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  Palmetto 71 prairie country very rich but too flat to drain off the water. There is some timber—small post oak.”42 Captain Samuel T. Foster, 24th Texas Cavalry (dismounted), near Resaca , Georgia, on May 13, 1864: “the skirmishers . . . went forward over very rough ground for about 1½ miles, where we got close enough to the Yanks in some thick Black Jack [oak] woods to hear them talking and laughing and sin[g]ing &c but they did not see us.”43 Captain William Vermilion, 36th Iowa Infantry, in a letter to his wife from Little Rock, Arkansas, on Oct. 14, 1863: “The site [Little Rock] had once been covered thickly with an oak grove. The trees still stand around all the fine dwellings.”44 Assistant Surgeon William Child, 5th New Hampshire Volunteers, in a letter to his wife from Newport News, Virginia, on Aug. 23, 1862: “Imagine to yourself a level of field of perhaps fifty acres. On one side a forest of oak and pine—on the other the James River. On this field are encamped perhaps twenty thousand men.”45 Private George A. Remley, 22nd Iowa Volunteers, in a letter to his father from Rolla, Missouri, on Sept. 24, 1862: “The country through which we passed in the day time is mostly covered with forests of white & black oak, walnut, elm, and a kind of oak called the ‘black jack,’ extending as far as I could see on both sides of the road.”46 Sergeant Alexander Downing, 11th Iowa Infantry, near Pittsburg Landing , Tennessee, on March 31, 1862: “The country around here is quite rough and the soil is very poor. There is a great deal of gravel and there are some rocks, but the soil works very easily. The timber here is mostly white oak.”47 Pa l m et to “From this noble and characteristic tree is derived the well known armorial emblem on the escutcheon of the State of South Carolina.”1 The plant responsible for South Carolina’s emblem and nickname, the Palmetto State, 72 Flora is a type of palm known scientifically as Sabal palmetto. The cabbage palm is the state tree of both Florida and South Carolina. With fan-shaped leaves four to six feet long that grow on tall straight trunks to eighty feet tall, this plant is usually restricted to the southeastern coast of the United States. Another species of palmetto, Sabal minor, is much smaller, with only the characteristic leaves above ground, the stem being buried. It grows inland from the Gulf Coast in moist areas. Civil War soldiers also came into contact with saw palmetto (Serenoa repens), a plant similar in range to cabbage palm but noted for its sharp, rigid spines on the leaf stalks. During the war there was a regiment known as the Palmetto Sharpshooters, a Palmetto Battalion Light Artillery, and the Confederate ironclad, Palmetto State. Confederate surgeon Francis Porcher wrote that palmetto leaves were used to make hats, baskets, mats, and thatching, and the “logs,” which do not splinter, were used in the construction of forts, wharves, conduits, and other underwater structures. In his treatise he quotes a newspaper correspondent from Georgia: “You speak of black moss for mattresses. Our common saw palmetto leaves, when split into shreds with a fork or hackle, boiled, and dried in the sun one or two days, makes a light, clean, healthy, and durable mattress. Let me suggest that palmetto pillows would be cheap and comfortable for our soldiers on the coast; their corn and flour sacks would in the absence of anything better furnish ready-made pillow ticks. Our negroes are busily employed in making light, durable, and handsome palmetto hats for our soldiers—quite a protection from the sun’s burning rays in the heavy drills of this and the next two months.”2 Southern women deprived of store-bought goods operated their domestic millineries and met other household needs with palmetto leaves as raw products. Southern refugee Fannie Cashman in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana: “The seclusion and inaccessability of the place made it difficult to obtain very elaborate wearing apparel. Palmetto grew abundantly and luxuriantly around our home, and we became expert in weaving it into hats which were very pretty and unique. The palmetto was gathered and then boiled. The boiling process bleached it perfectly white, and made it soft and pliable , thus adapted to the use we made of it.”3 Sarah Wadley, daughter of the supervisor of Confederate railroads, near Trenton, Louisiana, on Dec. 9...

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