Monday, December 22, 2003
A Civil War buff found a local man among the 'dead' in fake photos of the time.
By CATHY SECKMAN
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
EAST LIVERPOOL -- Attorney Tim Brookes flipped another dry, fragile page and kept reading. He'd been at it for awhile. His neck was stiff; his eyes were burning. When he found the passage, he had to read it twice. Did it really mean what he thought it did?
"I was thrilled," Brookes remembers. "Most people could go a lifetime and not discover something like this."
He hadn't uncovered an important legal insight or located an obscure case citation. What Brookes had discovered was, to his mind, a lot more exciting than a legal point. He'd found a happy-go-lucky Civil War drummer who liked to get his picture taken. That drummer, who lived and died more than 100 years ago, would help Brookes find his own place in history.
History lover
Brookes has been a Civil War buff since he was 5 years old and playing with his first battle set. The first time he went to Gettysburg, he was 6. He spent a good part of his childhood painting bloodstains on wooden soldiers and staging famous battles with his best friend.
As an adult, Brookes narrowed his interests a bit. "It's fascinating to see everyday people from the 1800s catapulted onto the front pages of history. They weren't prepared for it, any more than we would be. I love to see how they reacted. I'm interested in human nature, and I like quirky bits of history," he said.
"I don't like ponderous overviews of the war; I want to know what people did. I'm particularly interested in people from this area, maybe people who were less than reputable. If I find a local guy who ran like a dog at Shiloh, or another guy who carried the flag into a big battle, both are just as interesting to me."
Personal items
Diaries and tintypes are Brookes' favorite starting points for research. He first got wind of Jacob Shenkel, Civil War drummer, at a yard sale in Chester, W.Va.
"I opened an old desk drawer and found four tintypes of two guys in Civil War uniforms. I asked who they were, and the owners said one of them was Jacob Shenkel. I knew he was from East Liverpool. There were 300 Civil War vets from here, and I recognize all of their names when I hear them."
He bought the tintypes, then set out to dig up more information on Shenkel. A fellow history buff said his sister had been married to a Shenkel.
"I called her, and she said her late husband's nephew had Jake's diary."
Brookes called the nephew to ask if he could read and transcribe the diary. "Three weeks later, I got a big package in the mail, and it was the diary. The nephew said he didn't want it."
Brookes was thrilled. "Jake Shenkel was a 23-year-old Union drummer at the Battle of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863. One of the duties of drummers and fifers in battle was to carry the wounded back from the front lines. Jake's diary talked about giving beer to wounded soldiers and helping to hold down men who were having limbs amputated."
When the Union Army pulled out of Gettysburg, Shenkel stayed behind to help care for the wounded. His diary makes regular references to having his picture taken, and to sending and receiving photographs.
A discovery
"On Nov. 10, 1863, Jake went to a studio with two guys, and they had their pictures taken by Peter Weaver, a Gettysburg photographer. The next day, the three soldiers went to the battlefield with Weaver, where they 'took Scenes of Dead men then as Skirmishers then on Picket.'"
The line made Brookes stop and think. Could that mean what he thought it meant?
He immediately remembered a book published in 1975 by William Frassanito, a well-known Civil War historian. In the book, Frassanito exposed a practice Civil War photographers had of faking battlefield pictures.
"Some of the well-known fakes from Gettysburg, for instance, show dead men on the same rock, but in different positions. And there are no leaves on the trees. The battle happened in July."
What Brookes thought he was reading was an admission by Shenkel that he had posed as a dead soldier, four months after the battle, for a local photographer.
"Photos of casualties were very marketable during the Civil War. People were shocked to see them, because photography was so new."
Brookes called Frassanito, who lives in Gettysburg. "I was nervous, because I only knew him by reputation. I heard him give a talk at Kent once. He asked for copies of my Shenkel tintypes, then he called back and wanted to see the originals. I took them to him myself."
After comparing Jake's face to the faces of dead soldiers in recognized Gettysburg fakes, Brookes and Frassanito determined that the faces were the same. Shenkel was officially identified as one of those not-exactly-dead soldiers.
"It's just a neat, neat story," Brookes says, "to have everything fall into place like that. It was so much fun for me." He contacted the editor of Timeline, the journal of the Ohio Historical Society, and offered to write an article on the discovery. It was published in June 1987.
Lecture circuit
Since then, Brookes has made a hobby of dining out on Jake Shenkel. He lectures regularly on Civil War and local history. He also continues to write historical pieces for Timeline and other magazines.
"I did a story once on Pretty Boy Floyd, a gangster who was killed just outside East Liverpool, and now I'm the clearinghouse -- the expert -- on Pretty Boy Floyd. Hardly a week goes by without someone calling me for information on him. I've even heard from the FBI Museum's curator. He wanted to know if I could help him find a death mask of Floyd."
His next project will be writing a Timeline article about a set of tintypes that hang in his East Liverpool law office.
"I don't have names for all these men," he said, "but they were among 1,800 soldiers killed when the steamship Sultana went down in the Mississippi. The soldiers had just been released from Andersonville, a prison for captured Union soldiers, and crowded onto a boat that was only supposed to hold 200. The ship sank two weeks after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, so it didn't get much attention at the time. It was a worse disaster than the Titanic, but no one knows about it."
It amuses him, Brookes says, to be considered a historian when he's actually a small-town lawyer with a quirky hobby. History, he says, makes a welcome change from divorces and wills and drunken-driving cases. "I like being a clearinghouse for all sorts of local trivia. It's nice, having small-town recognition. Does it set the world on fire? No, but it's fun."