-of-war-camp at the tip of southern Maryland. What do you do?
John Jacob Omenhausser’s approach was to paint watercolors. Private Omenhausser described life as a prisoner-of-war not in a diary, but through pictures. Dozens of his drawings, paintings, and letters have been collected into a book called: ‘I Am Busy Drawing Pictures’: The Civil War Art and Letters of Private John Jacob Omenhausser.With me to talk about it is Ross Kimmel, co-author of the book and retired chief historian for the Maryland Park Service.
